Beatrice & Samuel A. Seaver Foundation

Beatrice & Samuel A. Seaver Foundation

The Beatrice & Samuel A. Seaver Foundation was established in 1986 in New York, crystallizing the philanthropy of the Seaver family whose wealth originated from Hydril Company, a manufacturer of oilfield drilling equipment. The foundation is structured as a 501(c)(3) organization, with trustees Hirschell Levine, a partner at accounting and advisory firm Withum Smith & Brown, and John Cohen serving as the primary advisors and stewards of the foundation's assets and grantmaking strategy. Grantmaking concentrates on medical education and research, hospitals, cancer care, human services, and Jewish organizations — a tightly focused mandate with New York as its geographic center of gravity. Known institutional beneficiaries include Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment, the latter reflecting a sustained, multi-year commitment to autism research that carries the family name. The foundation's assets include ownership of a commercial property at 10 West 33rd Street in Manhattan alongside a broader investment portfolio managed externally. The foundation reports an asset base in the $140 million to $160 million range (Altss estimate), placing it among the mid-sized private foundations in the New York metropolitan area. The board of trustees includes Christopher Seaver, son of Richard Seaver and nephew of Frank Seaver, and former CEO of Hydril Company — maintaining family governance continuity decades after the liquidity event that capitalized the foundation. The foundation does not maintain a public website or LinkedIn presence, operating with a deliberately low profile characteristic of family-directed, non-staffed philanthropic vehicles. The foundation's structural differentiator is its longevity without institutional drift: nearly four decades after founding, it remains a trustee-directed grantmaker with no professional investment staff, no program officers, and no expansion beyond its original medical and human-services focus. This architecture — a family foundation that outsources investment management entirely while trustees make grant decisions directly — is increasingly rare among vehicles of its size, most of which have either built internal teams or outsourced grantmaking to donor-advised funds.