· Private foundation
Minnesota Power Foundation
Its FY2025 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 FY2019–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k124 grants · $214k
- $10k–50k17 grants · $292k
- $50k–250k2 grants · $150k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| HEAD OF THE LAKES UNITED WAY | $99,500 |
| SECOND HARVEST NORTHLAND | $50,000 |
| UNITED WAY OF 1000 LAKES | $41,000 |
| UNITED WAY OF NORTHEASTERN MN | $30,000 |
| BORAL WATERS COMMUNITY FOUNDATION | $25,000 |
| LAKE SUPERIOR ZOO | $20,000 |
| VETERANS RESILIENCE PROJECTS | $20,000 |
| YMCA - DULUTH | $20,000 |
| UNITED WAY OF PINE AND CARLTON COUNTIES | $16,000 |
| NORTH CENTRAL MN FARM AND ANTIQUE | $15,000 |
| DULUTH LIBRARY FOUNDATION | $15,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA FOUNDATION | $15,000 |
| SECOND HARVEST NORTHLAND | $14,600 |
| DULUTH CHILDREN'S MUSEUM | $10,000 |
| IEDC | $10,000 |
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 (FY19–25, $201k) 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.
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 +28% since the first grant, against +8% for the ones you funded once.
171 repeat relationships — 49 still active in FY2025, 122 since wound down; 67 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, 67% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $216k 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
- UWUNITED WAY OF NE MINNESOTA7× · 2019–2025 · $203k · revenue +32%
- SHSecond Harvest Northland7× · 2019–2025 · $172k · revenue +157%
- EHESSENTIA HEALTH FOUNDATION3× · 2022–2024 · $110k · revenue +13%
Funded once
- MFMESABI FIT COALITIONone grant, 2023 · $45k
- CCCHISHOLM COMMUNITY FOUNDATIONone grant, 2022 · $30k
- OSOLD SCHOOL ARTS CENTER 210 GALLERY AND ART CENTERone grant, 2024 · $30k
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.
Provide emergency food relief for the families in the Lonsdale MN region .
By utilizing and bringing together community resources the willmar area food shelf will provide food assistance to individuals and families. our goal is to insure no one goes hungry.
To promote and protect the rights of people with disabilities and their families while supporting inclusion and participation in the community throughout their lifetime.
Providing direct and indirect services in the areas of mental health, developmental disabilites, and substance use to residents of aitkin, cass, crow wing, morrison, todd, and wadena counties.
The open door is a leading hunger-relief organization serving dakota county, minnesota, where food insecurity is a growing challenge. the open door is dedicated to ending local hunger by providing access to healthy, fresh, and nutritious…
Since 1986, open your heart to the hungry and homeless has worked to ensureevery minnesotan is free from hunger and homelessness. by partnering with organizations serving those in need, we grow donor engagement and raise awareness to…
First call for Help of Itasca County is a private, nonprofit community organization whose mission is to provide free, confidential and nonjudgement crisis intervention, active listening, and information and referral services 24 hours a…
To improve the quality of life by providing resources and services within our communities.
Serve fresh and frozen meals to seniors, disabled and homebound individuals in central MN. Over 60,000 meals served annually to over 400 individuals.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is One Roof Community Housing and the most unlike its peers is Rocky Wall Productions. 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 27 years old; the field is 26. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 16% startups (under 5 years old) — 10% of your grantees by number, and just 4% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 7% 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.
179 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2026.
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 2017–2026, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 179 of the 512 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 HEAD OF THE LAKES UNITED WAY ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF 1000 LAKES ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF NE MINNESOTA ↗
- Who funds Second Harvest Northland ↗
- Who funds DULUTH-SUPERIOR AREA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ESSENTIA HEALTH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds UNITED WAY OF CARLTON AND PINE COUNTY AREA ↗
- Who funds MORRISON COUNTY UNITED WAY INC ↗
- Who funds COLLEGE OF ST SCHOLASTICA INC ↗
- Who funds DULUTH PLAYHOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds FIRST WITNESS CHILD ADVOCACY CENTER ↗
- Who funds LAKE SUPERIOR CENTER ↗
- Who funds LUTHERAN SOCIAL SERVICE OF MINNESOTA ↗
- Who funds Northland Counseling Center Inc ↗
- Who funds ARROWHEAD ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY AGENCY INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds SECOND HARVEST NORTH CENTRAL FOOD BANK ↗
- Who funds IRONWORLD DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds MESABI FIT COALITION ↗
- Who funds SMART NORTH ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds DULUTH AREA FAMILY YMCA ↗
- Who funds ITASCA COUNTY FAMILY YMCA INC ↗
- Who funds FAMILY SAFETY NETWORK OF CASS COUNTY INC ↗
- Who funds CHESTER BOWL IMPROVEMENT CLUB ↗
- Who funds EMPLOYMENT ENTERPRISES INC ↗
- Who funds GND DEVELOPMENT ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds UNION GOSPEL MISSION INC ↗
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: Duluth-Superior Area Community Foundation · Lloyd K Johnson Foundation · Northland Foundation · Smdc Medical Center · C K Blandin Foundation · Ordean Foundation · Otto Bremer Trust · Mardag Foundation · Second Harvest Northland · Grand Rapids Area Community Foundation · Pachel Foundation · Head of the Lakes United Way
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 Power 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.