The foundation
Based in Minneapolis, the Dwan Claypool Foundation supports the people and institutions through which knowledge, care, and cultural life endure.
Our work
A life is shaped by what a person can reach: an education, a place to receive care, the means to speak and be heard. Our purpose is to help make those possibilities more widely available.
The foundation works across five areas: arts and creative expression, climate and environmental justice, education, health, and global development. We support artists, educators, health workers, and local organizations in Minnesota, the wider Midwest, and communities around the world.
These fields meet in the circumstances of everyday life. A child’s opportunity to learn is connected to their health and surroundings. A community’s future depends on its natural resources, its institutions, and its capacity to preserve and question its own history. Our work takes those connections seriously.
We build sustained relationships with organizations rooted in the places they serve. Their knowledge gives the work its direction. Philanthropic support can give it room to continue.
Explore the programs
Our history
James Verner Claypool and Irma Hartley established the foundation in 1939. Its founding belief placed private wealth in the service of a wider human obligation: the care of a world that others would inherit.
Today, under the chairship of Mary Dwan Claypool, the foundation continues to deepen its work in the Upper Midwest while extending its international commitments. It remains a private family foundation, governed by family members and independent directors.
Time gives this work both its possibility and its responsibility. A decision made in one generation enters the lives of another. The task is to be attentive to the needs of the present while preserving the capacity to respond to what comes next.
Meet the boardGiving and investment
2024 grantmaking
$640 million
Grants reached more than 1,200 organizations in over 30 countries. This followed the board’s 2023 decision to expand the grantmaking budget over several years.
The total describes the scale of a year’s giving. The work itself continues in organizations, institutions, and communities: in the care they provide, the knowledge they share, and the opportunities they make available.
Program-related investments
$250 million
Alongside grantmaking, our investment portfolio provides capital for community lenders, sustainable infrastructure, affordable housing, and inclusive economic development.
More than 60 percent of our endowment is invested using environmental, social, and governance criteria.
Quiet service
The John “Jack” Claypool Award for Quiet Service
The foundation’s annual award recognizes individuals whose service strengthens communities across Minnesota. Its attention is on work that can be easy to overlook: the patient, repeated acts through which people make themselves useful to one another.
Established in 2012 as the Claypool Community Honor, the award was later renamed in memory of John Claypool, known as Jack, who helped steward the foundation through much of the twentieth century. He died in 2021.
The award carries forward his regard for service in ordinary places, including classrooms, clinics, congregations, farms, and homes. Such work is often known best by the people who depend on it.