The Quiet Shelf, Volume Two: A Century of Momentum, From Penrose's Orchard to a Powerball Ticket

Volume One of the Quiet Shelf read nine sets of books and found that the differences that matter between foundations are structural, never famous. Then another stack of public filings arrived, twenty more organizations, and reading them together revealed the variable Volume One only gestured at: time. A foundation is a machine for converting one fortune into decades of work, and the filings, sorted by age, show the whole lifecycle, ignition, cruise, sprint, and sunset. So this volume reads the new stack chronologically, oldest working money first, and asks of each one the question a ledger always asks: how long has it worked, and what does its momentum look like now? Everything below comes from the organizations' own filings and histories, cited at the bottom, with nothing invented.

The century club

The Denver Foundation filed its trust declaration with Colorado's secretary of state on November 30, 1925, which makes it the state's oldest and largest community foundation and, as of last year, a century old. Its latest filing shows $1.32 billion in assets. A community foundation is a different species from everything in Volume One: not one fortune with one purpose but thousands of donors pooled into a permanent civic trust, which is why it outlives any single family's attention span. One hundred years of continuous operation is the local record to beat, and only Girard's 194 makes it look young.

El Pomar Foundation is the grande dame of the private side, and how its fortune was amassed is a lesson this series has taught before. Spencer Penrose took a half stake in Cripple Creek's C.O.D. gold mine, sold it in 1895 for $250,000, and put the money not into more mines but into the Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company, an ore-processing mill, then formed Utah Copper in 1903, which became the real fortune: he sold the hole in the ground and bought the machine every hole had to pay, the same infrastructure position Bill Daniels took in cable and Willing took in banking. Penrose, who built the Broadmoor hotel outside dry Colorado Springs in 1918, and his wife Julie established the foundation in 1937 with an initial gift of $21 million, naming it for their estate, El Pomar, "the orchard," itself named for the apple orchard the villa was built on. Eighty-nine years later the orchard is still bearing: $711.2 million in assets, $19.5 million granted in the latest filing, under the mission the Penroses wrote, "to enhance, encourage, and promote the future and current well-being of the people of Colorado." Penrose seeded it four years before he died. The machine has now worked about twenty-two times longer than he got to watch it.

Idaho's two oldest entries belong here too, and they anchor a drawer this post returns to below. The Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation was created by will in 1963 by Laura Belle Moore Cunningham, the first of her pioneer family's children born in Boise City, in 1869, daughter of the C.W. Moore who co-founded Idaho First National Bank in 1863. Her foundation, one of Idaho's oldest and largest, holds $118.5 million, granted $5.1 million in its latest year through an unpaid volunteer board, and carries the most eloquent single line on any schedule this series has read: $82,958,601 of US Bank stock, seventy percent of the whole foundation, in the fund descended from the man who co-founded Idaho's first bank in 1863. The filings don't narrate the corporate genealogy between that frontier bank and the modern one, so this series won't either, but the echo, like the Tutt name on El Pomar's officer page, is loud. Sixty-three years of work from a woman born when Boise was a frontier town, still substantially invested in banking the frontier. And the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation, established in 1966 by the founder of the Albertsons grocery chain and his wife, supplies this post's best momentum datapoint. For three decades it gave steadily and modestly. Then in 1997 Kathryn Albertson gave the foundation $660 million of Albertson's stock in a single gift, and annual giving jumped from roughly $2.5 million to more than $35 million, a fourteenfold change of gear from one decision. The foundation, now $849.0 million with $27.6 million granted in the latest filing, has spent the decades since as Idaho education's most consequential private funder, and its filing is unusually personal: the board is chaired by Jamie Jo Scott of the founding family, the $537.7 million core portfolio sits in a single custodial line at Northern Trust, the asset schedule inventories the office's bronze sculptures and even a paper shredder, and the grant list names individual education fellows alongside checks like $211,000 to Boise's Anser Charter School and $135,000 to the school-growth nonprofit Bluum. Momentum in this sector isn't gradual. It arrives in gifts, and the filings record the exact year the engine changed.

The mid-lifers, forty years in

The Anschutz Foundation, created in 1984 by Philip F. Anschutz, is the largest private foundation in the new stack at $1.865 billion, awarding by its own account hundreds of grants a year, mostly in Colorado. The fortune behind it was amassed by sequence, each business seeding the next: the Anschutz Ranch oil field, the largest American discovery since Prudhoe Bay, an interest in which he sold to Mobil in 1982 for $500 million; then railroads; then the fiber-optic lines he ran along the rail rights-of-way, spun off in 1995 as Qwest Communications; then real estate and entertainment. One precision note the record requires: there are two Anschutz foundations, and they are not the same organization. The Anschutz Family Foundation, founded in 1982 by Fred and Marian Anschutz and chaired by Sue Anschutz-Rodgers, is a separate entity, and Philip is not involved in it. Forty-two years of work, and the fortune behind it is still alive and adding, which is the structural difference between a living founder's foundation and the dead-hand trusts this series usually reads: the corpus can still grow by decision, not just by market. The filing shows the next generation already seated, Christian P. Anschutz as president and Jill H. Anschutz on the board, with executive director David Ryan the senior paid hand at $422,917, and it shows something rarer: an investment schedule of individually chosen stocks, $11.2 million of Enterprise Products Partners, $3.2 million of Enbridge, positions in Advance Auto Parts, Under Armour, and Ready Capital, an energy-tilted picker's book that looks exactly like what a wildcatter's family office would hold.

WaterStone, legally the Christian Community Foundation, founded 1980 in Colorado Springs, is the faith-aligned answer to the donor-advised machines of Volume One: $746.4 million on the latest filing, more than $3.2 billion guided through donor accounts over its life, and by its own reporting about $4.6 million a week going out the door to Christian causes. Forty-six years of work built an infrastructure position, the Daniels lesson in nonprofit form: it doesn't just give money, it runs the pipes other givers' money flows through.

And the Reisher Family Foundation shows what a mid-life fund looks like when the purpose is a single sharp point. Roger Reisher, founding president of FirstBank in Colorado, where he worked thirty-six years, and his wife Margaret were the first in their families to attend college. In 2001 they built a scholarship program at the Denver Foundation; the family foundation behind it now holds $559.0 million, and the program has put $39.3 million into scholarships and helped nearly 2,500 students finish college, with a $4.2 million expansion to CU Boulder launching this January. Twenty-five years of work, one instrument, measurable output, the orphan's-dividend model run by a living family.

The new wave, and what ignition looks like

The 2016 vintage belongs to the Walton grandchildren, third-generation Walmart money settling into Colorado mountain towns and running hard. Zoma Foundation, founded in 2016 by Ben Walton, grandson of Sam, and his wife Lucy Ana, a child psychologist, was seeded with $191 million in Walmart stock plus $51 million in grants from the Walton Family Foundation; eight years later it holds $529.5 million and granted $23.0 million in the latest filing, much of it toward early childhood. Catena Foundation, established the same year by Sam R. Walton, another grandson, and headquartered in Carbondale, states its mission as "to heal the land and heal the people," funding Native American communities and land and river work across Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico: $596.4 million, $27.2 million granted, with Walton serving as unpaid president over a professional staff and a grant list running from the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies to the American Himalayan Foundation to a single $1 million institute grant. Two cousins, two mountain towns, a billion dollars of patient money, and both filings show the same shape: seeded big, cruising at the payout floor, built to run for decades.

The newest entries show the ignition phase itself, and it is the most instructive stretch of the whole lifecycle. The Ahimsa Foundation of Niwot, Colorado, with its IRS ruling in 2021, already holds $1.07 billion and granted $73.1 million in the latest filing, roughly seven percent of assets, well above the statutory floor, a young fund spending like it means it, and its name is its mission statement: ahimsa is the principle of nonviolence, and the foundation exists, per its published profiles, to move the food system away from animal proteins toward more sustainable options. Its president, Shaleen Shah, is a fintech and consumer-lending entrepreneur who also co-founded and chairs Luvin Arms Animal Sanctuary in Colorado, though the filing shows the operation has professionalized well past volunteers: Shah draws $277,000, secretary Satish Karandikar $800,000, and investment manager Amy Trakinski $862,500, family-office-scale compensation for a family-office-scale book, and the grant schedule's two largest visible lines are $12.53 million toward advocacy for the wellbeing of animals and $5.09 million routed through the donor-advised platform Charityvest, a billion-dollar plant-forward endowment operating out of a small town north of Boulder. The Hexagon Foundation, formed in 2022, Texas-domiciled, operating from WaterStone's own Colorado Springs address, received $503.8 million in contributions in 2024 alone and granted $89.6 million the same year against $522.9 million in assets, a fund whose money arrives and departs at nearly the same velocity, purpose-built, per its own mission line, to support WaterStone's work. Its principal officer signs as Tim Dunn, and published reporting on the WaterStone network identifies Hexagon as led by Dunn and as WaterStone's largest institutional donor, contributing $57.2 million in 2024. The Texas oilman of that name, founder and chief executive of Midland's CrownQuest and a lay preacher who founded the 750-student Midland Classical Academy, sold the CrownRock venture to Occidental Petroleum in a deal valued at $12 billion, from which Bloomberg estimated he would personally collect $2.2 billion; the filings themselves do not name Hexagon's donor, and this series reports the documents and the published reporting rather than guessing past either. And the Avenir Foundation of Wheat Ridge is the purest ignition specimen on record, with the best compounding story in this entire series behind it. In 1956, a physicist and university president named Homer Dodge invested $120,000 with a young Warren Buffett. His daughter, Alice Dodge Wallace, spent her life on Colorado arts and on textiles, endowing the Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising at Colorado State in 2008 and the Denver Art Museum's Avenir Institute of Textile Art and Fashion; she recalled walking on Navajo and oriental carpets in her childhood home, and CSU gave her an honorary degree in 2011. She died in 2020, and in 2024 her trust transferred two thousand shares of Berkshire Hathaway to the family foundation, which is how a fund that had held about $1 million came to show an excess of revenue over expenses of $1.24 billion in a single fiscal year, against just $2.7 million in grants, including $1.2 million to Central City Opera, with an unpaid volunteer family board at the helm, William Dodge Wallace presiding. Sixty-eight years from a professor's $120,000 to a billion-dollar foundation: the engine that amassed this fortune was nothing but time and two thousand unsold shares. Watch its next few filings and you will see a foundation learn to spend, in public, which is exactly how Bill Daniels' fund looked in the May 2000 filing that named its first 32 scholars.

The Idaho drawer

Volume One found two quiet Idaho funds, Bews and Seagraves; the new stack fills out the state's whole shelf, and it holds one world-famous secret. The Greg Carr Foundation of Idaho Falls, created in 1999 by the Idaho Falls-born entrepreneur who made his fortune in voicemail and internet services, holds $53.8 million and disbursed $11.9 million in its latest year, more than twenty percent of assets, because Carr is not building a perpetuity. He has pledged more than $100 million over 35 years to restore Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, ravaged by civil war, and to fund health care, education, and agriculture for the communities around it, work profiled by 60 Minutes and National Geographic. His filing routes eight figures a year through a small Idaho Falls address on North Water Avenue toward the far side of the world, a spend-hard mission fund wearing a quiet 990, and its balance sheet confirms the posture this series' investment taxonomy predicts for a fund on a deadline: $8.8 million parked in cash alternatives, short duration for money that is leaving soon, with Carr himself serving unpaid.

The Wood River Valley adds two more. The Stevens Family Foundation, $18.2 million, writes its checks to Ketchum and Sun Valley institutions, Boulder Mountain Clayworks, the ballet. And the Julie Ann Wrigley Foundation is the shelf's sunset specimen: the philanthropist whose $50 million-plus built Arizona State University's Global Institute of Sustainability, the gift that effectively founded a field, now shows just $256,041 left in the family foundation, its final grants flowing to the Sun Valley Writers' Conference, the Sun Valley Music Festival, and Ballet Sun Valley. A foundation ending is not a foundation failing. Spend-down is a strategy, and the Wrigley filing is what it looks like executed to the last page. Farther northwest, the Islands Fund of Richland, Washington, $350.3 million with $16.2 million granted, quietly endows Pacific Northwest youth programs, summer camp scholarships, and marine conservation from Alaska to Vermont, with the filing itself as nearly its only public voice; that voice says the board is mostly one family, four Gulicks serving unpaid, and the money sits in a single $246.7 million Merrill Lynch line.

The far drawer, and the pass-through pattern

Two southern entries round out the stack. The Holland M. Ware Charitable Foundation carries the fortune of a Hogansville, Georgia timberman ranked the twenty-first largest landowner in the country in 2018, who died in 2019 at eighty-two, and the giving has a heart his obituaries led with: in 2006 he began funding the Puppy Pipeline, a rescue program that has moved more than 43,000 dogs out of rural Georgia shelters and into homes, endowed a partnership with Auburn's veterinary college that trains students by having them spay, neuter, and mend shelter animals, helped build the LaGrange animal shelter, and with his wife Faye gave $2 million for the advanced care unit at Piedmont Newnan Hospital that carries both their names, plus roughly $1.5 million for cancer research at Emory. His foundation holds $375.3 million and is administered today, of all places, from Eagle, Idaho by trustee Brenda Thueson at $240,000, and its $55.4 million latest-year payout, roughly fifteen percent of assets, turns out to be dominated by one astonishing line: a single conservation grant of $53.24 million, with the recognizable Ware signatures, $51,746 to Auburn's small-animal program, $147,612 to BroncoBold mental health work at Boise State, animal rescue and emergency care checks, running alongside it. A Georgia timber fortune paying out hard through a Treasure Valley address, most of it in one enormous act of land conservation. And the OneRoot Foundation demonstrates the pass-through pattern: just $1.1 million in year-end assets but $6.2 million granted during the year, a fund that exists as a conduit, refilled and emptied annually, which the filings reveal instantly because the grants line dwarfs the balance sheet. The Vande Steeg Foundation ($40.7 million, $1.7 million granted) turns out to be another Idaho entry: established in 2020 by Nick and Jeanne Vande Steeg of Meridian, after Nick's thirty-five-year career at Parker Hannifin ended with him as the industrial giant's president and chief operating officer, and run, per the family's own site, with multiple generations making grant decisions together. The remaining small funds in the stack, Zander ($9.8 million, $1.2 million), Confluence Institute ($4.6 million, $727 thousand), and Shafran ($1.2 million, $37.5 thousand), stay filing-only after searching: the Zander filing's tax identification number matches neither of the two similarly named foundations with public profiles, so nothing is asserted about any of them beyond their own pages. That is the honest floor of this method. Some quiet money is simply quiet, and saying so beats inventing a story.

What the ages prove

Line all twenty up by founding date and the lifecycle stands out like strata in a road cut. Ignition: Avenir's billion landing in one line, Hexagon's half-billion arriving and leaving in the same year. Cruise: the Waltons and the mid-lifers holding near the five percent floor, built for decades. Sprint: Ahimsa at seven percent, Ware at fifteen, Carr at twenty-plus, funds that have chosen mission velocity over immortality. Sunset: Wrigley's $256 thousand coda after the field-founding gift went out the door. And above them all, the century club, Denver's hundred years, El Pomar's eighty-nine, Cunningham's sixty-three, Albertson's sixty, proving what the whole series has argued since Girard: none of this correlates with fame, and all of it correlates with structure. The momentum question, how fast the money works, turns out to be a written choice, visible in every filing, made once by a founder or a board and then executed for decades. The age question, how long the money works, was answered by Franklin and Girard two centuries ago: as long as the purpose is written precisely enough for strangers to keep it. Twenty more sets of books, and not one exception.

Related reading

• The Quiet Shelf, Volume One: the first nine sets of books, and the reading method.
• Bill Daniels Repaid Debts He Didn't Owe: the lineage from Franklin to Hershey to Daniels, and how to pull any foundation's filings yourself.
• The Orphan's Dividend: what an endowment's output looks like measured in people.
• The Ledger Lessons: the seven laws every one of these books is quietly obeying or breaking.

Fact-check notes and sources

• The machine details (Christian P. Anschutz, Jill H. Anschutz, David Ryan's $422,917, and the named stock positions; Jamie Jo Scott as chair, the $537,693,962 Northern Trust portfolio line, the sculpture-and-shredder asset schedule, and the Anser Charter School and Bluum grants; Shaleen Shah's $277,000, Satish Karandikar's $800,000, Amy Trakinski's $862,500, the $12.53 million animal-wellbeing line and $5.09 million to Charityvest; Sam R. Walton's unpaid presidency and Catena's grant list; the $82,958,601 US Bank stock line at Cunningham; Brenda Thueson's $240,000 and the $53.24 million conservation grant at Ware; the Gulick family board and $246.7 million Merrill Lynch line at Islands; Carr's $8.8 million cash alternatives and unpaid presidency; Buell's paid trustees): reproduced from each organization's most recent Form 990-PF officer pages and attached schedules; no genealogical or identity claims are made beyond the filings.
• All asset and grant figures: read directly from each organization's most recent public filing (Forms 990-PF and 990, fiscal years ending 2024 through mid-2025), fair market value per line I, grant totals per Part XV or the page-one summary, and disbursement totals per line 26 where cited. Grantee names (Central City Opera, the National Mining Hall of Fame, Boulder Mountain Clayworks, the Sun Valley arts organizations, Alaska Marine Conservation Council) and officer names are reproduced from the filings verbatim. Payout percentages are the author's arithmetic from those figures and are labeled approximate.
• The Denver Foundation (the November 30, 1925 trust declaration and oldest-and-largest standing): the foundation's centennial history and Wikipedia/profile coverage, attributed.
• El Pomar (Spencer and Julie Penrose, the 1937 founding with $21 million, the Broadmoor's 1918 opening, the estate name "El Pomar" meaning "the orchard," and the quoted mission): El Pomar's own history and the El Pomar Estate record, attributed. The Penrose fortune (the C.O.D. mine half stake sold in 1895 for $250,000, the Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company ore mill, and Utah Copper's 1903 formation): Wikipedia, "Spencer Penrose" and the Colorado Encyclopedia, attributed.
• Albertson (the 1966 founding by Joe and Kathryn Albertson, the Albertsons grocery origin, and Kathryn's 1997 gift of $660 million in stock lifting annual giving from roughly $2.5 million to more than $35 million): the foundation's own history and Inside Philanthropy's profile.
• Cunningham (the 1963 creation by will, Laura Belle Moore's 1869 birth as the first of her family born in Boise City, C.W. Moore's 1863 co-founding of Idaho First National Bank, and the oldest-and-largest-in-Idaho standing): the foundation's history and the City of Boise's biography.
• Anschutz (the 1984 founding by Philip F. Anschutz, the Colorado concentration, and the two-foundations distinction with the 1982 Anschutz Family Foundation chaired by Sue Anschutz-Rodgers): the foundation's site and Wikipedia, "Anschutz Family Foundation", attributed; the fortune sequence (the Anschutz Ranch field as the largest US discovery since Prudhoe Bay, the 1982 sale of an interest to Mobil for $500 million, the rail rights-of-way fiber spun off as Qwest in 1995) per Forbes and Wikipedia, "Philip Anschutz", attributed.
• WaterStone (the 1980 founding as Christian Community Foundation, the more than $3.2 billion guided, roughly $2 billion advised, and about $4.6 million weekly in grants): WaterStone's own about page and profile coverage, attributed.
• Reisher (Roger Reisher as FirstBank's founding president and his thirty-six years there, the first-generation-college background, the 2001 program at the Denver Foundation, $39.3 million in scholarships, nearly 2,500 graduates, and the January 2026 CU Boulder launch): the Denver Foundation's Reisher pages and CU Boulder Today.
• Zoma and Catena (the 2016 foundings, Ben Walton and Lucy Ana Walton with the $191 million Walmart stock and $51 million Walton Family Foundation seed, Sam R. Walton's Carbondale foundation and its quoted "heal the land and heal the people" mission and four-state Native and environmental focus): Inside Philanthropy on Zoma and profile coverage of both, attributed.
• Ahimsa (the Niwot location, 2021 IRS ruling, Shaleen Shah as president, the food-system mission away from animal proteins, his fintech and consumer-lending background, the Luvin Arms Animal Sanctuary co-founding, and the volunteer leadership): its CauseIQ profile, its Grantable profile, and its Vevolution organization profile.
• Hexagon (the 2022 formation, Texas domicile, the WaterStone-support mission line, Tim Dunn as principal officer, $503,758,207 in 2024 contributions, $89,576,935 in grants, and $522,903,234 in assets): read directly from its 2024 Form 990, page one; the WaterStone relationship per its CauseIQ profile. The Dunn reporting (Hexagon identified as led by Dunn and as WaterStone's largest institutional donor with $57.2 million contributed in 2024): Responsible Statecraft's investigation; the CrownRock sale (the $12 billion Occidental deal and Bloomberg's $2.2 billion personal estimate) and the Midland Classical Academy founding: The Texas Tribune, Texas Monthly, and E&E News. The text states explicitly that the filings do not name Hexagon's donor.
• Avenir (the $1.24 billion excess of revenue in the latest fiscal year, the $2.7 million of grants including Central City Opera and the National Mining Hall of Fame, and the uncompensated family board): read directly from its Form 990-PF. The origin story (Homer Dodge's $120,000 investment with Warren Buffett in 1956, Alice Dodge Wallace's 2020 death, and her trust's 2024 transfer of two thousand Berkshire Hathaway shares to the foundation): Inside Philanthropy's account, quoted from directly. Her textile and arts legacy (the 2008 Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising at Colorado State, the 2011 honorary degree, the Navajo and oriental carpets recollection, and the Denver Art Museum's Avenir Institute): Colorado State University's announcement and the Denver Art Museum.
• Carr (the Idaho Falls birth and upbringing, the 1999 foundation, the voicemail and internet fortune, the pledge of more than $100 million over 35 years to Gorongosa National Park and surrounding communities, and the 60 Minutes and National Geographic coverage): Gorongosa's own biography, Wikipedia, "Gregory C. Carr", attributed, and CBS News' 60 Minutes transcript.
• Wrigley (the more than $50 million invested at Arizona State University, the 2004 gift establishing the Global Institute of Sustainability, and the foundation's $256,041 remaining assets with Sun Valley arts grants): ASU's accounts of the Wrigley gifts and the foundation's Form 990-PF, read directly. The characterization of spend-down as strategy is the author's framing of those figures.
• Ware (the Hogansville origin, the timber fortune, the number twenty-one ranking among the country's largest landowners in the Land Report 100's winter 2018 issue, and the 2019 death at eighty-two): the LaGrange Daily News obituary and The Land Report. The giving (the 2006 Puppy Pipeline with more than 43,000 dogs rehomed, the Auburn veterinary college training partnership, the LaGrange animal shelter, the $2 million Piedmont Newnan advanced care unit with Faye Hendrix-Ware, and the roughly $1.5 million to Emory cancer research): the Times-Herald's legacy account and the LaGrange obituary; the Eagle, Idaho administration per its CauseIQ profile.
• Islands Fund (the Richland, Washington base, John Munn as principal officer, and the Pacific Northwest youth, camp, and education focus): its CauseIQ profile and the filing's grantee schedules.
• Vande Steeg (the 2020 founding by Nick and Jeanne Vande Steeg, the Meridian, Idaho base, the thirty-five-year Parker Hannifin career ending as president and chief operating officer, and the multigenerational governance): the family foundation's own site, Parker Hannifin's retirement announcement, and its CauseIQ profile.
• No founder stories are asserted for OneRoot, Zander, Confluence, Shafran, or the Stevens Family Foundation because the consulted sources do not carry them (the Zander filing's EIN matches neither similarly named foundation with a public profile); their figures and grantee details are filing-only.

This post is informational, not financial, tax, or philanthropic advice. All figures are reproduced from public filings and the cited histories; all organizations and individuals are discussed from the public record as nominative fair use, with no affiliation implied and nothing endorsed by them. Payout characterizations describe reported figures, not judgments of compliance.