The Walter And Adi Blum Foundation Inc.

The Walter and Adi Blum Foundation is a small, family-legacy private foundation ($10.5-10.7M in assets) run by a compact, stable leadership team — President Sandra E. Gambill and Secretary Margaret J. Murphy have led the foundation across multiple filing years, with Shaun Murphy and Norman Shaw Esquire also serving as directors/officers. This is not a staffed institutional funder with program officers; it is a hands-on family board that personally reviews every application at monthly meetings. That structure has two implications for applicants: first, relationships and local reputation matter — 132 of 135 identifiable grants (98%) went to Florida organizations, and the vast majority to Palm Beach County groups the board can plausibly see or verify firsthand; second, the process rewards clarity and modesty over polish — proposals should read like a direct appeal to a small group of engaged trustees, not a glossy packet for a program staff to triage.

The grantee list is dominated by small, tightly-scoped grants: youth sports leagues (Palm Beach County Football League, FC Boca Predators), direct-service nonprofits (Florida Outreach Center for the Blind, The Women's Circle, Caridad Center), and scholarship/education programs (Israel Tennis and Education Centers, Student Aces, Take Stock In Children). Very few grantees appear more than twice, suggesting the foundation spreads support widely across the community rather than building a small portfolio of long-term core partners — though recurring names like Habitat for Humanity (two separate local chapters), Feeding South Florida, and Paws 4 Liberty/Paws For Liberty show it will fund the same cause area repeatedly even if not the identical grantee.

First-time applicants should not expect a formal LOI-to-full-proposal-to-site-visit pipeline; the process is a single fill-in PDF application form reviewed monthly, functioning more like a mini community foundation than a large private grantmaker. Given the foundation explicitly wants to see matching/diversified funding and strong board engagement, applicants with an active, locally-connected board and other funding already secured will have a real edge over first-time or solely foundation-dependent requests.

Total giving has held remarkably steady for over a decade: $721,122 (2011) to $836,823 (2015) to $787,649 (most recent filing, FY2023), with grants paid specifically ranging from $460,500 (2020) to $558,050 (2015) and landing at $478,580 in FY2023. This is a foundation with a fixed, disciplined payout rather than one scaling with market performance — net investment income has actually grown (from $429,607 in 2020 to $639,408 in 2023) without a corresponding jump in grant payout, so there is no evidence of an imminent giving increase.

Across the 135-grant sample in the grantee data, the average grant is $17,684 and total distributed is $2,387,380 (this appears to be a multi-year aggregate, since it exceeds any single year's grants-paid figure). The foundation's own published typical-grant-size data (66 grants analyzed) shows a median of $5,000, average of $6,977, and range of $1,000–$25,000 — notably lower than the $10,000-$25,000 'typical award' language on its website, indicating a long tail of smaller grants ($1,000-$5,000) beneath the more visible five-figure capital and program grants. The single largest line item in the data — $1,413,580 to 'Charitable Contributions' across 3 grants — is almost certainly an aggregated/miscategorized entry rather than one grantee, and should be treated as an outlier rather than a benchmark for a realistic ask.

Geographically, funding is almost entirely Florida-based: 132 of 135 grants (97.8%) went to Florida organizations, with just 2 to New York and 1 to Tennessee — those outliers are likely tied to national organizations with a Florida chapter or program rather than a geographic expansion. By cause area, the visible pattern favors human services and direct aid (food, housing, disability services, domestic violence shelters), youth sports/education (scholarships, football/tennis programs, literacy tutoring), and veterans/service-animal programs (Paws 4 Liberty, Wounded Veterans Relief Fund) — with cancer research (H Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, $25,000; Moffitt Cancer Foundation, $20,000) as a notable healthcare exception to the otherwise hyper-local grant list. Officer compensation ($280,340 in FY2023) is a meaningful share of total giving (about 36%), reflecting the cost of a small independently-run family foundation rather than a leaner pass-through vehicle.

No peer foundations were returned in the underlying data bundle for this profile, so the comparison below uses foundations with a similar Palm Beach County, human-services/youth focus and comparable asset scale, based on public data referenced in web research (Candid, Cause IQ, ProPublica).

The Blum Foundation is small relative to these regional peers — its ~$788K in annual giving is a fraction of what larger Palm Beach County institutional funders distribute — but it is also far more accessible: there is no competitive RFP, no LOI gate, and no minimum grant size in practice (awards as low as $500-$1,000 are documented). For grassroots and small nonprofits with hyper-local Palm Beach County programs, Blum is a lower-friction, faster-turnaround option than the county's larger community and health foundations, even though the ceiling on any single award is much lower.

The most recent confirmed activity is an August 27, 2025 announcement from Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Palm Beach acknowledging a $10,000 grant from the foundation for its Immigration Legal Services Program, which supports family reunification and immigrant legal-rights education — a signal the foundation remains active in funding immigrant and social-services work into its current fiscal cycle. Beyond that single dated item, no 2025-2026 press releases, leadership changes, or new program announcements were found in web search; the foundation does not appear to issue its own press releases and relies on grantees to publicize awards.

Leadership has been stable for years: Sandra E. Gambill has served as President across the most recent filings (compensation rising from $135,500 to $168,000 across the years in the data), with Margaret J. Murphy as Secretary and Shaun Murphy as a Director — no turnover is evident in the available filing history, and no news of a leadership transition surfaced in research.

The foundation's own website highlights legacy capital projects as its signature achievements — Blum Stadium at William T. Dwyer High School and tennis courts at the West Palm Beach Multi-Cultural Center — both multi-year-old named facilities rather than recent announcements, reinforcing that this is a low-visibility, steady-state funder rather than one currently in an active growth or rebranding phase. Total assets have been essentially flat for over a decade ($10.4M-$11.2M range from 2011-2023), and there is no indication of a capital campaign, merger, or major gift event on the horizon.

Apply directly through the foundation's own fill-in PDF form (available at thewalterandadiblumfoundation.org/grant_application.php) rather than a generic LOI — this is a paper-process funder, not one using an online portal like Foundant or GivingData. Complete every field before submitting; the foundation's instructions specifically flag that all questions must be answered, implying incomplete forms are a real rejection risk with a board this small and this hands-on.

Timing is fixed and unusually specific: submit by the first Saturday of the month to be reviewed at the Board's third-Monday meeting that same month. Missing the Saturday cutoff means a full month's delay, so build submission timing into any funding calendar rather than treating this as a rolling deadline. There does not appear to be an annual application cycle or single hard deadline — it is a standing monthly review process, which is a real advantage for time-sensitive requests compared to funders with once-a-year windows.

Given that 97.8% of known grants go to Florida nonprofits and the vast majority to Palm Beach County specifically, out-of-state or non-local organizations should not apply — this foundation is not a national funder despite its size. Applicants should frame requests around the foundation's nine stated priorities (community sports, youth activities, Palm Beach preservation, the arts, underserved communities, education, healthcare, housing/homelessness/food assistance, and programs for people with special needs) and explicitly address the foundation's two stated evaluation criteria: (1) the degree to which the program helps people help themselves, and (2) the organization's demonstrated capability to deliver results.

Because the foundation says it prefers matching grants and multiple funding sources, applicants should list co-funders and in-kind support prominently rather than presenting Blum as the sole funding source. Do not request funding for endowments, religious/sectarian purposes, individual assistance, or lobbying — these are explicitly excluded. Given the typical award clusters at $5,000-$25,000 (median $5,000 per the foundation's own typical-grant-size data), first-time applicants should request in that range rather than anchoring to the rarer $50,000+ awards, and should not expect ongoing multi-year commitments since very few grantees in the historical data recur more than twice.