Q4 and 2021 Grantees Reflect Our New Grantmaking Approach Advancing Racial, Social, and Economic Justice.

During 2021’s final quarter, we awarded 68 grants totaling more than $3 million—bringing last year’s overall grantmaking to more than $20.5 million in 172 grants.

In continuing to respond to two years of continued pandemic and other crises, the Foundation approved a new approach toward its grantmaking in November 2021. This new approach refocuses our ongoing efforts to support grantees that are toppling barriers, changing systems, and finding equitable solutions to long-standing problems.

As Program Director Karla Miller outlines in her recent video and blog, our new grantmaking approach prioritizes helping organizations implement their self-determined strategies for changing systems and overcoming barriers to shared prosperity.

That’s how the Foundation can be a meaningful participant in supporting racial, social, and economic justice across the eight states and 76 Native nations of our region.

It’s also how we can best help our priority communities—Native Americans, communities of color, immigrants and refugees, and people in rural areas—achieve meaningful and lasting change.

And that’s what many of our 2021 grantees are already working toward—because their work and insights informed our approach. They reflect the major themes of our new approach, although we’re still developing a number of the specifics.

Among these grantees are:

Northside Economic Opportunity Network (NEON), a catalyst for a thriving local economy, serving diverse and ambitious entrepreneurs in Minneapolis’s north side.

A three-year, $750,000 grant awarded in Q4 will help NEON increase its staff (including a loan officer, a CFO, and three business advisors to serve entrepreneurs), purchase and renovate the building it occupies, and build a commercial kitchen to serve as a food-business incubator and community resource.

These moves will help NEON build its capacity to serve more entrepreneurs in north Minneapolis, home to many Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs who can thrive when they gain investments they’ve long been denied. NEON’s proven community approach focuses on individual mobility as the first step toward long-term entrepreneurial success—and, by extension, community stability.

Headwaters Foundation for Justice (HFJ), a community-based foundation in Minneapolis, supports organizations across the state that are working on the front lines of social change and justice.