SUNDANCE FAMILY FOUNDATION

The Sundance Family Foundation, founded on May 12, 2004 is a private family foundation located in St Paul MN. It's mission is to “strengthen youth development and support family stability". The Foundation focuses giving on organizations whose programming benefits the residents of the following Minnesota and Wisconsin counties: Hennepin, Ramsey, Washington, Chisago, Polk and St. Croix.Sundance has been championing Youth Social Entrepreneurship (YSE) since 2007, as a way to support youth age 14-24 in low-income or underrepresented communities. YSE programs integrate positive youth development, community engagement, and social entrepreneurship. Nonprofits with YSE enterprises offer youth their first wage-earning jobs, workforce readiness skills, and encourage them to take a variety of business and community leadership positions. To accomplish this part of its 2016-2020 strategic plan, Sundance has the following strategies:• Build the capacity of YSE nonprofits to produce rigorous evidence-based evaluation• Develop bridges and pipelines between youth-serving nonprofits, post-secondary training, and job opportunities• Create innovative transportation, training and workplace mentoring pilot projects• Produce Wunderkammers: Community Tech and Training Exploratoriums which provide hands-on career exploration with working technicians• Communicate these bold innovations through video, social media and storytelling.Housing and Solution for Homelessness:Sundance adheres to a values-based, empowerment model of philanthropy. It is small, nimble and able to take lead positions on bold solutions. Sundance has been able to support emerging coordinated entry programs in the seven county area surrounding the Twin Cities, Mn and has provided start-up funds to create innovative models of support for youth and families without permanent shelter. Building a Community of “Greater Good" Investors:Sundance has also taken a leadership role “doing well while doing good," by using Impact Investing as its investment strategy. Impact Investing considers Environmental, Social and Governance criteria (ESG) to quantifiably measure sustainability and social impact on society to seek both a financial return while accomplishing a social good. Sundance utilizes industry-agreed ESG criteria to create and evaluate its measurable assessment of true social impact over time. Over the past five years, while investing in socially impactful funds, Sundance has achieved superior bottom line returns, often beating commonly used investment benchmarks including the S&P 500 and Russell 2000. Sundance has used a four-phase process over five years to implement a robust Impact Investment portfolio.