· Private foundation
C K Blandin Foundation
Its FY2024 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2020–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k747 grants · $1.6M
- $10k–50k88 grants · $2.5M
- $50k–250k86 grants · $8.6M
- $250k+10 grants · $3.1M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| GREATER MINNESOTA HOUSING FUND | $335,000 |
| ITASCA AREA SCHOOLS COLLABORATIVE | $333,333 |
| ITASCA AREA SCHOOLS COLLABORATIVE | $333,333 |
| ITASCA AREA SCHOOLS COLLABORATIVE | $333,333 |
| ITASCA AREA SCHOOLS COLLABORATIVE | $333,333 |
| ITASCA AREA SCHOOLS COLLABORATIVE | $333,333 |
| ITASCA AREA SCHOOLS COLLABORATIVE | $333,333 |
| MISSISSIPPI HEADWATERS AREA DENTAL HEALTH CENTER | $250,000 |
| LEGAL AID SERVICE OF NORTHEASTERN MN | $250,000 |
| MISSISSIPPI HEADWATERS AREA DENTAL HEALTH CENTER | $250,000 |
| ITASCA COUNTY FAMILY YMCA INC | $240,000 |
| MINNESOTA NORTH COLLEGE | $240,000 |
| MINNESOTA NORTH COLLEGE | $240,000 |
| ITASCA COUNTY FAMILY YMCA INC | $240,000 |
| MINNESOTA NORTH COLLEGE | $240,000 |
Do your dollars go where the need is?
Each grant placed by the hardship in its grantee’s ZIP, then read against the area’s typical level.
Your human-services grants (FY20–24, $5.5M) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 8%. 100% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Most of your grants land in higher-need ZIPs.
Matched: human-services grants are those whose grantee’s IRS cause code is Human Services. Placed by people below the poverty linein the grantee’s ZIP, averaged from the tracts in that ZIP; grantee ZIP can differ from where services are delivered.
US grants placed by each grantee’s ZIP, which can differ from where services are actually delivered. Need from public data — U.S. Census/ACS, CDC PLACES, Eviction Lab, USDA — shown as context about the area, never attributed to your giving.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 7% of C K Blandin Foundation’s grant dollars are earmarked, by their stated purpose, for a different county than the recipient’s own address — money that lands at a nonprofit in one place but is meant to do its work in another. Read by recipient address, 100% of the giving stays in MN; read by stated purpose it is 95% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
Recipient view: each grant at its grantee’s ZIP, mapped to a county. Directed view: each grant at the county its stated purpose names, falling back to the recipient’s county when the purpose names no place; US grants only. A county shows only if it carries the top 95% of that view’s dollars. Purposes are read from the foundation’s own 990 grant descriptions.
Who you back again
Which organizations you funded more than once, and which you funded a single time. Each grantee is matched to its own filings.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +33% since the first grant, against +18% for the ones you funded once.
890 repeat relationships — 409 still active in FY2024, 481 since wound down; 229 grantees were first funded in FY2024 (too recent to call).
How the two cohorts compare
Organizations
Total granted
Median revenue growth · since first grant
Still filing today
New vs renewed · share of each year
In FY2024, 72% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $4.3M went to new ones.
Where new relationships form · theme of each grantee’s first grant
First-time = a grantee’s first year in your filing window; renewed = funded in an earlier year too. As a portfolio matures the renewed share naturally climbs — once funded, an org stays “renewable” — so the signal is the years that buck it (a new-grantee intake wave). The earliest year is left-censored: relationships that predate the data read as “new.” Theme is the grantee’s IRS cause.
Backed again, and grew
- KCKOOTASCA COMMUNITY ACTION INC5× · 2020–2024 · $2.7M · revenue +14%
- IEITASCA ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CORPOR4× · 2020–2023 · $1.5M · revenue +10% · 42% of their budget
- ICITASCA COUNTY FAMILY YMCA INC5× · 2020–2024 · $1.5M · revenue +93%
Funded once
- COCITY OF HILL CITYone grant, 2022 · $156k
- LALAKES AREA HABITAT FOR HUMANITYone grant, 2023 · $150k · revenue -35%
- COCITY OF NORTHOMEone grant, 2022 · $150k
Repeat = funded in two or more distinct years; growth and survival are read from each grantee’s own subsequent IRS filings.
The map has a center of gravity: the average direction from the rest of the sector toward the organizations the foundation funds — the shape of its giving. Scoring every nonprofit along that direction surfaces the ones that look most like the portfolio. These are the closest matchesthat aren’t grantees — a resemblance in what they say they do, not a recommendation.
Support and enhance the development of the arts in northwestern minnesota. facilitate and encourage the creation and appreciation of the arts.
The minnesota chamber of commerce proactively leads the business community statewide to: advance pro-business, responsible minnesota public policy that creates jobs and grows the econony; provde member services to address evolving business…
Mn community measurement empowers stakeholders with meaningful information to drive improvement.
The minnesota business partnership's mission is to maintain a high quality of life for all minnesotans by ensuring that the state's economy remains strong, globally competitive and its prospects for growth bright by working with elected…
Creating powerful advocacy to enhance economic vitality in the minneapolis-st. paul region.
The association of minnesota counties is a voluntary non-partisan statewide organization that assists the state's 87 counties in providing effective county governance to the people of minnesota.
To promote business development and tourism in winona minnesota and the surrounding area
Arts Midwest works collaboratively with private and public arts supporters to support, inform, and celebrate arts organizations and creative communities across the Midwest. Our mission is to build unprecedented opportunity across the…
The mission of the minnesota agri-growth council is to advocate for minnesota's food and agriculture industry by serving as a unified voice and promoting relationships with allied industries.
Minnesota Voice is a collaboration of organizations working toward permanent change in social, racial, and economic justice by increasing civic engagement and voter participation across the state.
Enhancing and strengthening our community and our regional core.
To encourage and support the vitality of the arts in west central minnesota
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Springboard for the Arts and the most unlike its peers is Madison Art Gallery. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
For each theme you fund, this compares how the sector’s money is shifting with how your own giving is shifting.
Sector change and giving change are each shown relative to their own range, growing (right) or shrinking (left); both normalized, so inflation isn’t mistaken for growth.
Your grantees are a median of 29 years old; the field is 20. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 18% startups (under 5 years old) — 6% of your grantees by number, and just 4% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.3% lost their exemption, against 12% of the field you don’t fund.
Age = years since IRS exemption (a founding proxy). “Closed” = auto-revocation for 3 years of non-filing — a floor on closure, not proof, and bigger established orgs lapse least. Association, not causation.
220 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2025.
Each one resolved to its own IRS returns and tracked year by year — your grant beside their revenue from every source. Association, dated; never a causal claim.
Counted here: distinct organizations you funded across 2017–2025, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 220 of the 1,463 grantees resolved in that span have returns of their own we could reconcile; the rest are funded organizations whose filings we could not track year by year.
Where your money sits — by cause, then by grantee
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
Each org by its size and your share of it — top-left is where you’re load-bearing
Go grantee by grantee — a decade per org, and how each moved after you funded them
A decade per grantee — revenue shaded, your grants as bars, all rows on one timeline.
- Who funds KOOTASCA COMMUNITY ACTION INC ↗
- Who funds Itasca Community College Foundation ↗
- Who funds GRAND RAPIDS AREA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ITASCA ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CORPOR ↗
- Who funds ITASCA COUNTY FAMILY YMCA INC ↗
- Who funds GREATER MINNESOTA HOUSING FUND ↗
- Who funds LEECH LAKE FINANCIAL SERVICES INC ↗
- Who funds BIGFORK VALLEY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NORTHERN COMMUNITY RADIO INC ↗
- Who funds ITASCA COMMUNITY TELEVISION INC ↗
- Who funds REIF ARTS COUNCIL ↗
- Who funds MINNESOTA DIVERSIFIED INDUSTRIES INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds BOYS' CLUB OF DULUTH ↗
- Who funds ARROWHEAD ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY AGENCY INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds NATIVE GOVERNANCE CENTER ↗
- Who funds NORTH HOMES INC ↗
- Who funds MISSISSIPPI HEADWATERS AREA DENTAL DBA NORTHERN DENTAL ACCESS CENTER ↗
- Who funds BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF THE LEECH LAKE AREA INC ↗
- Who funds NORTHLAND AREA FAMILY SERVICE CTR ↗
- Who funds ELDERCIRCLE ↗
- Who funds SECOND HARVEST NORTH CENTRAL FOOD BANK ↗
- Who funds FIRST CALL FOR HELP OF ITASCA COUNTY ↗
- Who funds NORTHEAST ENTREPRENEUR FUND INC ↗
- Who funds Center For Rural Policy & Development ↗
- Who funds REGIONAL NATIVE PUBLIC DEFENSE CORP ↗
- Who funds GRACE HOUSE OF ITASCA COUNTY ↗
- Who funds Advocates for Family Peace ↗
- Who funds UPPER MIDWEST FILM OFFICE ↗
The grantmakers whose grantees overlap with yours far more than size alone predicts. Each orbits closer the stronger the alignment; the arcs between them show where they also fund each other. Here it reads as a tightly interlocked camp — most of these funders back each other's grantees too.
Open a dossier: The McKnight Foundation · Grand Rapids Area Community Foundation · Mardag Foundation · Otto Bremer Trust · Minnesota Power Foundation · Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation · Northland Foundation · Minnesota Community Foundation · The Bush Foundation · Minnesota Historical Society · Duluth-Superior Area Community Foundation · The Minneapolis Foundation
Affinity is a Gamma-Poisson posterior co-funding rate, re-centered on the typical rate, so thin evidence shrinks toward no signal. A research starting point: overlap is association, not proof of shared intent.
Government reliance of your grantees
Every dot is one organization C K Blandin Foundation funds. Left–right is the share of its income from government; up–down is the share from you. Bigger dots raise more. Filter to federal or a single department — and drag the year to watch it move.
Government income is each org’s traced federal awards (USASpending — grants and contracts) plus state payments (open checkbooks) as a share of its total revenue (IRS Form 990); the self-reported government-grant line (990 line 1e) is carried for cross-check: a grantee that reports government grants we could not trace to a source is left off the chart rather than shown as receiving none. An association, not a claim that your grant caused the public funding. Coverage is precision-first — a floor, not a census; state records exist for 9 states, so a grantee outside them shows no state figure (dimmed) rather than a false zero. Federal award amounts are obligations, which can span years, so a single-year share is indicative. 990 filings lag 12–24 months.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to C K Blandin Foundation?
Find your warmest path to C K Blandin Foundation through trustees and officers whose names appear on both boards. Search for your organization and Plinth traces the shortest route it can evidence.
Each link is a name appearing on two organizations’ public IRS 990 filings, matched on that name and, where the filings support it, on location. A same-state match has geographic support, which is a second matching feature rather than confirmation that the two are one person; a cross-state one is the likeliest to be two people who share a name. Every hop shows its tier, low-confidence and distant paths are held back rather than guessed, and it is worth confirming the person before you use the introduction.