A NOTE FROM OUR CEO
This year marks the fifth anniversary of our work together at Constellation. Your support has allowed us to lay the foundation for an innovative philanthropic movement that is creating real and lasting impact in our community. The five-year mark has inspired me to pause and reflect on the powerful tools that have been built and the remarkable opportunities ahead.
We have built a world-class quantitative toolkit of over 240 customized metrics, each rigorously designed to help maximize the measurable impact of every dollar of your support. We have built a portfolio of top-performing nonprofits providing an array of critical services that are collectively turning each dollar invested into over $5 worth of long-term impact. With the help of a growing number of our state’s leading companies, we have built Beyond Dollars, an innovative capacity-building volunteer program that connects the talent of our corporate workforce with the pressing needs of top social entrepreneurs. With the partnership of a deeply committed donor, we have launched CoLab, a world-class research arm that is already investing deeply into long-term evaluations to uncover lasting insights on fighting poverty.
In just the last year alone, the benefits of your investments through Constellation have reached over 80,000 of our neighbors experiencing poverty in the Twin Cities. We are a community of donors and stakeholders who, in just a few short years, have allowed this work to grow into a philanthropic movement—a movement that has generated $9 million of annual support by investing not just in nonprofits, but in lasting social solutions.
Our next phase of work at Constellation will focus even more on the growth and potential of our grantees. I am proud to share that we are establishing a growth fund within our broader portfolio to deepen support for the highest- performing nonprofits primed to scale. This will include investing at increased levels, ensuring access to top-tier support as they focus on sustainable and effective growth. It will include exploring opportunities to wrap robust longitudinal research around this work as we expand our understanding of transformative solutions and their ability to grow. And it will include new partnerships.
The truth is, no philanthropic entity alone can fund all the services essential to uplifting our neighbors experiencing poverty. Accomplishing that level of change in the Twin Cities will require coordination across philanthropy and with our friends in the public sector. This is why I see within Constellation’s work—and within each of your investments into it—an opportunity even greater than the life-changing direct impact each of those donations makes in our community. I see the opportunity to catalyze shared investments into solutions that I believe, and the evidence shows, will drive real, lasting change for our Twin Cities community.
Thank you for your trust and partnership in illuminating a brighter future.
ANDREW DAYTON
FOUNDER & CEO
