Wilmac Foundation

Wilmac Foundation is a small, closely-held family foundation controlled by William B. Macmillan (President) and Deborah G. Macmillan (Vice President), with a Secretary/Treasurer seat that has rotated between Thomas Raisbeck and Robert J. Theiler across recent filings while the top two officer roles have stayed constant. Officer compensation is $0 in every year on record, and there is no listed program officer, grants staff, application portal, or public grants page — the foundation is run as a volunteer family vehicle, likely with back-office administration handled through its Minneapolis lockbox address (a common arrangement for bank-administered family trusts) rather than an in-house team. There is no functioning public website tied to this EIN; the domain on file (wilmac.org) actually belongs to an unrelated North Dakota school special-education cooperative, so applicants should not treat it as a source of guidance.

The grantee history is the clearest signal of how this funder actually operates: of the 33 recorded grants, the large majority went to organizations that received support in three consecutive years, at essentially flat dollar amounts each time (e.g., Denver Rescue Mission, The Gathering Place, Colorado Uplift, and Ukraine Volya Foundation each received $10,000 x 3 = $30,000; Greenwood Wildlife Rehabilitation Center and American Transplant Foundation follow the same pattern). This is a hallmark of relationship-based, renewal-driven giving rather than a competitive or rotating grant program. Most grants are coded UNRESTRICTED rather than tied to a specific program, meaning the foundation trusts existing partners with general operating support once a relationship is established.

For first-time, unsolicited applicants, the realistic odds of breaking in cold are low. The more productive path is identifying a warm introduction — through a shared board member, a Denver-area civic or health-nonprofit network, or another funded organization that could make an introduction — rather than submitting an LOI to a generic address. Organizations aligned with the foundation's demonstrated interests (health research and patient-support causes, homelessness/human services in metro Denver, and occasional international humanitarian giving) are the best fit; organizations far outside those lanes should not expect traction regardless of proposal quality.

Wilmac Foundation's payout is modest and steady: across the 33 grants captured in the data bundle, total giving was $692,606 at an average of $20,988 per grant, while the foundation's own reported typical-grant-size figures show a median of $10,000, an average of $20,523, and a range from $1,250 to $62,000 (based on 11 grants). The gap between the average ($20,988-$20,523) and the median ($10,000) confirms a small number of larger gifts pull the mean up — Cure Addiction Now ($150,000 across 3 grants) and Conscious Alliance ($145,606 across 3 grants) are the two largest relationships, together accounting for roughly 43% of the $692,606 tracked total.

Geographically, the giving is heavily concentrated: 22 of 33 grants (67%) went to Colorado organizations, with California (5), Washington DC (3), and New York (3) rounding out the rest — despite the foundation's own mailing address being in Minneapolis, MN. This mismatch strongly suggests the controlling family's real ties are to Colorado, with Minneapolis serving only as an administrative/banking address.

On total assets and payout, the foundation has grown from a small trust of roughly $746,812 in assets (FY2012, $40,550 grants paid) into its current $3.3M-asset scale through two large corpus contributions — $1,000,168 in FY2014 and $2,000,000 in FY2015 — which lifted annual grants paid from under $100,000 to a sustained $200,000-$342,000 range by FY2019-FY2022. Total giving figures track this: $254,245 (FY2019), $263,567 (FY2020), $272,716 (FY2021), $342,507 (FY2022), then a pullback to $334,170 total giving / $196,106 grants paid in FY2023, coinciding with net investment income falling from $476,663 (FY2021) to $122,378 (FY2023). FY2024 shows $346,645 in total revenue but no posted grants-paid or total-giving figure yet. By purpose code, UNRESTRICTED grants dominate the top-recipient list, with PROGRAM SUPPORT as the secondary category (Sweetfeet, Greenwood Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, American Transplant Foundation) and a single small line item ($8,000) for a named community event (Downtown Denver's Parade of Lights).

Wilmac Foundation sits in a cluster of nearly identically-sized private foundations under the "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE category — the peer set below was matched almost entirely on asset size (all cluster within about $1,600 of each other), not mission, which itself says something about how thin the public data trail is for foundations at this scale.

None of the five peers have a website on file, and none disclose giving levels or focus areas in the available data — Wilmac is actually more transparent than this peer group simply by virtue of having 990-derived grantee-level data available. The practical takeaway is that Wilmac is best benchmarked against other small, closely-held single-family trusts (typically $3-4M in assets, $150K-$350K in annual payout, no staff, no public application process) rather than against larger institutional or program-driven foundations, and applicants should calibrate ask size accordingly — this tier funds four- and five-figure grants, not six-figure program grants.

No foundation-specific news, press releases, or announcements for Wilmac Foundation were found in web searches covering 2025-2026; this is consistent with a foundation that has no communications function, no website, and no public-facing program. The most recent filing data available shows FY2024 total assets of $3,317,939 and total revenue of $346,645, but the FY2024 grants-paid and total-giving figures had not yet posted at the time of this research, so the current disbursement level for 2025-2026 giving cannot be confirmed from public sources.

The last fully-reported fiscal year, FY2023, showed a pullback in both grants paid ($196,106, down from $248,250 in FY2022) and net investment income ($122,378, down from $476,663 two years earlier in FY2021) — a pattern consistent with a foundation whose annual payout tracks portfolio performance rather than a fixed distribution formula. Leadership has been stable at the top: William B. Macmillan (President) and Deborah G. Macmillan (Vice President) appear as directors across every filing captured, while the Secretary/Treasurer role has changed hands between Thomas Raisbeck and Robert J. Theiler across different filing years, suggesting minor administrative turnover but no change in family control. No new program announcements, staff hires, or strategic-plan changes were identifiable, and none should be expected given the foundation's all-volunteer, zero-compensation officer structure.

There is no evidence Wilmac Foundation accepts unsolicited proposals: application_instructions on file are blank, there is no application form URL, no stated deadline, and no funding cycle. Grant seekers should not expect to find (or need) an LOI template, an online portal, or a program officer to call — none of the standard artifacts of a competitive grants program are present. The single largest actionable insight for grant seekers is that essentially every top recipient received support in three consecutive years at a flat dollar amount, which means the realistic way in is a warm introduction that leads to being added to that renewal list, not a cold proposal that competes for a one-time award.

Practical steps: (1) Map any personal, professional, or board-level connection to William B. Macmillan or Deborah G. Macmillan, or to any organization already on the grantee list (Cure Addiction Now, Conscious Alliance, Race To Erase MS, Sweetfeet, Fisher Center for Alzheimer's Research Foundation, Greenwood Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, The Gathering Place, Denver Rescue Mission, Ukraine Volya Foundation, American Transplant Foundation, Colorado Uplift, Downtown Denver Events Inc.) — a peer-to-peer introduction from one of these groups is far more likely to work than any written proposal. (2) If a connection is found, frame the ask as unrestricted general operating support in the $5,000-$30,000 range (matching the bulk of historical grants), since only a small handful of relationships have reached into the $40,000-$62,000 range and none in the sample exceeded roughly $62,000 in a single grant. (3) Emphasize sustained, multi-year partnership potential rather than a one-off project, since the grant history rewards continuity. (4) Given the strong Colorado concentration (67% of grants) despite the Minneapolis mailing address, Denver-metro human-services and health-research organizations should lead with local relevance; organizations outside health/human-services/Colorado themes are working against the observed pattern. (5) Do not attempt to contact the foundation through wilmac.org — that domain belongs to an unrelated North Dakota school district cooperative and will not reach the Macmillan family or their advisors.