Impact Overview

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IMPACT OVERVIEW

WE START WITH ONE QUESTION

What will have the greatest impact for those living in poverty in the Twin Cities?

At Constellation, we make every decision with one question in mind – what will have the greatest impact for those living in poverty in the Twin Cities? – and we center our work accordingly.

This begins by raising philanthropic resources from a growing community of generous donors; since our Leadership Funders cover all of our operating costs, every dollar donated to Constellation is invested within twelve months into the poverty-fighting organizations in our portfolio of nonprofit grantees. To build this portfolio, we rely on evidence about what is working best. Our grantee partners receive significant financial investments as well as access to unparalleled pro bono capacity-building support to further bolster the impact of their powerful work and our donors’ generous donations.

The process continually repeats itself, all designed to objectively identify and holistically empower our community’s top poverty-fighting service providers.

Every dollar donated to Constellation is projected to create nearly $5 in health and income improvements for people experiencing poverty in the Twin Cities.

View Our Impact Reports

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IMPACT AREAS

Constellation invests in and empowers nonprofit service providers that demonstrably raise the living standards of individuals living in poverty in the Twin Cities. To do this, we focus our support on four key issue areas and, importantly, the intersections between them: education, employment, health, and housing. These are broad categories, so Constellation prioritizes the evaluation of organizations addressing key drivers of poverty that local data, research, and lived experiences indicate are exacerbating inequities.

EDUCATION

Participants at a workforce training program

EMPLOYMENT

HEALTH

A person walking into their mixed generational household

HOUSING

Metric-Driven Approach

We are living in an information tsunami. In fact, 90% of the data ever created by humanity was produced in the last two years. With an ever-growing body of evidence at our fingertips, our community has the opportunity to harness a more outcome-driven approach to poverty alleviation. Too often, though, the evidence used to drive philanthropic resources reflects the outputs of charitable work – such as how many people were served – and not the outcomes for individuals and families experiencing poverty.

Through the application of our metrics, Constellation takes an outcome-driven approach to fighting poverty in the Twin Cities. By leveraging the full power of analytics to harness the best available information, we power each of our grantmaking decisions with objective insights to maximize lifetime impact.

Learn More About Our Metrics

More Than Metrics

Three kids smiling and standing in a row with arms around eachother

Careful benefit-cost analysis is central to Constellation’s approach to fighting poverty and is used to help create our portfolio of impactful grantees. However, the true innovation that Constellation strives to bring to our community is the intersection of metrics and on-the-ground community insights as the driver of philanthropic resources.

Close consideration of critical qualitative factors is key to informing Constellation’s investments. It is only by thoughtfully building into our decisions all of this information – the qualitative and quantitative, the stories and science – that Constellation can ensure that your donations are invested in programs shown to be most promising in the fight against poverty.

Every nonprofit that Constellation has the privilege to support has a powerful story behind their work – here is an example of one of those stories.

Beyond Dollars

Once a nonprofit is selected for our portfolio, the organization is provided not only with significant funding, but also with connections to best-in-class pro bono partners at top local companies through our Beyond Dollars program, which provides Constellation’s grantees with tailored services otherwise inaccessible to most poverty-fighting organizations.

At the end of every grant cycle, Constellation conducts an updated benefit-cost analysis and qualitative evaluation. If progress has been made, our cycle of financial and capacity-building support is repeated, with the goal of building long-term partnerships focused on scaling poverty-fighting impacts in the Twin Cities.

About Beyond Dollars

The Philanthropic Marketplace

Like any philanthropic funder, the Constellation Fund represents a marketplace of ideas. In our case, the market is not filled with vendors offering fruits and vegetables, but instead with committed organizations offering many different types of philanthropic interventions. In the commercial world, the goods that sell in a market are sorted and ranked by the interaction of supply and demand, and with key indicators like profits and losses. In the philanthropic world, by contrast, competition cannot be relied upon to select the interventions having the largest impacts. The task of sorting is left to the judgment of the funder.

Illustration of people around a gigantic microscope.

At Constellation, we believe that this judgment should be informed by the best possible information. To accomplish this goal in support of our poverty-fighting mission, Constellation uses data and research to carefully value the measurable improvements that differing poverty-fighting interventions are making in the living standards of residents experiencing poverty. Specifically, we thoughtfully leverage peer-reviewed research, local demographic information, and data from nonprofits to conduct careful benefit-cost analyses that allow us to better understand the relative impacts of different poverty alleviation programs. We match that best-in-class quantitative analysis with thoughtful qualitative evaluations – such as the quality of a nonprofit’s leadership and on-the-ground insights about pressing community needs – in order to fund the poverty-fighting interventions that, judged with all the best available evidence, are the most promising among available options.

CONTACT US

The Constellation Fund
729 N. Washington Ave.
Suite 600
Minneapolis, MN 55401
info@constellationfund.org

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Constellation supports poverty-fighting nonprofit service providers in the Twin Cities. Click below for information on our unique application process.

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