Sunshine Charitable Foundation

Sunshine Charitable Foundation

David and Denise Bunning established the Sunshine Charitable Foundation in 2005 as a 501(c)(3) private foundation, routing capital generated through the family's investment activities toward medical research. The foundation operates from Lake Forest, Illinois, with additional administrative space in nearby Libertyville. Its grantmaking focuses on children's health, particularly food allergy and eosinophilic esophagitis research — areas where Denise Bunning has been a long-term advocate through her co-founding of MOCHA (Mothers of Children Having Allergies). The foundation's deployment strategy is notably concentrated: its assets are funneled almost entirely into buyout vehicles. While it does not publicly disclose direct portfolio holdings, the approach suggests a preference for private equity structures to compound capital available for grantmaking. Research partnerships define its operational footprint. The foundation maintains a close, documented collaboration with Dr. Ruchi Gupta and the Center for Food Allergy & Asthma Research (CFAAR) at Northwestern University, co-publishing research that shapes clinical understanding of pediatric food allergies. Total assets are not publicly disclosed by the foundation. An independent estimate places the foundation's corpus at roughly $115 million. The Bunning family's broader investment architecture is managed through TLP Group, headquartered at 111 Lake Street in Libertyville, where David Bunning serves as CEO and CIO. Michael J. Bunning, a family member, is an Executive Vice President at TLP and participates in investment decisions. The foundation itself does not maintain a separate, named investment team in public filings. May 2024: David Bunning continued in his role as Chairman of the Board of Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE), reinforcing the foundation's alignment with national allergy research networks. The foundation's unusual architecture lies in its hybrid nature: a single-family philanthropic vehicle that operates with the grantmaking focus of a disease-specific foundation but deploys its corpus through concentrated private equity allocations. This structure allows the Bunnings to sustain long-term research commitments — such as the multi-year Northwestern collaboration — without the fundraising cycles that constrain typical nonprofit research funders.