Festus & Helen Stacy Foundation

Festus & Helen Stacy Foundation

The Festus & Helen Stacy Foundation was established in 1980 in Fort Lauderdale by Festus Stacy and his wife Helen. Stacy built his fortune through APenn and Penn-Champ Oil, a pair of manufacturing and energy companies that operated in the mid-Atlantic and Appalachian basin. Control of the foundation passed to daughter Virlee Stepelton and her husband Douglas, who serves as president and primary investment officer, with two third-generation family members now holding vice-president and director roles. The foundation does not follow a conventional asset-class allocation model. Its corpus is held in a mix of publicly traded securities and a single commercial property on North Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale, while grantmaking runs through three tightly scoped program areas: Evangelism/Church Planting, Leadership Development, and Holistic Ministries. All grantees are Christian organizations deploying capital predominantly outside the United States. The foundation reports no direct private-equity commitments, no fund-of-funds relationships, and no co-investment vehicles — it operates as a liquid, donor-directed endowment with a narrow religious mandate. Team size is undisclosed. The board comprises four trustees drawn entirely from the Stacy-Stepelson family line. Douglas Stepelton is the only named principal with an external professional track record — he previously served as president of the Broward-Gold Coast chapter of the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers. The foundation maintains a secondary philanthropic vehicle, the Festus & Helen Stacy Foundation II, though no public filings differentiate its grantmaking scope or separate investment pool. A notable domestic grantee is Westminster Academy, a Christian school in Fort Lauderdale where the foundation funded the athletic complex renovation. Structurally, the foundation is unusual in that it permits itself no program-related investments, no recoverable grants, and no venture-philanthropy structures — every dollar deployed is a pure charitable expenditure. The investment policy prioritizes yield and liquidity over long-term illiquidity premiums, a posture consistent with the foundation's role as a current-distribution engine rather than an intergenerational endowment builder. Governance remains tightly held; no independent trustees, investment committee, or external OCIO has been disclosed.