The Butler Foundation

The Butler Foundation is a small, closely-held family foundation ($6.1M in assets) run by a single part-time-equivalent Executive Director, Cynthia Wentworth, and a board drawn entirely from two families — Butler (Clara, Barbara, Marjorie) and Bunning (Bonnie, Jessie, Caitlin) — plus longtime trustees Graham Mcswiney and Steven Albrecht. Critically, IRS filing data shows there is no formal, open submission process for general grants. The only documented application channel is for scholarships, and even that is restricted: U.S. applicants must be children of employees of NES Labs, and a second track funds one indigenous Ecuadorian student per cycle, selected entirely by Earth University Foundation rather than by the Butler Foundation's own board. Everything else the foundation funds — conservation land purchases, wildlife research equipment, hospital lab equipment, historic-site education programs — appears to move through pre-existing relationships. The strongest evidence for this: across the 18 grants and 9 recipient organizations in the sampled data, every single grantee received exactly two grants, pointing to renewal-based, multi-year funding rather than one-off competitive awards drawn from unsolicited proposals. For an organization with no prior relationship to the foundation, the realistic path in is not a cold LOI to a general mailbox — it is a warm introduction through geographic proximity (the foundation is anchored in Springfield, NH, with heaviest grant density in NH and VT), thematic fit with its demonstrated niche (Neotropical bird and habitat conservation, New Hampshire/Vermont field biology, or scholarship/education support tied to the Upper Valley), or a direct connection to a trustee or to NES Labs. Organizations that do get in should expect the relationship to compound: fund one discrete, well-scoped project (equipment, a defined research study, a signage/interpretation installation) rather than general operating support, and be prepared to report back and re-apply for a second, similarly-sized grant the following cycle — that is the observed pattern for every current grantee. There is no evidence of site visits, formal LOI-to-full-proposal staging, or a published RFP; contact is most likely by letter or phone to the PO Box/(603) 369-7224 line on file with the IRS.

Total annual giving has ranged from $406,169 (2022) to $769,323 (2021) over the last five reported fiscal years, with the most recent filing (FY2024) showing $666,487 in charitable disbursements — a payout that exceeded that year's total revenue of $269,459 by roughly $455,000, drawn down from investment reserves. Assets have fallen steadily from $8,164,720 in 2011 to $6,108,561 in 2024, a ~25% decline over 13 years despite a decade-plus bull market, indicating the board consistently prioritizes distribution over asset preservation. Per the foundation's own reported typical grant size, awards range from $3,000 to $110,000, with a median of $38,000 and an average of $38,882 across 11 tracked awards. At the recipient level, a sample of 18 grants to 9 organizations totaling $472,442 (average $26,247/grant) breaks down into three clear program buckets: (1) environmental and wildlife conservation/research — Jocotoco Conservation Foundation ($140,000 across 2 grants, funding a 99-hectare expansion of the Tapichalaca Reserve in Ecuador), Friends of Mindo Cloud Forest ($37,570, interpretive signage at Parque Condor), NH Audubon ($32,000, aerial insectivore and cliff swallow studies), Vermont Institute of Natural Science ($25,560, game cameras/GPS units for broad-winged hawk tracking), and Elaine Conners Center for Wildlife ($3,112) — together roughly 50% of sampled dollars; (2) medical/scientific research equipment — a single relationship with Mass Eye & Ear Associates ($130,000 across 2 grants for a Sanger DNA sequencer), about 28% of sampled dollars; and (3) education/scholarships — Earth University Foundation ($57,500), The Fells ($34,700, a summer education and landscape program), and University of New Hampshire ($12,000), roughly 22%. Geographically, New Hampshire received the most individual grants (8 of 18, ~44%), followed by Vermont (4), with Massachusetts, Maryland, and Georgia at 2 each — but Ecuador-directed conservation giving and the single large Boston medical-equipment grant together account for over half of total dollars, showing the foundation's giving is locally distributed by grant count but internationally/institutionally concentrated by dollar volume.

No formal peer-foundation dataset was available for this record, so the comparison below uses publicly known regional funders of comparable scale and focus as directional context rather than precise benchmarking; figures for peers are approximate ranges, not sourced from verified filings in this session.

The Butler Foundation sits at the small end of the family-foundation tier by assets and giving, and — unlike the large community and mid-size conservation funders in this set — has no published application cycle at all outside its restricted scholarship tracks. Its closest structural peers are other single-family trusts with legacy-driven, relationship-based giving to a fixed roster of grantees rather than the open, competitive processes that define larger institutional funders like the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation.

The most recent verifiable activity is the FY2024 Form 990-PF (period ending December 2024): $666,487 in charitable disbursements, total revenue of only $269,459 (interest income $88,474, dividends $200,186), and net assets of $6,108,561 — a roughly $455,000 net asset drawdown for the year, and the fourth consecutive year of assets sitting below the $7M+ levels seen from 2011-2020. Executive Director Cynthia Wentworth's compensation was $100,539 in 2024, compared to $97,168 (2023) and $113,136 (2022) — a level that fluctuates year to year, likely reflecting variable hours rather than a raise trajectory. The trustee roster (Clara Butler, Barbara Butler, Marjorie Butler, Bonnie Bunning, Jessie Bunning, Caitlin Bunning, Graham Mcswiney, Steven Albrecht) has been stable across the filings reviewed, with no turnover or new-appointee announcements found. No 2025 or 2026 grant announcements, press releases, leadership changes, or new program launches were identified in web search — this is a low-visibility, non-publicizing family foundation. Notably, the foundation's on-file website (thebutlerfoundation.com) currently belongs to a different, unrelated mesothelioma-research charity based in Boston (honoring Kevin J. Butler and John E. Butler); this appears to be a name collision or a stale website record rather than an active web presence for the Springfield, NH foundation, and should not be relied on for contact or application purposes.

Treat this foundation as relationship-gated, not RFP-driven — the single confirmed open channel is the scholarship program, and even that has hard eligibility gates: U.S. scholarship applicants must be children of NES Labs employees (a private-sector eligibility restriction, not open to the general public), while the Ecuador-focused scholarship track is entirely administered and selected by Earth University Foundation, meaning a direct approach to the Butler Foundation board won't influence that award. If you fall inside the NES Labs eligibility window, the process is simple and low-friction: there is no formal deadline, and the requirement is a written essay plus high school transcripts/grades submitted directly to the Board of Trustees — keep the essay concrete and grounded (the board is small and reads submissions personally, not through a screening committee). For nonprofits outside the scholarship program hoping to be considered for the foundation's conservation, research, or education giving, do not submit a cold general-purpose LOI to a public inbox — none was found to exist. Instead, look for genuine points of overlap with the foundation's demonstrated pattern: Neotropical/Ecuadorian habitat conservation (mirroring its Jocotoco and Mindo Cloud Forest grants), New Hampshire or Vermont wildlife field research with a clear, fundable equipment or study component (as with NH Audubon's cliff swallow study or VINS' hawk-tracking GPS units), or a specific, discrete capital need at an institution already tied to the Upper Valley/NH region (as with The Fells or UNH). The common thread across every funded project is specificity — a named piece of equipment, a defined research study, a bounded signage or capital installation — rather than general operating requests; the $3,000-$110,000 range (median $38,000) tracks the cost of a defined deliverable, not a program budget. The clearest mistake an outside organization could make is assuming a scale mismatch: given a $6.1M asset base distributing under $700K/year to essentially the same nine organizations, the odds of unsolicited proposals displacing an existing renewal relationship are low. If pursuing a first contact, do so by phone or letter to the PO Box on file — (603) 369-7224, PO Box 430, Springfield, NH 03284 — rather than through the mismatched thebutlerfoundation.com website, and expect the first meaningful response to come well ahead of any single deadline, since the foundation operates on no fixed cycle.