The Constellation Fund

The Constellation Fund is built to harness the incisive power of modern analytics alongside on-the-ground insights to allocate precious philanthropic resources to the people and partners creating the most impact in the fight against poverty in the Twin Cities. We use quantitative metrics alongside qualitative analysis to select our grantee partners. Our metrics are built using the best available evidence to develop metrics that allow Constellation to reliably project the long-term quality-of-life impact of poverty-fighting services resulting in a benefit-cost ratio used to help objectively build a portfolio of the most impactful nonprofits across a broad spectrum of programs and interventions. In fiscal year 2023, this approach led Constellation to invest over $3.2 million into 31 poverty-fighting nonprofits working across four impact areas education, employment, health, and housing. Constellation's evidence-driven analysis projects that these nonprofits will turn every dollar of that investment into an average of $4.70 of lifetime health and income improvements for individuals and families experiencing poverty in our community. The average projected impact of the nonprofits receiving Constellation funding last year was more than three times greater than the average of $1.51-to-1 for all other organizations that we evaluated in 2021.The Constellation Fund continues to expand the reach of our signature capacity building program, Beyond Dollars. Beyond Dollars creates best-in-class pro bono experiences through curated teams of volunteer employees from Fortune 500 corporations to mid-sized companies, who deliver unparalleled capacity-building services to our impactful nonprofit partners.