Inside Philanthropy periodically publishes quick overviews of the grantmakers that are on our radar, looking at recent developments and key details about how they operate. Today, we’re taking a look at the Galveston, Texas-based Moody Foundation. With $2.9 billion in assets, the foundation has disbursed more than $1.6 billion since its inception in 1942, with a focus on the arts, education, environment, health and social services. Most encouragingly for the state’s nonprofits, the foundation accepts letters of inquiry on a rolling basis. Here are five things to know about the foundation.
It’s (arguably) the largest funder in Texas
Moody is one of the largest private foundations in the second-most-populous and second-richest state by GDP in the country. A 2019 University of Texas press release went so far as to call it “the largest philanthropic foundation in the state of Texas,” although it’s hard to say if it is definitively the largest foundation in terms of its assets, since some of its peers’ sites don’t include current figures.
As far as out-the-door grantmaking is concerned, according to the foundation’s most recent 990, it gave $94 million in grants in 2019, putting it ahead of the Houston Endowment ($76 million), but behind the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation ($149 million) and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation ($211 million).
A search of Moody’s grants database reveals it awarded 215 grants totaling $142 million in 2021. It has also awarded $15.8 million in pandemic relief funds, including $400,000 in grants to 54 of Dallas’ small arts companies.
In addition, the foundation manages its own initiatives, like Generation Moody, which provides educational opportunities for Galveston Island residents, from infancy through post-secondary learning. Launched in 2018, the initiative has distributed more than $28 million in grants. Another initiative, Moody Scholars, provides financial assistance to qualified high school students in their pursuit of an undergraduate degree in the state of Texas. The program has awarded over $22 million to 6,200 students throughout the state since its inception in 1969.
Expansive statewide giving kicked off in the early 1960s
The story of the Moody Foundation begins in the waning days of the Civil War. William Lewis Moody, Jr. was born on January 25, 1865 in Fairfield, Texas and went on to study law at UT before working for his father’s cotton business in Galveston. He made his fortune by building newspapers, ranches, hotels and the Galveston-based American National Insurance Company, which formed the basis of the foundation’s assets.
In 1942, Moody and his wife Libbie Rice Shearn Moody set up the Moody Foundation “to benefit in perpetuity present and future generations of Texans.” The foundation primarily supported local charities during these formative years. After Moody’s passing, his estate was transferred to the foundation, which subsequently expanded its charitable giving across the state beginning in the early 1960s, prioritizing large capital grants to colleges, children’s health projects, libraries and historic preservation.
The Moody Foundation operates under the direction of a board of three trustees: William Moody, Jr.’s great-granddaughter Frances Moody-Dahlberg, her brother Ross Moody, and niece Elizabeth Moody. In a letter on the foundation’s site, Moody-Dahlberg writes, “All of our grants, from large to small, express our sense that coming together as a community honors the diversity, enables the unity and uplifts the hopeful spirit that is Texas.”
It makes huge capital-purpose gifts
Now this is the part of the post where I’m supposed to make the obligatory “everything is bigger in Texas” reference, and while I admit it’s pretty cliché, it happens to apply to the Moody Foundation, which has a penchant for making large — and some would argue anachronistic — capital-purpose gifts to the state’s universities. Anachronistic because critics have been questioning the utility of large donor-supported construction projects in the past few years, even pre-pandemic. These projects, the logic goes, rarely include ongoing maintenance costs in the sticker price, and, as a result, administrators could be passing downstream costs onto students in the form of higher tuition. Of course, this logic hasn’t dissuaded many higher ed funders who believe that large construction projects help universities attract high-performing students, boost the school's reputation, and generate regional economic activity.
In 2019, Moody made a $130 million gift to UT for the construction of Moody Center, a new basketball arena and events complex. The commitment brought the foundation’s total funding to institutions in the UT system to at least $260 million. The Moody Center officially opened its doors in late April, with actor Matthew McConaughey, who also chipped in for the $338 million project, presiding over the ribbon-cutting ceremony. The center was constructed “with minimal cost to the university and zero cost to the city and its taxpayers,” wrote Nick Moyle of the San Antonio Express.
Many of Moody’s big university gifts do have a substantial non-capital purpose component. In 2019, the foundation committed $100 million to fund the Moody School of Graduate and Advanced Studies at Southern Methodist University (SMU) and gave $25 million to the school, according to its Form 990 for the year. The gift was earmarked to bankroll the construction of a new building, as well as provide endowment and operational funds in support of graduate school faculty and financial aid for students.
Last September, the foundation announced a similar hybrid commitment to Rice University: $100 million to be split evenly to fund an endowment and the construction of a new student center, suggesting that the pandemic didn’t dampen the foundation’s affinity for large construction projects. According to Rice, the new student center aligns with administrators’ plans for a 20% expansion of the undergraduate student body by fall 2025. (Readers probably won’t be surprised to learn that Moody family members’ alma maters include Rice, UT and SMU.)
Speaking to Paper City’s Shelby Hodge a couple of months after the foundation announced the Rice gift, trustee Ross Moody said, “the SMU and UT gifts represent about 16% of our annual giving amount and it’s 24% including Rice, which leaves about $60 to $70 million a year to give to other nonprofits across the state.”
But it’s also about more than big capital gifts
The Moody Foundation earmarked most of its 2021 gifts for specific projects, the largest being the $100 million commitment to Rice, followed by $5.9 million for Galveston Island Day School’s Moody Early Childhood Center program, $5 million for the Moody Education Solutions Accelerator at the Highland Park ISD Educational Foundation, and $5 million for assistance with Moody Coliseum renovations at Abilene Christian University.
I found the latter gift to be especially noteworthy, as trustees showed a willingness to pay for substantial ongoing renovation costs to the coliseum, which was constructed in 1968.
But smaller Texas-based nonprofits will find solace in the fact that the foundation awards a substantial number of smaller grants. Its grants database shows that it made 125 grants — roughly 60% of all grants — of between $10,000 and $50,000 during 2021.
Better yet, the foundation accepts letters of inquiry on an ongoing basis. Interested organizations can submit up to three projects via a refreshingly streamlined and intuitive process by clicking here. If the foundation is interested, it will respond by providing grant application guidelines. Trustees meet four times a year to select recipients. The foundation site also includes financial reports, with the most recent one being its 2018-2019 Biennial Report.
More funding should be on its way
Through the Moody Foundation and other affiliated entities, the Moody family, as previously noted, controls a majority of the stock of the American National Insurance Company. In August 2021, Brookfield Asset Management, a Canadian investment management company, announced that it had agreed to acquire ANICO for $5.1 billion. This could be very good news for Texas nonprofits, as Ross Moody told Paper City that the windfall will enable the foundation to give an additional $25 million to $30 million per year.
In the meantime, the foundation has kept the spigot open. Last month, it gave Rice $50 million to fund a dozen newly created student opportunity endowments for activities like international travel and visiting speakers. The gift was part of the foundation’s $100 million commitment announced last September, which also included funding for a new building.
“The Moody Foundation was interested, not only in making sure it was possible for us to build the building, but also making sure that programs that constitute student life and opportunity were funded as well,” Rice President David Leebron told student paper the Rice Thresher. “A building alone isn’t sufficient.”