Across the Twin Cities, people are chasing the ordinary dreams of a middle-class life: a safe place to call home, a good school for their kids, a job that adds up to something. What stands between them and that life is rarely effort. It’s a system that makes the climb harder than it needs to be.
The Constellation Fund’s model may be data-directed and numbers-focused, but at its core is a heart-driven vision for a Twin Cities where more people are thriving. In 2024, Constellation’s research investment arm, CoLab, commissioned a study to survey more than 500 Minnesotans with lived experience of poverty.
“It’s more than just a scarcity of material goods,” one survey respondent told researchers. “It also encompasses a scarcity of opportunities and empowerment.”
Entangled in a System Meant to Help
What was most striking about the results of this study was that almost all respondents spoke of getting entangled in a system meant to help them — a web of social programs riddled with complexity, undignified processes, and a scarcity of resources.
Many described a kind of trap: earn a little more, and a housing voucher disappears; get an incremental pay raise at work, and the food assistance that feeds their family shrinks. As one survey respondent put it, “It just seems like it’s a never-ending circle — like there’s no way to get ahead.” This is the texture of poverty in the Twin Cities: exhaustion, overwhelm, a feeling of being trapped. There is a heaviness of never attaining enough to escape survival mode.
A Bright Spot in the Darkness
The promise that research offers is a sense of clarity in the dark. It shows us which programs have the most impact for changing a person’s life. Evidence-based strategies give us a model for simplifying complex systems, de-siloing interventions, rewarding human-centered program designs, and creating a full picture of what’s possible.
This is where the Constellation Fund’s work snaps into focus. We find, fund, and scale the most effective poverty-fighting solutions. At the core of our work is the question: What will have the greatest impact for those experiencing poverty in the Twin Cities?
Finding the Leverage Points Across a Lifetime
The research tells us there is no silver bullet. No one intervention has the power to fight poverty on its own. Life, of course, is complicated. People often face multiple challenges simultaneously and single-issue solutions rarely produce a lasting impact.
Some interventions provide essential relief in a moment of crisis — a bag of groceries, a rental assistance check, a warm bed. Some interventions help someone cross a threshold that reshapes everything downstream. A high school diploma. A stable job with a career ladder attached. A first year of secure housing after a period of instability.
The most effective programs, together, have the ability to produce moments of durable, compounding change — for the participant, and often for their children.
Constellation uses an evidence-based model that maps the most effective poverty-fighting interventions over the course of a person’s life. This framework helps Constellation apply a systems-level, holistic approach to our grantmaking. We fund both the emergency relief and the exit ramps, with the goal of disrupting the circle that traps people in poverty.
Creating Smart Solutions for a Complex Problem
Supporters of the Constellation Fund often describe feeling a sense of relief when they learn about our work. It’s a feeling that comes from knowing that people are dedicating their expertise and time to figuring out this complex problem at a level of rigor that doesn’t exist often in philanthropy. Some feel a heart-pull toward building better systems that help people thrive.
Others simply believe our community is stronger when more people have financial stability. Many see something even bigger: the chance to bend a trajectory not just for one person, but for the generations that follow them. That’s the vision Constellation is built to realize: a robust, efficient system with clear paths to opportunity. Together, we can build it, one evidence-backed grant at a time.
