The Michael Paul Wein Charitable Foundation

"Underpromise and Overdeliver"

recent status

Since our mission includes encouraging universal transparency from our grantees, obviously we also expect to be transparent ourselves.  This page includes our most recent attempt to do so.   Below we disclose as much as we know as of this latest date of posting:

We post this on our web-site, but also instruct  our trustees to publish this information (after the death of the Founder) wherever it is appropriate.

This page includes the following information:

Where this information  should be published

At very least, the information below should be sent

Information regarding the source of this Foundation's endowment

The Will of Michael Wein, the founder of this Foundation, provides for the following distributions of funds after his death.  More historical background can be found at funding and at history-estimates.  The most recent information and estimates are included in this table.   All values are in US dollars.

*** the founder's house is included above at its out-of-pocket cost of us$520,000.   However it was appraised by 3 separate and independent  local appraisers  at values of us$675,000, us$695,000, and us$700,000 in October 2001, and San Miguel property values (especially in the centro area where the house is located) have steadily increased since 2001.  In August 2005, the house was appraised at us$1,000,000, almost us$500,000 higher than the value included in above computations.

Information regarding the beneficiaries of the Founder

The primary beneficiaries of the founders will are this foundation (the MPWCF), the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation (ACLUF), Rider University, and individual persons who are related to or friends of the Founder (both in San Miguel and in the USA).

These beneficiaries, as of our most recent calculations, are to receive:

Information regarding our endowment

The Foundation's endowment is expected to come entirely from the execution of the founders will.  While the estate is currently valued as shown above, the estate has a long history of growing as the Founder's needs were always less than his income (both from investments and other sources).  Therefore, the estate might be expected to continue to grow in amounts similar to those shown on the history & estimates web-page.

Information regarding our investments, cash flow, and expenses

Prior to his death, the Founder currently provides funds that are distributed to current grantees.  These grants are relatively modest in amount now and are intended to approximate the net profit from the rental of two apartments attached to his San Miguel house.

However, shortly after the founder's death, the following cash flow is expected to occur.   A report to this effect is to be published annually (and sent to all parties noted at the top of this page, at the end of each of our June 30th fiscal years) and is to follow the formats shown below (in the  investment summary, the cash flow summary, and the listing of overhead expenses).

The trustees should be reminded that the instructions to the Trustees (see more about this at Our trustees web-page) state that the Investment endowment is to increase (on average) from year to year in order for the endowment to keep up with inflation.

The investments summary should look like this ($000 omitted) (using 2016 and 2015 as random example years):

Note (a) - The entire market went down in 2015 (the Dow decreased ___% and our investments decreased ___%, quite comparably.  However, we more than made it up in 2016 by basically following our "hold" philosophy and "just good companies" investment policy.   We also accomplished our goal of keeping up with inflation as the $3,000 at the beginning of the two years increased to $3,245 at the end of the two years, a 4.08% average increase for each of the two years 

The cash flow summary should look like this ($000 omitted) (using 2016 and 2015 as random example years):

Note (b) - we were able to keep our payments to our grantees relatively constant (and at least equal to the prior year) even with a drop in the endowment.   The payments to grantees approximated 8% in both years. 

And finally, since our mission also looks highly on grantees who have low overhead to high mission percentages, we offer our own transparent view of our own overhead expenses.