Over the past six years, the St. David's Community Health Foundation in Austin, Texas, has quietly become one of the biggest grantmakers in the city, the Austin American-Statesman reports.

After being embroiled in a six-year dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over its tax-exempt status, the foundation's asset base has grown to $410 million, up from $252 million in 2005, making it the second-largest grantmaker in Austin behind the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. Established in 1996, the St. David's Foundation supports about fifty-five organizations serving needy residents of Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop, and Caldwell counties in the areas of senior care, health education, disease prevention, mental health, primary and specialty health care, and dental health. With the exception of scholarships supported by outside fundraising, all the grants the foundation awards are derived from profits made by hospitals and facilities in the St. David's HealthCare system, of which the St. David's Foundation owns 41 percent.

Fearing it might lose its lawsuit with the IRS, which concerned the grantmaker's partnership with the for-profit Hospital Corporation of America, the foundation kept its grantmaking at around $3 million annually from 1997 to 2004. Since the dispute was resolved, however, the foundation's grantmaking has grown eightfold, to an estimated $27 million this year. Last week alone, the foundation awarded nearly $3.9 million to twenty-four nonprofits, including $650,000 to the Lone Star Circle of Care, $375,000 to Communities in Schools of Central Texas, and $349,000 to Austin Recovery.

"From 1998 to 2004, we were in a war with the IRS over our tax-exempt status," said St. David's Foundation CEO Earl Maxwell. "[Until we won the lawsuit in 2004,] we did not build that foundation. We did not want to create expectations in the community we would have to renege on....Our intent is to become more of a regional foundation and return the money to the people who go to our hospitals."