Grants - Minneapolis Jewish Federation

Looking for funding? The Jewish Community Foundation of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation manages several funds that provide funding through a competitive grant process. Check below to see if any of our participating funds meet your needs.

The Pat and Tom Grossman Transformational Fund

Currently: Open

The Pat and Tom Grossman Transformational Fund supports Jewish organizations’ efforts to elevate their operations, transform their programs, and increase their capacity to serve the community. The goal of these grants is to support hard to fund needs that will have a significant impact on Jewish oriented nonprofit organizations and enhance the quality of Jewish life in the Twin Cities.

Click here to apply.

Click here to learn about areas of support, funding priorities and grant amounts

Areas of support include, but are not limited to:

Projects that increase an organization’s capacity to serve the Jewish community
Infrastructure development
- Physical
- Human (Employees, contractors, and consultants)
IT/Systems
Seed money for transformational programming
- Pilot programs
- New approaches to existing programs to take them to the next level

Priority for funding will likely be given to projects or programs:

For which other funding sources are not readily available
That provide additional or new resources to meet needs in the Jewish community
Which are likely to be sustainable when the grant period is ended
That have clearly defined goals and measurable outcomes

*Please note: Support for synagogue needs and support for an organization’s capital campaigns are outside the scope of this grant opportunity and will not be considered.

Grant amount:

While there is no specific maximum or minimum grant amount, it is anticipated that grants will range between $10,000 and $75,000. The size of the requesting organization, and/or the size of the program for which support is being requested, will be taken into consideration.

Multi-year grant requests will be considered if there is a plan for sustainability beyond the grant period.

Louis Herman Memorial Fund

Currently: Open

The Louis Herman Memorial Fund, a designated fund of the Minnesota Jewish Community Foundation, is open to applications for the current grant cycle. The Louis Herman Memorial Fund has been used to support a variety of organizations in the Jewish community. Areas of particular interest to the Fund include:

Promoting Judaism among children and youth
Day school education
Israel experience
Technology in schools

While the fund does not place a limit on the dollar amount requested, historically most grant recipients have received grants of $5,000 – $20,000.

Special consideration will be given to new and innovative projects. Grants will not generally be awarded for regular operating budgets.

Grant finalists will be invited to give a brief presentation to the Louis Herman Memorial Fund Advisory Committee yearly in June.

Mount Sinai Community Foundation

Currently: Closed

The MSCF funds one-time projects up to $10,000 that fulfill the MSCF’s mission to improve health, enhance well-being, or otherwise advance medical care for Minnesota residents. MSCF gives equal consideration to proposals that impact the Jewish and non-Jewish communities in Minnesota. MSCF is especially interested in proposals that provide innovative approaches for addressing health, well-being or medical care that might not be funded by other grant sources. MSCF also gives priority to identifiable, discrete projects that the Foundation may fund alone or with other funding partners.

Through the generosity of the Frances & Samuel Finkelstein/Janice Finkelstein Mattison Memorial Fund, one of the grants funded will be in the area of cancer research and education. Organizations interested in securing the designated Memorial funds, should address the connection to cancer research and education in their application.

Click here for more information.

The Howard B. & Ruth F. Brin Jewish Arts Endowment Fund

Currently: Closed

The Howard B. and Ruth F. Brin Jewish Arts Endowment Fund is awarding Rimon: The Minnesota Jewish Arts Council a special three-year grant for its unique Artist Salon series. With a distinctive dialogue format, the Salons invite the public to meet artists explaining what inspires them and how they create their art. Rimon produces its Salon series for Jewish artists in an array of venues throughout the Twin Cities, each uniquely suited to its subject. The Brin Endowment’s funding will enable Rimon to commission new works of art specifically for one of the Salons in each of the three years.

This new grant to Rimon changes the nature of the 30 year-old Brin Endowment which previously had solicited annual applications. The Brin Endowment has awarded more than $150,000 to nearly 130 projects in support of Jewish arts in music, dance, theater, puppetry, literature, visual arts, photography and film.

Learn more about Howard B. & Ruth F. Brin

The Brin Endowment Fund was established in memory of the prominent Minneapolis couple Howard B. Brin and Ruth F. Brin. They believed that the arts are an essential way to enhance Jewish identity. Recognizing the challenges to artists and communities to foster and to support Jewish creativity, their family set up the Brin Endowment. The Brin Endowment endorses and now supports the Rimon Artist Salon commissions to individual artists.

Howard B. Brin (1919-1988), helped establish the Minneapolis Jewish Community Center in 1967 and was its president; he was also a noted collector of Jewish coins, amateur archeologist who participated in the first famous Masada excavation, and businessman. Ruth F. Brin (1921-2009) was nationally recognized for her 13 published books including children’s books, a memoir, a novel and poetry. Her pioneering liturgical poetry can be found in the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist prayer books.

The Howard B. and Ruth F. Brin Jewish Arts Endowment is a designated fund of the Minnesota Jewish Community Foundation. For further information contact Amy Newman, at anewman@jewishminneapolis.org or David J. Harris at rimon@bfcampus.org.

The Toodie and Frank Trestman Collaborative Education and Special Needs Fund

Currently: Closed

The Toodie and Frank Trestman Collaborative Education and Special Needs Fund supports local efforts in two areas:

Collaborative education: formal and informal Jewish education programs that involve collaboration between two or more organizations
Special needs: increasing the ability of children and adults with special needs to participate in Jewish life and receive a Jewish education.

Apply here

For an in-depth description of the Trestman Fund’s goals, click here

The Toodie and Frank Trestman

Collaborative Education and Special Needs Fund

The Fund was created through generous donations from our community to the Federation Community Capital Campaign, chaired by Toodie and Frank Trestman. Income derived from investments in designated endowment funds such as this one, help support Federation’s mission to build community, care for the welfare of Jews everywhere and maximize participation in Jewish life.

Grantmaking Focus

The Fund makes grants in the following focus areas:

Collaborative Education – support for formal and informal Jewish education programs that involve collaboration between two or more organizations, primarily (but not exclusively) in three programmatic areas:

Family education;
Teen programs; and
Professional development.
Special Needs – subsidies and other support for the education of children and adults with special needs and their participation in all aspects of Jewish community life. This includes the removal of barriers of attitude, communication, physical accessibility and affordability, the provision of other support to enable people with disabilities to participate in Jewish education (both formal and informal), recreation, and social activities.

Grantmaking Guidelines

The target audience of any project or programming must be local.
Grants may be awarded from the Fund to support both new and existing programs and/or subsidize tuition or a voucher system.
The Fund’s advisory committee will consider multi-year funding requests to support innovative programming that will impact a large segment of our community with special needs and/or programming in the arena of collaborative education.
Preference is given to requests that:
Are programmatic in nature
Assist those in the lowest income brackets
Have a track record of proven quality
Have a wide reach of impact on the community
Requests will NOT be considered to fund education programming for individuals with special needs otherwise funded by the Minneapolis Jewish Federation through unrestricted funds or from the special education funding pool or for requests where funding is available through government, either federal, state or local, sources.

Women’s Endowment Fund

Currently: Closed

The Women’s Endowment Fund supports programs and projects that enhance the lives of women and children in the Jewish community and beyond.

2021 Grant Awards:

Beit Ruth Educational & Therapeutic Village – Teenage Girls At-Risk: Building Social-Emotional Wellness & Resilience
Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) – Walking the Distance Pre-Army Academy for Women
Minnesota JCC – Essential Equipment for Safety of Children in ECC
Nevet – Nutritious School Sandwiches for Disadvantaged Israeli Children in Rehovot
Yozmot Atid – ‘Taking the Leap’: A Small Business Development Program for Israeli Women
Minneapolis Jewish Federation – Women’s Philanthropy Programs