Medina Foundation, closing in 2027, makes final grants of $1 million to $5 million to 42 Western Washington nonprofits
The Seattle family foundation announced its last round on Nov. 10, according to The Chronicle of Centralia. With its earlier 2026 grants, it expects to give away nearly $110 million this year.
Seattle. The Medina Foundation of Seattle, which plans to close in early 2027, has made its final round of grants: between $1 million and $5 million each to 42 nonprofits in Western Washington, for endowments, capital campaigns or program expansion. The Chronicle of Centralia reported the round on Nov. 11, citing a news release the foundation issued the day before.
Combined with grants made earlier in the year, the foundation will give away nearly $110 million in 2026, the newspaper reported. The foundation's own website had not posted the announcement as of Nov. 12.
Who received grants
The Chronicle listed six grants in Thurston and Grays Harbor counties: $4.5 million to Rochester Organization of Families for a building project; $3 million to Boys & Girls Clubs of Thurston County for a permanent home for its Yelm club; $2.6 million to the YMCA of Grays Harbor for what it calls the Grays Harbor Generations Transformation Project; $2.15 million to Garden Raised Bounty, known as GRuB, in Olympia; $1.38 million to Community Youth Services for youth behavioral health care in the South Sound; and $1 million to Coastal Harvest for rural hunger relief. FareStart, a Seattle job training nonprofit, received $5 million, the paper said.
“These are the largest individual grants we've ever made.”
How the foundation is winding down
Norton Clapp, a former president of the Weyerhaeuser Company, founded the foundation in 1947. It has funded mainly human service organizations in a 14 county region around Puget Sound, most often with general operating support, and its pages put its average giving at about $4 million a year.
Its trustees decided in December 2024 to close it. In 2025, its last year of regular grantmaking, it made 226 grants totaling $6.2 million and pledged nearly $14 million more in exit grants to 195 longtime grantees, with no application required and 90 percent of the money unrestricted, according to its 2025 annual report. It no longer accepts unsolicited proposals.
The final round came from an invitation only request for proposals for what the foundation called transformative projects, opened in February 2026. It drew 245 letters of inquiry asking for more than $865 million in all, the foundation said, and it invited full applications in April. The foundation has said it aims to close in 2027, the year of its 80th anniversary.
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