Put more of our assets to work for good
Why it’s important to us
As a foundation, our grantmaking is the most obvious way we use our assets for good. Less visible, but equally important, is how we use other kinds of investments to advance our purpose. This area of our work is guided by our impact investing approach.
One part of the approach is in how we manage our endowment. We invest our endowment assets to earn money to grant out in communities. As we are trying to earn money, we also want to be intentional about the impact we are having with the investments we make.
Outside of our endowment, we make program-related investments (PRIs) that support good work. This includes things like low-interest loans and credit guarantees and equity investments in social impact ventures. While we don’t expect to make market returns, we do expect the money we put into PRIs to come back to us to be reinvested in other efforts. This allows us to meet different kinds of community needs in different ways and to have more impact with those dollars over time.
158%
Progress toward original goal of $100M in active impact investments
How we’re doing
Last year we surpassed our 3-year, $100 million impact investing goal set in 2021. As of May 2025, we had made $158M in impact investments ($117M in endowment investments and $41M in PRIs). These are non-grant investments we make to advance our three impact investing objectives: making capital markets more equitable, supporting business and community development in our region and investing in sustainable climate solutions.
Beyond what we define as impact investments, we track what we call “aligned investments.” These are investments in fund managers that are changing investment industry practices in ways that advance our impact objectives. We work with fund managers to consider changes in how they work — like expanding their hiring practices and expanding their sourcing networks — so more people have access to the money they control.
Learn more about how we’re doing in this area in our impact investing learning paper.
What’s next
We have multiple new goals for our impact investments and aligned investments. One example is to make more PRI investments in North Dakota and South Dakota. Another is to increase the total percentage of aligned investments from 66% to 75%. Information about how we’re doing on our new set of goals will be shared in future scorecard updates.