Woods Charitable Foundation

Woods Charitable Foundation (EIN 20-1060852) is a closed, preselected-giving private family foundation — not an open grantmaker. Its 990-PF filings and third-party profiles (CauseIQ, Grantable) confirm it "does not accept unsolicited requests for funds." It has no staff and no program office: the sole officer is Mark A. Strode, who holds President, Secretary, and Treasurer roles simultaneously with zero reported compensation across every filing on record. The foundation's only public address is JPMorgan Private Bank's Fiduciary Department in Philadelphia, a trust-administration mailbox, not a grants office. Critically, our data bundle's website, phone number, and "Standard Grants"/"Breakthrough Initiative Grants" program names were sourced from woodscharitable.org — but that site belongs to an entirely different organization, Woods Charitable Fund, Inc. of Lincoln, Nebraska (EIN 47-6032847), which runs a real LOI-based, twice-yearly application cycle for Lincoln-only nonprofits. Grant seekers should not apply through that portal expecting to reach this foundation. For organizations actually trying to build a relationship with EIN 20-1060852, the realistic path is geographic and personal, not procedural: the grantee list is dominated by Napa Valley, CA institutions (Blue Oak School, Queen of the Valley Foundation, Cope Family Center, Friends of the Cameo, Justin Siena, Napa Humane Society) plus a small number of legacy East Coast ties (Millbrook School in NY, an unnamed Towson, MD recipient). This pattern strongly suggests grants follow President Strode's personal and community network in and around Napa, CA, rather than a competitive review process. First-time applicants with no board-level or community connection to that network should expect essentially no chance of a response. Organizations already serving Napa Valley civic, health, youth, or education needs — and with a warm introduction to someone connected to Strode or the existing grantee circle — have the only plausible opening, and even then should expect the foundation's overwhelming recent capacity to be committed to its existing Blue Oak School pledge.

Across the 18 grants captured in our data (recent multi-year window), Woods Charitable Foundation gave a combined $764,000, averaging $42,444 per grant — but that average is skewed by one dominant relationship. Blue Oak School received three grants totaling $615,000 (80% of all recorded giving) to support its "Acorn Fund" school-enhancement initiative. Excluding that single relationship, the remaining 17 grants total just $149,000, averaging $8,765, with a typical range of $2,000 to $50,000: Trauma Nation ($50,000, general support), Queen of the Valley Foundation ($43,000 across two grants), Cope Family Center ($15,000 across two grants, including a 50th-anniversary gift), Friends of the Cameo ($10,000), King Ridge Foundation ($5,000, Outride youth cycling program), American Diabetes Association ($5,000), Players Philanthropy ($5,000), Napa Police Youth Services Bureau ($3,000), Community Resources for Children ($3,000), Fields of Gold ($3,000), Millbrook School ($2,500, wellness program), Justin Siena High School ($2,500, financial aid), and Napa Humane Society ($2,000). Geographically, California accounts for 12 of 18 recipients (67%), with Maryland (2), and Arizona, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia at one each — a footprint anchored in Napa Valley (Napa, St. Helena, Yountville) with scattered East Coast outliers. By sector, giving spans human/family services, youth programs, health/hospital foundations, K-12 and independent-school education, and animal welfare, with no single program area dominating outside the Blue Oak School capital commitment. Total organizational giving has fallen sharply over time: $1.18M (2013) and $1.44M (2014, the historical peak) down to $996K (2015), then to a materially lower band of $210,500-$520,000 every year from 2019 through the FY2025 filing (~$488,900 in disbursements). Total assets fell in step, from $19.7M (2013) to $4.76M (2023) and $4.74M (2025) — a roughly 76% contraction, most of which occurred in an unreported 2016-2018 gap, consistent with a large one-time distribution or corpus split rather than gradual investment losses (net investment income stayed positive in nearly every reported year).

All five listed peers share Woods Charitable Foundation's near-identical asset size (~$4.74M) and generic "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE classification, and — like Woods — none has a listed public website in our data. That combination (small trust-administered corpus, no public web presence, generic filing category) is the signature of a closed, single-family or single-trustee foundation rather than an institutional grantmaker with staff and a program strategy; grant seekers should assume all six behave similarly (invitation-only, no LOI process) unless they can independently confirm otherwise for a given peer.

The most recent available filing (FY2025, per ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer) shows total assets of $4,742,733, revenue of $455,761 (42.5% dividends, 56.7% asset sales), expenses of $534,896, and a net loss of $79,135 for the year; charitable disbursements made up 91.4% of expenses, or roughly $488,900. Leadership has been stable and unpaid: Mark A. Strode has held the combined President/Secretary/Treasurer role with zero reported compensation across every filing on record (2011-2025), and no leadership transition was found in web research. The standout programmatic activity in the recent grantee data is a sustained, large commitment to Blue Oak School's "Acorn Fund" in Napa, CA — three separate grants totaling $615,000, suggesting an ongoing multi-year capital or enhancement pledge rather than a one-time gift. No press releases, news articles, or social media activity specific to this foundation (EIN 20-1060852) were located; it does not appear to issue public communications. Web searches for "Woods Charitable Foundation" news instead surface substantial 2025-2026 activity from unrelated organizations that share similar names — most notably Woods Charitable Fund, Inc. of Lincoln, Nebraska (EIN 47-6032847), which gave $1.53M across 51 grants in 2025 and broke ground on a new cultural-center expansion project for 2027, plus Woods Fund Chicago and WoodNext Foundation. None of that activity involves this foundation, and grant seekers researching this EIN should disregard it.

This foundation does not run a solicitable grants program, so conventional application tips do not apply — the actionable advice here is about correctly identifying the funder and calibrating effort. First, verify identity before investing any time: confirm you are looking at EIN 20-1060852 (Philadelphia-administered, Mark A. Strode, Napa CA grantee base), not EIN 47-6032847 (Woods Charitable Fund, Inc., Lincoln, NE, which does run a real twice-yearly LOI cycle at woodscharitable.org/apply). Because our underlying data bundle's website, phone number, and program names were pulled from the Lincoln, NE, organization's site by mistake, any grant seeker who reaches out to info@woodscharitable.org or (402) 436-5971 expecting a response from this foundation will be contacting the wrong entity. Second, do not submit an unsolicited proposal, cold email, or LOI to the JPMorgan Private Bank Philadelphia address — CauseIQ and the foundation's own filing pattern (18 grants across a recent multi-year window, all to organizations with a discernible Napa Valley or Strode-family tie) indicate a closed, relationship-driven process with no public intake mechanism. Third, if your organization genuinely has a pre-existing connection — you serve Napa, St. Helena, or Yountville, CA; you are Blue Oak School, Queen of the Valley Foundation, Cope Family Center, or a similar existing grantee's peer institution; or you have a board member or donor who can make a warm introduction to Mark Strode directly — that personal channel is the only realistic path in, and it works far better than any written proposal. Fourth, keep expectations calibrated to capacity: with total FY2025 disbursements near $489,000 and roughly 80% of recent dollars already committed to one ongoing Blue Oak School pledge, very little discretionary capacity likely remains for new relationships in a given year. Finally, for organizations without a Napa Valley or Strode-family connection, this funder should be deprioritized entirely in favor of open, LOI-based funders serving the same sectors and comparable asset sizes.