Tres Chicas

Tres Chicas is a small, unstaffed family foundation run entirely by three members of the Zuber family — Alison Zuber (Chairman), Amisha Zuber (CFO), and Sierra Zuber (Secretary) — each drawing only $7,000/year in compensation as of the 2023 filing, and $0 in the most recent filings. There is no program staff, no grants office, and no publicly documented application process (application_instructions is recorded as "none" in IRS filings, and the foundation's own domain, treschicas.org, currently redirects to a for-sale parking page). Multiple independent grants databases (Grantable, Instrumentl) confirm what the underlying data implies: Tres Chicas does not solicit or accept unsolicited proposals. Every grant in its history traces back to a personal or trustee-driven relationship rather than a competitive RFP.

The practical implication for grant seekers is that cold applications have effectively zero chance of success here. The realistic path in is relationship-based: board or family introduction, a connection to UCLA medical research (the single largest and most recurring giving category — $220,000 across three gifts to a named UCLA Chiari spinal neurosurgery fund and $200,000 to a UCLA Health Sciences lab fund), or membership in the small set of civil-liberties, disaster-relief, refugee-services, and animal-welfare organizations the trustees have supported repeatedly for years (ACLU Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, Direct Relief, Doctors Without Borders, RAICES, HIAS, IFAW).

Organizations without a warm connection should not prioritize outreach here. Instead, this profile is most useful for (a) organizations that already have a board, staff, or donor connection to the Zuber family or UCLA medicine, and (b) peer intelligence — understanding what a small (~$7.3M asset), closely held California family foundation looks like in practice, since its behavior (personal causes, repeat gifts, no formal process, declining size in recent years) is typical of thousands of similarly sized private foundations that never post an RFP.

Tres Chicas held $7,278,274 in total assets as of its most recent filing, down from $7,892,845 the prior year — a roughly 7.8% contraction consistent with its "partially liquidated" designation and a 59.7% year-over-year drop in total revenue (to $514,772) driven by weaker investment gains. Grants paid have followed a similar downward path: $520,000 across 18 grants in FY2023 versus $310,000 across just 8 grants in FY2024, per third-party 990 aggregators.

Across the fuller multi-year window captured in IRS data (52 grants, $1,401,000 total, averaging $26,942 per grant), the typical grant size is officially recorded as a median of $17,500 with a range of $5,000 to $100,000 (18-grant sample), while the largest single-year gift on record was $150,000 to UCLA Foundation in 2024. The top cumulative recipients are UCLA Foundation (FBO Batzdorf Chiari Spinal Neurosurgery, $220,000/3 grants), UCLA Health Sciences Development (FBO Gwynne Hazen Cherry Labs, $200,000/2 grants), UC San Diego Dept of Psychiatry (FBO Jeff Max Brain Injury Study, $100,000/2 grants), Direct Relief ($95,000/3 grants), American Bar Foundation ($75,000/1 grant), Planned Parenthood Federation ($60,000/2 grants), and the Chordoma Foundation and ACLU Foundation (each with multiple gifts totaling $50,000).

Geographically, California dominates: 26 of 52 tracked grants (50%) went to CA-based or CA-affiliated organizations, followed by DC (5), Alabama, North Carolina, New York, and Ohio (3 each), and Colorado, Illinois, and Texas (2 each). No purpose codes are itemized beyond "general charitable" in the underlying filings — this is a discretionary, cause-agnostic foundation rather than a program-area-restricted one, though its actual pattern skews toward medical research (especially UCLA-affiliated), civil liberties/legal aid, disaster and humanitarian relief, immigration/refugee services, and animal welfare.

Tres Chicas sits in a cluster of similarly small, closely held private foundations nationwide with near-identical asset bases (~$7.28M) but almost no public grantmaking infrastructure. None of its listed peers publish giving priorities or application guidance either, reinforcing that this asset tier of foundation is dominated by low-transparency family vehicles rather than institutional grantmakers.

All six foundations fall within a tight $7.28-7.28M asset band and share the generic "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE classification, which typically signals small family or single-donor foundations with minimal or no staff and no public RFP process. Tres Chicas is at least distinguishable by its documented (if declining) giving pattern and identifiable trustee family, whereas its peers here have no public giving data in this dataset — grant seekers should expect the same relationship-only access model across this entire peer set rather than treating any of them as an open funding opportunity.

The most notable recent development is financial contraction rather than a new initiative: FY2024 total revenue fell 59.7% to $514,772 and total assets dropped from $7,892,845 to $7,278,274, driven by weaker net investment income and reduced gains on asset sales. Grantmaking followed suit — total grants paid fell from $520,000 (18 grants, FY2023) to $310,000 (8 grants, FY2024), and Cause IQ now flags the foundation's status as "partially liquidated."

Despite the smaller grant count, the average award size rose to roughly $39,000, and the single largest gift on record — $150,000 to UCLA Foundation — was made in this most recent cycle, continuing the foundation's long-running support of UCLA-affiliated medical research (the Batzdorf Chiari Spinal Neurosurgery and Gwynne Hazen Cherry Labs funds have received a combined $420,000 across five gifts historically).

No leadership changes were found: Alison Zuber (Chairman), Amisha Zuber (CFO), and Sierra Zuber (Secretary) remain the same three-person governance team that has run the foundation for multiple filing years, now with $0 recorded officer compensation in the most recent filings (down from $7,000 each previously). The foundation's website, treschicas.org, no longer hosts organizational content and currently displays a domain-for-sale placeholder page — there is no indication of a refreshed public-facing program, new RFP, or media presence in 2025-2026. Taken together, the picture is a small family foundation quietly reducing its footprint rather than one entering a growth or outreach phase.

Tres Chicas has no documented application process, no online portal, no LOI form, and no published deadline — IRS filings record its application_instructions field as "none," and its own website no longer functions as an organizational site. Grants databases that track funder behavior (Grantable, Instrumentl) independently confirm the foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals and operates purely on an invitation basis driven by the Zuber family's personal and professional networks.

Given this, generic cold outreach (mailed LOIs, portal submissions, cause-matching platforms) is very unlikely to produce a response and should not be a primary strategy for organizations without an existing connection. The highest-probability path in is a warm introduction: if your organization has any board member, major donor, medical staff, or alumni tie to UCLA (especially UCLA Health Sciences or UCLA-affiliated neurosurgery/psychiatry research), that is the single strongest documented affinity in the foundation's 15+ year giving history and worth exploring directly through UCLA development staff who may already have a relationship with the family.

Outside of UCLA medicine, the foundation has shown durable, repeat loyalty (2-3 separate gifts over time) to a specific short list of national organizations: Direct Relief, the Chordoma Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and smaller California-based groups like the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County and Santa Barbara Equine Assistance and Evacuation Team. Organizations already on this list, or working in closely adjacent spaces (disaster relief, civil liberties/legal defense, rare-disease medical research, animal welfare, refugee/immigrant services), have the next-best fit even without a direct family connection — a respectful, low-pressure note of introduction referencing shared mission alignment (not a formal proposal) is more appropriate here than a full application package. Avoid mass-mailed appeals; a foundation this small and family-run is far more likely to respond to a specific, personally addressed letter than a templated solicitation. Given the FY2024 contraction in both assets and grant volume, seekers should also set realistic expectations: the foundation is currently making fewer, larger gifts to fewer organizations rather than expanding its roster.