Wendt Family Foundation

The Wendt Family Foundation is a relationship-driven, invitation-leaning funder rooted in the Wendt family's JELD-WEN manufacturing legacy in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Founded in 2012 as an evolution of the JELD-WEN Foundation, it is governed by a multi-generational family board (President Roderick Wendt, VP Mark Wendt, Secretary Andrea Wendt Olson, Treasurer Matt Wendt, plus Emeritus Nancy Wendt) with day-to-day grantmaking run by Executive Director Ashley Wendt and Assistant Executive Director duties historically compensated near $120,000-$174,000 annually — indicating a professionally staffed, not purely volunteer, operation. Multiple third-party aggregators independently confirm the foundation 'does not respond to unsolicited applications,' and the foundation's own site has no downloadable form, portal, or published deadline — instead directing all inquiries to a single email (ashleyw@wendtff.org) to 'connect' before any formal ask is made. This is a foundation that favors organizations it already knows or that are introduced through its Klamath Basin network. The grantee list bears this out: of 42 tracked grants totaling $2.45M, 40 went to Oregon organizations (nearly all Klamath County-based) and only 2 to California. First-time applicants should treat the initial email as a relationship-building step, not a proposal submission — the foundation explicitly states 'NO SPECIFIC FORMAT REQUIRED' and 'NONE' for both deadline and restrictions in its IRS-reported application_instructions, reinforcing that this is a conversational, not-bureaucratic process once a connection is made. The typical progression appears to be: informal outreach/introduction → conversation with Ashley Wendt or the board → a grant that starts modest (sponsorships as low as $1,000-$3,000) and, for trusted long-term partners, escalates into multi-year, six- and seven-figure 'legacy project' commitments (e.g., the $975,000 cumulative pledge to OHSU Foundation's cancer center across 4 grants, or the single $300,000 gift to Willamette University for a JELD-WEN-branded endowed chair). Grantees with repeat, multi-year funding (Favell Museum, Friends of the Children, Klamath Ice Sports, Ross Ragland Theater) suggest the foundation strongly prefers sustained partnerships over one-off gifts.

Across the 42 tracked grants totaling $2,451,859, the average grant is $58,378, but the distribution is heavily right-skewed by a handful of legacy commitments: the top single relationship (OHSU Foundation, 4 grants for a cancer center pledge) accounts for $975,000 — nearly 40% of all tracked dollars — and the largest single grant is the $300,000 Willamette University 'JELD WEN Free Enterprise Chair Sponsorship.' Beneath that ceiling, the bulk of giving is local and modest: Favell Museum ($192,740 across 4 operating grants), Sanford Health ($175,000 pediatric clinic grant), Friends of the Children ($165,749 across 3 grants), Ross Ragland Theater ($120,000 for operations/roof repair), and Basin United Soccer Club ($118,977 for a basketball court). At the smaller end, sponsorship-tier gifts to Klamath Basin Audubon Society ($26,000), Assistance League Klamath Basin ($16,000), Klamath Community Foundation ($15,000), Pregnancy Hope Center ($13,000), Oregon Tech Foundation ($9,000), United Way Klamath Basin ($3,000) and Mazama High School robotics ($1,000) round out the portfolio — the IRS-reported typical_grant_size confirms this pattern with a median of $25,000 and range of $1,000 to $250,000 across 13 sampled awards. Geographically, giving is almost entirely Oregon-concentrated (40 of 42 grants) with a tight cluster in Klamath Falls/Klamath County; only 2 grants reached California. On the balance sheet, total assets have declined from $11.5M (FY2021) to $7.8M (FY2024), while total giving has held in a $1.0M-$1.14M band from FY2019-FY2023 (most recently $1,081,136 in FY2023 against $630,000 in reported grants-paid, with the gap likely reflecting program-related/operating expenses under the American Institute for Full Employment). FY2024 shows a negative total revenue of -$327,724, reflecting investment-portfolio volatility rather than a pullback in grantmaking intent. Officer compensation has stayed in the $131,400-$218,125 range since 2019, evidence of a professionally run, not purely volunteer, grants operation.

The Wendt Family Foundation sits within a cohort of similarly-sized ($7.7M-$7.8M in assets) Human Services-classified family foundations, but stands out for its unusually high annual giving relative to asset base and its blended local/legacy giving model.

All six foundations cluster tightly around $7.7M-$7.85M in assets, making Wendt a near-median member of this peer set by size. What distinguishes Wendt is transparency and scale of activity: it maintains a public website with a named executive director and named contact email, publishes IRS-level detail on 42 distinct grantee relationships, and pays out roughly 14% of assets annually in giving — a payout rate well above the 5% IRS minimum and notably higher than what is typically seen in small, closely held family trusts of this size, several of which (like the peer trusts above) leave minimal public footprint beyond their 990-PF filings.

Public, foundation-specific news for the Wendt Family Foundation (Klamath Falls, OR, EIN 94-3229232) is sparse — this is a low-visibility family foundation that does not issue press releases about its grants. The most concrete recent data point is procedural: the foundation's FY2025 Form 990-PF was filed on 2025-11-13, per nonprofit-data aggregators (ProPublica, Cause IQ), confirming the foundation remains active and compliant, though itemized FY2025 grant data was not yet broken out in public databases at the time of this research. Note that web searches for 'Wendt Family Foundation' also surface substantial recent activity from a different, unrelated organization — the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation of Buffalo, NY — including a $50,000 grant announced 2026-06-01 to The Salvation Army's 'Hope on Main' emergency shelter project; that news does NOT pertain to this Klamath Falls foundation and should not be cited to grant seekers targeting this funder. On the foundation's own channels, the most recent structural development on record is the continued operation of the American Institute for Full Employment, an in-house policy-research arm focused on unemployment insurance and workforce development that the foundation funds directly (reflected in the $102,352 'consulting, policy development, analysis' program line in its IRS filing) alongside its $876,688 general philanthropic-giving program. No leadership changes have surfaced in recent searches; Roderick C. Wendt continues as President and Ashley Wendt as Executive Director based on both the foundation's site and its most recent officer-compensation filings.

This funder does not accept blind proposals, so the single most important step is the first one: email Executive Director Ashley Wendt at ashleyw@wendtff.org with a brief, specific introduction — who you are, what you do, and how it connects to Klamath County economic vitality, education, or community building — before drafting anything resembling a full proposal. The foundation's own IRS filing states there is 'NO SPECIFIC FORMAT REQUIRED' and lists application restrictions as 'NONE' and the deadline as 'NONE,' which confirms there is no portal or form to fill out; treat any request for materials as coming directly from the foundation in response to your outreach, not from a published checklist. Geography is the sharpest practical filter: 40 of 42 tracked grants went to Oregon organizations, almost entirely in the Klamath Basin (Klamath Falls, Klamath County) — organizations outside Oregon, and especially outside Klamath County, face a materially harder path in based on the grant history, though the two California grants show it is not an absolute bar. Lead with alignment language around 'free enterprise principles,' 'work ethic, personal responsibility, and self-reliance,' and 'building healthy and vibrant communities' — these are the foundation's own stated values on its About page, and echoing them (genuinely, not performatively) signals cultural fit to a family board that explicitly ties its giving to its founders' JELD-WEN-era values. A common mistake for outside applicants is pitching a large, standalone ask cold; the grant history instead shows the foundation building relationships that start small — sponsorships in the $1,000-$15,000 range (robotics teams, festival sponsorships, senior center capital projects) — and growing into multi-year operating support (Favell Museum, Friends of the Children, Klamath Ice Sports each received 3-4 grants over time) before any legacy-scale commitment (six- or seven-figure, multi-year pledges like OHSU Foundation's cancer center or Willamette University's endowed chair) is considered. Because the board is composed of Wendt family members across two generations, warm introductions through Klamath Basin civic, business, or education networks (Oregon Tech, Klamath Community College Foundation, Sky Lakes Medical Center) are likely to carry more weight than a cold email alone, though the foundation does list a direct contact channel for those without an existing connection.