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Community Wealth Building Grants
Weaves together financial, intellectual, cultural and social assets for healthy communities.
NOTE: Community wealth-building grants for 2024 are by invitation only.
About Blandin Foundation and 2024 Grantmaking
Mission: We connect, fund and advocate for ideas and people to inspire resourcefulness and move rural places forward.
As one of the few foundations in the nation devoted exclusively to rural needs, Blandin Foundation has shifted our strategic focus to better meet rural Minnesota’s urgent challenges. The COVID pandemic and racial turmoil accelerated many of the economic and social disparities that originally inspired our collective passion for rural philanthropy, and we realized we had to take bold steps to meet the moment. Our intent is to support rural communities and Native Nations in tapping courage, ingenuity, and resourcefulness to rebuild connections that have long been a source of their strength and identity.
Community Context for Our Focus on Community Wealth Building
We know that land ownership inequality is growing, wealth and income gaps persist, and that this inequality harms economic growth. Community wealth building’s focus on collaborative work aimed at reducing disparities and support for projects that promote equitable access and outcomes will help push back against these harmful trends. Knowing that Community Wealth Building concepts were developed in urban settings, one objective of this grant program is to gather data from partners’ community wealth building activities to more deeply inform rural practice and impact.
What is Community Wealth Building?
In a nutshell, it is building the rural bases of knowledge, money, workforce, entrepreneurship, and investment — and keeping those powerful resources close to home. Its goal is to reduce disparities in outcomes that too often fall along the lines of place, race, and class.
Community Wealth Building is a community development approach that considers the full spectrum of assets needed for healthy communities – financial, intellectual, environmental, cultural, and social – and weaves them together in a way that roots all development locally, focusing on sustainable, shared community benefit and reducing disparities.
How CWB Can Look
Areas of opportunity can be layered together for maximum impact. Examples might include:
- Socially Beneficial Use of Land and Property – land trusts, environment/energy transition work, land access projects, permanently affordable or cooperatively-owned housing.
- Equitable Workforce Systems – creating living wage jobs, human-centered education and training systems that serve community/regional needs and focus on eliminating disparities.
- Inclusive Ownership – Co-ops, employee ownership models, social enterprises, access to capital for lower-income entrepreneurs.
- Local Financial Power – building community capacity to access capital/other resources, local financial institutions invest in inclusive community prosperity.
- Local Procurement Focus – using local/regional demand to drive business development, supporting local/regional supply chain development – all to reduce disparities.
Contact Us
We encourage you to reach out to our Grants team members at any time with questions.
