· Public charity
Minnesota Historical Society
The Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) is a non-profit educational and cultural institution established in 1849.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k39 grants · $338k
- $10k–50k89 grants · $2.0M
- $50k–250k51 grants · $5.0M
- $250k+1 grant · $273k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| FRIENDS OF LINDEN HILL INC | $272,500 |
| CITY OF HACKENSACK | $244,761 |
| CITY OF BROWNS VALLEY | $207,744 |
| BROWN COUNTY | $198,093 |
| RAMSEY COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY | $194,605 |
| PRESERVE APPLETON'S HERITAGE | $186,276 |
| GERMANIC AMERICAN INSTITUTE | $164,500 |
| CITY OF SANDSTONE | $159,209 |
| LOWER PHALEN CREEK PROJECT | $140,018 |
| REGENTS UNIVERSITY OF MN | $133,022 |
| DAKOTA COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY | $129,721 |
| DODGE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY | $128,387 |
| MN STATE UNIVERSITY MANKATO | $122,320 |
| LAKE OF THE WOODS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY | $119,640 |
| TOWER SOUDAN HISTORICAL SOCIETY | $119,475 |
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 (FY17–25, $511k) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 8%. 98% 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 9% of Minnesota Historical Society’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 87% — 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 +23% since the first grant, against +4% for the ones you funded once.
357 repeat relationships — 133 still active in FY2025, 224 since wound down; 47 grantees were first funded in FY2025 (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 FY2025, 87% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $984k 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
- SMSCIENCE MUSEUM OF MINNESOTA9× · 2017–2025 · $915k · revenue +7%
- OCOLMSTED COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY8× · 2018–2025 · $623k · revenue +66%
- WCWINONA COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY9× · 2017–2025 · $573k · revenue +155%
Funded once
- WCWaseca Countyone grant, 2019 · $105k
- STSylvan Townshipone grant, 2022 · $65k
- COCITY OF ROCKFORDone grant, 2017 · $49k
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.
Historical museum
The Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) is a non-profit educational and cultural institution established in 1849. MNHS collects, preserves, and tells the story of Minnesota's past through museum exhibits, libraries and collections,…
To discover, preserve, and share the history and hertiage of chisago county, minnesota.
Maintain historical museum
Operation of Historical Museum for the collection, preparation and display of artifacts from Dawson County Nebraska and disseminate and educate the public about Dawson County and it's historical treasures.
Operate a museum and put on programs about history.
Preservation of union county iowa hisorical information and artifacts.
To educate the public on the history of Manistee County
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Olmsted County Historical Society and the most unlike its peers is Bill and Bonnie Daniels Firefighter. 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 36 years old; the field is 20. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 17% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 2% lost their exemption, against 10% 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.
302 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. 302 of the 634 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 SCIENCE MUSEUM OF MINNESOTA ↗
- Who funds Sacred Heart Area Historical Society ↗
- Who funds RAMSEY COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds TOWER-SOUDAN HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds OLMSTED COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds SCOTT COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY INC ↗
- Who funds WINONA COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds MCLEOD COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds ARMORY ARTS AND MUSIC CENTER ↗
- Who funds ROSEAU COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds ST OLAF COLLEGE ↗
- Who funds DAKOTA COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds LYON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds FRIENDS OF CHRIST CHURCH LUTHERAN ↗
- Who funds Nobles County Historical Society ↗
- Who funds ANDERSON CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES INC ↗
- Who funds BROWN COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds HISTORICAL & CULTURAL SOCIETY OF CLAY COUNTY ↗
- Who funds THE AMERICAN SWEDISH INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds DODGE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds CARVER COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
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: Minnesota Humanities Center · Minnesota Community Foundation · Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation · C K Blandin Foundation · Fr Bigelow Foundation · The McKnight Foundation · Hardenbergh Foundation · Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation · Mardag Foundation · The Minneapolis Foundation · Propel Nonprofits · Youthprise
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 Minnesota Historical Society 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.