· Public charity
The Five Wings Arts Council
THE FIVE WINGS ARTS COUNCIL encourages and promotes arts creation, appreciation, and education through grant programs and technical assistance to enhance the quality of life for minnesota residents in cass, crow wing, morrison, todd, and wadena counties.
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 27 grants below total $535,208 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $656,618 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $121,410 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 $10k4 grants · $31k
- $10k–50k23 grants · $505k
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| LEGACY CHORALE | $40,000 |
| WADENA MADHATTERS COMMUNITY THEATRE | $37,500 |
| CENTRAL LAKES COLLEGE FOUNDATION | $36,000 |
| CROSSING ARTS ALLIANCE | $34,995 |
| WALKER BAY THEATER | $33,050 |
| GREAT RIVER ARTS ASSOCIATION | $31,842 |
| LAKES AREA MUSIC FESTIVAL | $30,000 |
| ST FRANCIS MUSIC CENTER | $30,000 |
| HEARTLAND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | $30,000 |
| NORTH CENTRAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT | $28,950 |
| LONG PRAIRIE CHAMBER ORCHESTRA | $20,000 |
| NORTHWOODS ARTS COUNCIL | $19,406 |
| PEQUOT LAKE PUBLIC SCHOOL | $18,200 |
| LAMPLIGHTER COMMUNITY THEATRE | $15,000 |
| CASS LAKE BENA SCHOOLS | $14,965 |
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 (FY23–23, $8k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 7%. 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.
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.
29 repeat relationships — 22 still active in FY2025, 7 since wound down; 4 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, 94% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $35k 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
- LALAKES AREA MUSIC FESTIVAL9× · 2017–2025 · $272k · revenue +207%
- HSHEARTLAND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA9× · 2017–2025 · $195k · revenue +73% · 40% of their budget
- CLCENTRAL LAKES COLLEGE FOUNDATION9× · 2017–2025 · $193k · revenue +153%
Funded once
- M5MISC 5000 OR LESSone grant, 2017 · $91k
- OWOLD WADENA SOCIETYone grant, 2018 · $10k
- SFSUSTAINABLE FARMING ASSOCIATION OF MINNESOTAgraduatedone grant, 2023 · $10k · revenue +41%
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.
Inspire artists, audiences, and our greater southern wisconsin community to celabrate the art of theatre.
The mission of the Mankato Area Arts Council, DBA Carnegie Art Center, is to be a vibrant community destination that inspires, nurtures, and expands artistic, cultural, and educational experiences.
The great northern celebrates our cold, creative winters through ten days of diverse programming that invigorate mind and body. in an era of changing climate that threatens our signature season, we seek to create community, inspire action,…
Arts presenter serving the greater Reedsburg area.
Promotion of and presentation of dramatic arts
To promote and support the arts in willmar and surrounding communities through coordination, communication and collaboration and promotion.
Enrich the quality of life in the wyoming and surrounding lakes areas by facilitating venues where regional, national and international cultural activities can illuminate, educate and entertain.
Bring art to rural northwestern minnesota. our goal is to offer a variety of arts experiences that are affordable and accessible to all ages and abilities, and to stimulate the vibrancy of our region.
To promote the arts to educate, entertain, and enlighten in northern WI.
To provide promotion, technical and developmental assistance and grants to non-profit arts organizations, community groups, schools and individual artists. the nine counties in minnesota served are blue earth, brown, faribault, lesueur,…
Great music, theatre and opera on the iron range in historic aurora, minnesota.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Great River Arts Association and the most unlike its peers is Leech Lake Area Chamber of Commerce. 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 25 years old; the field is 26. You back the younger end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 13% startups (under 5 years old) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 1% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 4% 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.
23 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. 23 of the 51 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
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 LAKES AREA MUSIC FESTIVAL ↗
- Who funds GREAT RIVER ARTS ASSOCIATION ↗
- Who funds HEARTLAND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA ↗
- Who funds CENTRAL LAKES COLLEGE FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE CROSSING ARTS ALLIANCE ↗
- Who funds LEGACY CHORALE OF GREATER MINNESOTA ↗
- Who funds STAPLES AREA MEN'S CHORUS INC ↗
- Who funds NORTH CENTRAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATION INC ↗
- Who funds STAGE NORTH THEATRE COMPANY INC ↗
- Who funds WADENA COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY ↗
- Who funds NEW YORK MILLS ARTS RETREAT ↗
- Who funds PINE RIVER AREA FOUNDATION INC ↗
- Who funds SPROUT MN ↗
- Who funds ACTORS REPERTORY THEATRE ↗
- Who funds SUSTAINABLE FARMING ASSOCIATION OF MINNESOTA ↗
- Who funds LEECH LAKE AREA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE ↗
- Who funds THE BRAINERD BAXTER YOUTH CENTER ↗
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: Communitygiving · Initiative Foundation · Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation · Otto Bremer Trust · C K Blandin Foundation · Mardag Foundation · Minnesota Community Foundation · The McKnight Foundation · The Minneapolis Foundation · Amazonsmile Foundation · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund
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 The Five Wings Arts Council 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.