The Mountain Spring Foundation

The Mountain Spring Foundation is a small, fast-growing private family foundation administered through Foundation Source in Wilmington, DE, but run in practice by two officers — Steven Alex Leistner (Director, President, Secretary, Treasurer) and Saba Eslami (Director) — with zero paid staff and zero officer compensation reported in any filing year. There is no program office, no published RFP, and no application portal; the foundation's own website is a single landing page with only a contact email (info@themountainspringfoundation.org) and phone number, no About, Grants, or How to Apply pages. This is the profile of a founder-directed vehicle that gives to organizations the trustees already know or have personally vetted, not one that runs a competitive open cycle. All 20 grants on record are tagged "General & Unrestricted" or tied to a specific event, reinforcing that funding decisions are relationship- and trust-based rather than program-criteria-based. The strongest signal in the data is geographic and relational concentration: 81% of dollars go to Utah organizations, and the single largest relationship — Wasatch Adaptive Sports Inc, which has received 5 separate grants totaling $95,000 — shows the foundation rewards organizations it funds repeatedly rather than one-off applicants. For an organization with no prior connection to the Leistner/Eslami family, a cold LOI or portal submission is unlikely to work, because no portal exists. The realistic path in is a warm introduction through a Utah nonprofit already in the portfolio (Wasatch Adaptive Sports, Encircle Family and Youth Resource Center, Silicon Slopes, Chabad Lubavitch of Utah, Huntsman Mental Health Foundation, or Maliheh Free Clinic), a direct, personalized email to info@themountainspringfoundation.org that clearly ties the organization's mission to health, disability services, youth/family support, or Utah community development, or a mention in shared professional/philanthropic circles given Steven Leistner's Utah tech-adjacent network (Silicon Slopes is a grantee). First-time applicants should expect a slow, informal process with no set deadline and no formal notification timeline, since none is published anywhere.

Across the 20 grants captured in filings since inception, total giving is $367,778 at an average of $18,389 per grant, but that average masks a wide range: individual grants run from $1,500 (St Jude Children's Research Hospital) up to a single $75,000 commitment (Policy Project), with the largest cumulative relationship — Wasatch Adaptive Sports Inc — totaling $95,000 across 5 separate grants. The foundation's own typical-grant-size data (drawn from its most recently verified filings) shows a tighter, more disciplined band: minimum $1,000, median $10,000, average $8,667, and maximum $15,000, suggesting the foundation is now writing more numerous, smaller checks even as total dollars grow. Giving has scaled sharply with the foundation's asset base: $0 in grants in 2019, $11,500 in 2020, $26,000 in 2021, $70,000 in 2022, $190,278 in 2023, and roughly $250,000 across 12 grants in 2024 per third-party 990 aggregators — a trajectory that roughly tracks the foundation's asset growth from $1.0M (2019) to $9.1M (2024). Revenue is almost entirely contributions from the founding family (94-100% of revenue in every year on record, e.g., $4.075M of $4.065M total revenue in 2024), meaning grant capacity depends on continued family contributions rather than investment returns (net investment income has been $0 in most years except a $633,218 spike in 2021). By geography, Utah absorbs 81% of dollars (16 of 20 grants), with Washington, DC at roughly 17% (2 grants, including the $75,000 Policy Project grant and a $15,000 grant to the Hopewell Fund's Generation Data Education Fund), New York at about 2% (a single $10,000 grant to Sponsors For Educational Opportunity Inc), and Tennessee negligible (the one-off $1,500 St Jude gift). By purpose, every recorded grant is "General & Unrestricted" or event-based — there is no program-restricted or capital-campaign giving on record, and no multi-year pledges are documented.

The foundation's NTEE classification (A12, "Arts & Culture") is a filing artifact rather than a functional description — its actual grantees span adaptive sports, health clinics, mental health, Jewish community services, youth/family resource centers, and tech-community nonprofits, none of which are arts organizations. That makes its official "Arts & Culture" peer set a weak comparison group, though it is useful as an asset-size benchmark since all five peers sit within a few hundred thousand dollars of Mountain Spring's $9.14M in assets.

All six sit in a tight $9.0M-$9.3M asset band, but none of the five NTEE peers publish grant-level detail in the data available here, so Mountain Spring's transparency — a full grantee list via its 990-PF — is itself unusual for this cohort. The practical takeaway for applicants is that Mountain Spring's "peers" by asset size are not true competitors for a given proposal, because its real funding lane (Utah community/health/youth services) has little overlap with typical arts-and-culture-coded foundations; grant seekers should instead benchmark against other small Utah-focused family foundations rather than this NTEE peer set.

No press releases, news coverage, or social media activity for The Mountain Spring Foundation could be located — this is consistent with a foundation that has no communications function and a single-page website with no news section. The most concrete recent signal is procedural: its most recent Form 990-PF was filed November 17, 2025, covering fiscal year 2024, and third-party 990 aggregators (Instrumentl, Grantable) show that filing reported 12 grants totaling approximately $250,000, up 71.4% in grant count from 2023's total of $190,278 across fewer grants. Total assets grew 65.7% year-over-year to $9.1M as of the 2024 filing, funded by $4.075M in new contributions from the founding family that year — the single largest annual contribution on record, exceeding the $2.89M contributed in 2021 and $1.27M in 2022. Leadership has been stable and unchanged across all filing years: Steven Alex Leistner (Director, President, Secretary, Treasurer) and Saba Eslami (Director), both uncompensated, with no evidence of staff hires, board expansion, or a name change. Because the foundation's giving has roughly doubled year-over-year for three consecutive years (2021 to 2022 to 2023 to 2024), the most actionable "recent activity" for a prospective applicant is simply that the foundation is actively scaling its grantmaking and will likely have a larger 2025/2026 giving budget than any prior year, even though no forward-looking announcement confirms this.

There is no published LOI process, application form, portal, or deadline for The Mountain Spring Foundation — application_instructions in IRS-linked data are explicitly blank, and the foundation's website has no Grants or How to Apply page. Treat this as a closed, relationship-driven funder rather than an open-cycle one, and calibrate outreach accordingly: a generic cold proposal sent to info@themountainspringfoundation.org is unlikely to get a response, because every grant on record appears to have originated from a personal or professional connection to the trustees rather than a competitive review. The single highest-leverage move is a warm introduction from a current grantee — Wasatch Adaptive Sports Inc (5 grants, $95K total), Encircle Family and Youth Resource Center, Silicon Slopes, Chabad Lubavitch of Utah, Huntsman Mental Health Foundation, or Maliheh Free Clinic — since the foundation has shown it repeats gifts to organizations it already trusts (Wasatch Adaptive Sports and Chabad Lubavitch of Utah, Encircle, and the Honarvar Memorial Foundation have each received grants in more than one cycle). If no warm connection exists, a short, personal email directly to info@themountainspringfoundation.org — not a mass-distributed grant application — that explicitly frames the request in terms the foundation has funded before (adaptive/inclusive recreation, youth and family crisis services, mental health, Jewish community life, or Utah tech-community programming) is more likely to land than a generic proposal. Because every recorded grant is General & Unrestricted, do not submit a narrowly restricted or capital-campaign ask; frame the request as flexible operating support. Given contributions and giving have both scaled sharply in 2023-2024, timing an approach for late in the calendar year (after the family's typical contribution timing) or early in a new fiscal year may align better with when discretionary funds are freshest, though no fixed cycle is confirmed. Common mistakes to avoid: assuming the "Arts & Culture" NTEE tag means the foundation funds arts organizations (its actual grant history shows none), sending a proposal through a general online portal (none exists), and requesting funding outside Utah or the DC/NY relationships already on record without a strong independent rationale — geographic outliers like the New York and Tennessee gifts appear tied to specific personal relationships, not an open national program.