Trout Lily Foundation

Trout Lily Foundation is a small, Vermont-rooted private trust (EIN 82-3683719, ruled 2018) governed by two trustees — Jan L. Blomstrann and the corporate trustee Hemenway Trust Company LLC — with no paid staff and no officer compensation reported in any filing year. Its own database record flags it "preselected_only," and its website (troutlilyfoundation.org) currently shows only a "Launching Soon" placeholder with no grants page, application form, or contact channel. This is a strong signal that Trout Lily operates as a relationship-driven, trustee-directed giving vehicle rather than a competitive-RFP funder, despite the platform's accepting_applications flag reading "true." Cold, unsolicited proposals mailed to the PO Box 45, Middlebury address are unlikely to be the path in.

The grantee list bears this out: nearly every recipient is a well-established Vermont institution — the University of Vermont, Shelburne Farms, the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Burlington City Arts Foundation, Rokeby Museum, Champlain College — the kind of organizations that accumulate multi-year, multi-grant relationships with a single funder rather than winning one-off open competitions. Sixty-one percent of the 73 recorded grants (45 of 73) went to Vermont-based organizations, with secondary clusters in Massachusetts (11), New York and Maryland (4 each), and North Carolina (4), plus single grants in DC, Illinois, and Arizona tied to national organizations (Barack Obama Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, World Central Kitchen).

For a first-time applicant, the realistic entry points are: (1) geographic and institutional proximity to Middlebury/Addison County and the broader Burlington nonprofit ecosystem; (2) alignment with capital projects or general operating support rather than narrow pilot programs, since those dominate the funded-purpose list; (3) a live, time-sensitive disaster or crisis response if your organization is active on the ground (the foundation moved fast on the 2023 Vermont floods, the Ukraine crisis, and the Turkey-Syria earthquake); and (4) a warm introduction through Hemenway Trust Company LLC's existing Vermont philanthropic and wealth-management network, or through an organization already in the portfolio. There is no evidence of a site visit or multi-stage LOI-to-proposal pipeline in the data — grants appear to move directly from trustee decision to disbursement.

Across the 73 grants captured in the platform's grantee data (2019-2023 filings), Trout Lily distributed $1,608,000 total, averaging $22,027 per grant. The foundation's own typical-grant-size record (a tighter, more recent 12-grant sample) shows a median of $10,000, an average of $15,625, and a range of $2,500 to $50,000 — though cumulative multi-year commitments to a single grantee run much higher: Burlington City Arts Foundation received $275,000 across three grants for its 405 Pine Street renovation, the University of Vermont received $165,000 across two grants for a statewide cancer-screening van, and combined gifts to the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts and to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (via the trustee-named immunology research fund) each totaled roughly $125,000-$150,000.

Geographically, Vermont dominates at 45 of 73 grants (61.6%), followed by Massachusetts (11, 15.1%), New York and Maryland (4 each), North Carolina (4), Illinois and DC (2 each), and Arizona (1) — largely explained by national organizations (Barack Obama Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, World Central Kitchen) receiving crisis-response gifts. By purpose, capital support and capacity-building/general-operating grants are the clearest repeating categories — Burlington City Arts (capital renovation), Flynn Center (capital repairs, $150K combined), Rokeby Museum (capacity and archival building, $95K combined), and Shelburne Farms (land conservation, $100K) — alongside a steady stream of $10,000-$40,000 general-operating gifts to Vermont human-services and cultural nonprofits (Vermont Foodbank $60K, Appalachian Voices $70K across four grants, Vermont Humanities Council $50K, Orion Society $40K).

The giving trend line is the most important recent signal: grants paid rose from $187,500 (FY2020) to $374,000 (FY2023) in the platform's data, and external 990 sources show that trajectory continuing sharply — $887,600 distributed in FY2024 and $1,079,801-$1,011,000 in FY2025 across 51 awards (average $21,800, per Instrumentl). That growth in giving has come alongside a decline in total assets, from a $5,061,265 peak in 2021 to $3,706,390 in the most recent filing — a spend-down pattern, not steady-state endowment giving, meaning grant capacity is currently expanding even as the underlying corpus shrinks.

Trout Lily sits within a cluster of similarly sized private foundations (~$3.7M in assets) classified under the same "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE reporting category — a generic tax classification for family/trust foundations rather than a description of actual program focus, so peer comparison here is necessarily asset-based rather than mission-based for most of the set.

Of the five peers, only the Luther Vandross Foundation has a live, public-facing website and application process — a genuinely open annual scholarship competition for HBCU students, a sharp contrast to Trout Lily's closed, relationship-based model. The other four peers show no public web presence in this research, which is itself a useful data point: at this asset tier ($3.7-3.8M), a majority of similarly sized family/trust foundations operate quietly, without solicited applications, making Trout Lily's pattern the norm rather than the exception for grant seekers to plan around.

Trout Lily Foundation maintains an unusually low public profile for its size — no press coverage, news announcements, or social presence surfaced in this research, and its own website (troutlilyfoundation.org) displays only a "Launching Soon" placeholder as of this report. The most concrete recent signal comes from its own IRS Form 990-PF filings: FY2025 distributions reached approximately $1.0-1.08 million across roughly 51 grants (per ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer and Instrumentl's 990 analysis), up sharply from $887,600 in FY2024 and $374,000 in grants paid in FY2023 per the platform's own database. This represents close to a five-fold increase in annual giving since FY2020 ($228,867), even as total assets declined from a 2021 peak of $5,061,265 to $3,706,390 most recently — evidence of an active, accelerating spend-down rather than steady-state endowment management.

No leadership changes are evident; Jan L. Blomstrann and the corporate trustee Hemenway Trust Company LLC have held the trustee roles since the foundation's 2018 ruling, and no officer compensation has ever been reported. The most notable programmatic activity visible in the grant-level data (through FY2023, the most recent year with itemized grantee detail) was a cluster of disaster and crisis-response gifts: flood-recovery grants to the Vermont Humanities Council, the Vermont Women's Fund (Rise & Thrive Fund for flood-affected women business owners), and Rainbow Bridge Community Center following the catastrophic July 2023 Vermont flooding, alongside Ukraine humanitarian gifts (World Central Kitchen, International Orthodox Christian Charities) and Turkey-Syria earthquake relief (Doctors Without Borders). Whether that responsive pattern continued into the larger FY2024-FY2025 giving years is not yet visible in itemized form and would require the newest 990-PF schedule of grants once published.

There is no public application form, portal, deadline, or LOI process documented anywhere for Trout Lily Foundation — its database record lists application_instructions as "none" and the foundation's own website is not yet live. Treat this as a closed, trustee-directed funder and plan accordingly rather than submitting a cold, unsolicited proposal, which the data suggests will not be reviewed through any standard intake.

The strongest available strategy is relationship-building within the Vermont philanthropic ecosystem the trustees clearly move in. Hemenway Trust Company LLC, the corporate trustee, is a Vermont-based trust and wealth-management firm — organizations with existing donor or advisor relationships through Vermont trust/wealth-management networks, or through the Vermont Community Foundation and similar intermediaries, are best positioned to get a proposal in front of the trustees. A warm introduction from a current or past grantee (UVM, Shelburne Farms, Flynn Center, Rokeby Museum, Burlington City Arts, Champlain College) is likely more effective than any direct outreach.

When an opening does exist, frame the ask around what the funded-purpose data actually rewards: capital projects (building renovation, archival storage, equipment), general operating and capacity-building support, and — distinctly — rapid response to a declared regional or global crisis where a Vermont organization or a recognizable national relief brand can move quickly (Doctors Without Borders, World Central Kitchen, and Vermont flood-response grantees all fit this pattern). Narrow, multi-year program grants for pilot initiatives are rare in the data; the foundation favors flexible, near-term-usable dollars. If your mission touches cancer immunology or biomedical research specifically, note the trustee-named "Jan L. Blomstrann Immunology Research Fund" at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute — this is a personal cause area worth referencing if genuinely relevant, not worth forcing.

Common mistakes to avoid: submitting a generic LOI to a general inbox (none is published); assuming the "accepting_applications: true" flag means an open RFP (the same record marks the foundation "preselected_only"); and requesting funding outside Vermont/New England without a strong national-crisis or flagship-institution rationale, since out-of-region grants in the data are the exception, not the rule.