# Castle Rock Foundation The **Castle Rock Foundation** (1993–2011) was the Coors family's movement-conservative grantmaker — spun out of the [[Adolph Coors Foundation]] in 1993 with a **$36.6 million** endowment so that the family's political giving could be separated, on paper, from the brewery's charitable name, and merged back into it on November 30, 2011. For eighteen years it was the vehicle through which the [[Coors Family]] fortune continued the work [[Joseph Coors]] had begun in 1973 with the seed money for the [[Heritage Foundation]]: funding think tanks, legal shops and advocacy groups whose stated purposes were, in the foundation's own words, "a better understanding of the free enterprise system" and "a limited role for government." ## What it funded Castle Rock's grantee list, as compiled from its 990s, ran to some fifty organizations: the [[Heritage Foundation]], the [[American Enterprise Institute]], the [[Cato Institute]], [[ALEC]], the [[Manhattan Institute]], America's Future Foundation and the rest of the movement's Washington and state infrastructure, alongside the older Coors creations — the [[Free Congress Foundation]] (the [[Paul Weyrich]] shop that Coors money had built) and the [[Mountain States Legal Foundation]] the family founded in 1977. Its officers in 1999 were the family: William K. Coors president, Peter H. Coors vice president, Jeffrey H. Coors treasurer. Assets were about $67 million that year against $3 million in grants; by the end of 2001 it was Colorado's fifteenth-largest foundation. Its giving surfaced politically in 2004, when [[Peter Coors]] ran for the Senate and critics pointed out that the brewery marketed to gay and minority consumers while the foundation funded the groups opposing their rights. ## Why it matters here Castle Rock is a small page about a large mechanism: the *split* — a company foundation for the public face, a separate family vehicle for the movement — is the template later adopted by the [[Bradley Impact Fund]], the DonorsTrust accounts and the donor-advised funds through which the right's money now moves without appearing. The Coors pipeline is the original; see [[Coors Family]] for the dynasty and [[Adolph Coors]] for the founder. ## See Also - [[Coors Family]] · [[Adolph Coors Foundation]] · [[Joseph Coors]] · [[Peter Coors]] · [[Adolph Coors]] - [[Heritage Foundation]] · [[American Enterprise Institute]] · [[Cato Institute]] · [[ALEC]] · [[Manhattan Institute]] · [[Free Congress Foundation]] · [[Paul Weyrich]] · [[Mountain States Legal Foundation]] - [[Bradley Impact Fund]] · [[Dark Money]]