· Public charity
Southwest Initiative Foundation
SOUTHWEST INITIATIVE FOUNDATION's (swif's) original mission was to strengthen southwest minnesota in three ways: improving the region's economic self-reliance, overcoming human distress, and promoting regional leadership coordination and partnerships.
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.
The 166 grants below total $4,862,354 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $5,602,139 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $739,785 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k39 grants · $279k
- $10k–50k99 grants · $1.9M
- $50k–250k26 grants · $2.0M
- $250k+2 grants · $666k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| ISD #466 - DASSEL-COKATO | $342,996 |
| CITY OF MARSHALL | $323,400 |
| CITY OF TRACY | $211,500 |
| LITTLE HUSKIES LEARNING CENTER | $189,733 |
| WALLIN EDUCATION PARTNERS | $133,512 |
| CLARK-VINROOT PROPERTIES LLC | $126,000 |
| PIPESTONE SENIOR CITIZENS CENTER | $116,904 |
| MINNESOTA RIVER AREA AGENCY ON AGING INC | $100,500 |
| ISD #2884 - RED ROCK CENTRAL | $79,300 |
| PLAZITA RESTAURANT 4 LLC | $75,000 |
| FM BANK | $75,000 |
| ACE OF SOUTHWEST MINNESOTA | $74,500 |
| KIDS ROCK CHILD CARE CENTER INC | $65,291 |
| TYLER GOLF CLUB OF TYLER MINNESOTA | $55,000 |
| PETERSONS INC | $54,750 |
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, $1.5M) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 97% 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.
Which US states your grants reach
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 12% of Southwest Initiative 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, 99% of the giving stays in MN; read by stated purpose it is 91% — 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 +24% since the first grant, against +19% for the ones you funded once.
175 repeat relationships — 68 still active in FY2025, 107 since wound down; 97 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, 34% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $3.2M 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
- PFPrairie Five Community Action Council Inc9× · 2017–2025 · $586k · revenue +53%
- MRMinnesota River Area Agency on Aging Inc8× · 2017–2025 · $501k · revenue +29%
- UCUNITED COMMUNITY ACTION PARTNERSHIP INC7× · 2017–2025 · $164k · revenue +116%
Funded once
- NFNORTHLAND FOUNDATIONone grant, 2023 · $480k · revenue +20%
- DODEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC TRANSFORMATIONone grant, 2024 · $255k · revenue 0%
- PAPIPESTONE AREA SOFTBALL-BASEBALL ASone grant, 2020 · $126k · revenue -82%
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.
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…
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…
The organization's mission is to bring stakeholders together to promote prosperity and long-term growth of minnesota's economy.
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.
Mn community measurement empowers stakeholders with meaningful information to drive improvement.
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.
Provide quality childcare services at a central facility in the fosston, mn community. childcare is desperately needed in our area.
To promote business development and tourism in winona minnesota and the surrounding area
We make a positive difference in the health of the patients and communities we serve.
Promote and develop economic expansion in duluth and northeastern mn and northwestern wisconsin. the organization leads regional research efforts related to human resources, and emerging industries to inform business development and…
Grow businesses, build wealth and increase reinvestement in the african communities of minnesota
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.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Communitygiving 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 35 years old; the field is 28. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 11% startups (under 5 years old) — 4% of your grantees by number, and just 4% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.3% 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.
173 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. 173 of the 904 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 Prairie Five Community Action Council Inc ↗
- Who funds Minnesota River Area Agency on Aging Inc ↗
- Who funds WEST CENTRAL INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds NORTHWEST MINNESOTA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds NORTHLAND FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds SOUTHERN MINNESOTA INITIATIVE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds INITIATIVE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds WALLIN EDUCATION PARTNERS ↗
- Who funds DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC TRANSFORMATION ↗
- Who funds LITTLE HUSKIES LEARNING CENTER ↗
- Who funds UNITED COMMUNITY ACTION PARTNERSHIP INC ↗
- Who funds PRAIRIE HOME HOSPICE INC ↗
- Who funds PIPESTONE AREA SOFTBALL-BASEBALL AS ↗
- Who funds FIRST CHILDREN'S FINANCE ↗
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: Southwest Minnesota Arts Council · C K Blandin Foundation · United Way of Southwest Minnesota · Communitygiving · Minnesota Community Foundation · Minnesota River Area Agency on Aging Inc · Worthington Regional Health Care Foundation Inc · Mardag Foundation · BCBSM Foundation Inc · Minnesota Council on Foundations · Otto Bremer Trust · Minnesota Historical Society
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 Southwest Initiative 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.