Stephen & Tabitha King Foundation

Stephen & Tabitha King Foundation

The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation was established in 1986 by authors Stephen and Tabitha King, drawing its capital from the literary output that made Stephen King one of the world's most commercially successful writers. Born in Portland, Maine, and a former high school English teacher at Hampden Academy, King sold his first novel, Carrie, in 1973 and left teaching to write full-time. The foundation is rooted in the family's Maine identity — Tabitha King, an author of eight novels, has served on the Bangor Public Library board and received a Constance Carlson award for literacy work in 1998. Grantmaking stays entirely within Maine, distributing approximately $3 million per year (per the firm, 2025) across community-based initiatives. The foundation's stated interests — libraries, literacy, information access, community health, and arts and culture — reflect a focus on local institutions rather than national nonprofit brands. The foundation does not operate as a venture-philanthropy or impact-investing shop; it writes checks to organizations that address underlying causes of social and environmental problems, with a declared preference for projects that serve the most members of a community. It does not accept unsolicited applications from outside Maine, and the contact form on its site explicitly notes that messages are not received by Stephen or Tabitha King. The foundation operates with a lean team led by Executive Director Cherie Galyean, who spent most of her career at the Maine Community Foundation before joining the Kings' foundation. Mark Poirier, a novelist and former creative writing lecturer at Harvard and Colby College, joined in 2025 to direct a newly launched writers' residency program housed in the foundation's historic Bangor properties. The treasurer role sits with Mark Levenfus, a partner at the professional services firm CBIZ. Stephen and Tabitha King retain their titles as president and secretary, respectively, but day-to-day grantmaking runs through the staff. What distinguishes the foundation structurally is its single-state geographic constraint paired with a grantmaking philosophy that explicitly targets populations with less access to traditional funding channels — a posture that combines the intimacy of a family foundation with a mandate that reads more like a community foundation. The 2025 launch of the writers' residency program adds a programmatic layer beyond grantmaking, using the Kings' real estate assets as a vehicle for creative production rather than direct charitable distribution.