Wilburforce Foundation

The Wilburforce Foundation is a private grantmaking foundation in Seattle, founded in 1991 by Rose Letwin, who remains its founder, president and sole funder. It works on conservation of lands, waters and wildlife across western North America and Alaska, gives by invitation rather than open application, and runs the Conservation Leadership Award and the Wilburforce Leaders in Conservation Science programme. Its most recent filed year shows roughly $153M in total assets and around $19.3M in grants, down from about $34.5M in 2022; roughly 908 grants totalling about $74M cumulatively, median grant around $50,000, twelve staff.

One correction to the submission that brought this entry in, because it matters: the foundation was not formed by an early Microsoft engineer. Rose Letwin worked at Microsoft briefly in a non-engineering role before leaving for an aerospace company and later taking a University of Washington degree in forestry and wildlife conservation. The early Microsoft engineer was her then-husband Gordon Letwin, the company's eleventh employee and a significant figure in MS-DOS and OS/2; they divorced in 2008. He did not found the foundation.

N696LM is a 2025 Gulfstream G500, serial 72173, hex A94206, registered on 6 February 2026 to TVPX Aircraft Solutions Inc Trustee of North Salt Lake, Utah — a brand-new airframe behind an owner trust. The aircraft is real and the registration is current; the link to Wilburforce is not. Nothing published anywhere ties this tail to the foundation, the 'LM' initials are unexplained, and no reporting exists on a conservation foundation operating a new Gulfstream. This attribution is the owner-supplied one and is the weakest on the site — it is recorded here as a claim, not as a fact, and should be pulled or corrected the moment a primary source says otherwise.