About

PFund Foundation is a community-led foundation founded by and for the LGBTQ+ community.

PFund Foundation is a regional community foundation advancing a thriving and equitable future for queer communities across the Upper Midwest. For nearly 40 years, PFund has mobilized resources, invested in leaders and organizations, and connected philanthropy with community-driven change. In 2025 alone, PFund awarded more than $2.1 million in grants and scholarships to nonprofits, grassroots initiatives, businesses, and individuals across the region.

As a community-led foundation, PFund centers the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQ+ communities in every aspect of our work. Our grant-making process is guided by community review panels made up of volunteers from across the Upper Midwest who help evaluate applications and make funding recommendations. By combining regional reach with deep local relationships, PFund ensures resources are distributed where they can have the greatest impact while strengthening the long-term resilience and leadership of queer and trans communities.

How Community Foundations Work

Community foundations are nonprofit charities that connect donors with opportunities to support their communities through grants, scholarships, and planned gifts. They steward and invest donations to create long-term community impact through endowment funds.

Unlike private foundations funded by a single source, community foundations are supported by many donors and guided by community leadership. They manage a variety of charitable funds and help direct resources where they are needed most. 

At PFund Foundation, this model brings together LGBTQ+ people, allies, and partners to collectively invest in stronger, more equitable queer communities across the Upper Midwest. The PFund staff recruits and trains members of the community to read, score, select recipients of the vast majority of PFund’s grant and scholarship funds.

The PFund Process

Step 1: Identify Community Needs

• PFund Foundation’s grantmaking priorities are rooted in community voice, lived experience, and responsiveness to emerging issues across the Upper Midwest. We identify funding priorities in two primary ways:
  • Strategic Planning: Every several years, PFund conducts a strategic planning process informed by community input, data analysis, feedback from grantees, and the evolving needs of queer and trans communities. This process helps guide our long-term grantmaking and programmatic priorities.
  • Responsive Action: When urgent issues or emergencies arise, PFund staff and board convene community leaders, partners, and stakeholders to better understand the situation and determine how resources can be mobilized quickly and effectively to support impacted communities.

Step 2: Build and Steward Resources

• PFund Foundation builds its annual grantmaking pool through a combination of charitable contributions, endowment support, and philanthropic partnerships.
  • The majority of our funding comes from generous donors and community supporters whose gifts provide flexible resources that can respond to changing community needs. 
  • PFund also draws an annual distribution from our General Endowment and endowed grant and scholarship funds to sustain long-term grantmaking.
  • In addition, PFund partners with foundations and institutions that rely on our expertise, relationships, and trusted position within queer and trans communities to steward and distribute funding as an intermediary partner.

Step 3: Reach and Support Applicants

• For nearly 40 years, PFund has built deep relationships with nonprofit organizations, grassroots leaders, businesses, and community groups across the region. These connections allow us to proactively reach potential applicants and ensure opportunities are accessible to communities often excluded from traditional philanthropy.
• Our staff works closely with prospective applicants throughout the process, providing outreach, technical assistance, and individualized support to help organizations and individuals submit strong applications.

Step 4: Community-Led Review

• Community participation is central to PFund Foundation’s grantmaking process. Our board, staff, and volunteer reviewers reflect the diversity of the communities and region we serve.
• Each year, we recruit volunteers from across the Upper Midwest to review applications and evaluate proposals through a community-informed lens. Reviewers come together to discuss applications, share perspectives, and make funding recommendations for grants and scholarships that will have meaningful impact.

Step 5: Invest in Community Impact

• Once funding recommendations are finalized and approved by PFund’s Board of Directors, recipients are notified and funds are distributed.
• Our support extends beyond financial investment. Grantees and scholarship recipients also gain access to leadership development opportunities, capacity-building resources, educational programming, and regional networks that help strengthen their work and deepen community impact.
• At every stage of the process, PFund Foundation is committed to ensuring resources are stewarded responsibly, equitably, and in alignment with our mission to advance a just and thriving future for queer communities.

PFund’s Mission and Vision

Prioritized Communities

Queer People of Color

LGBTQ+ people who also belong to minority racial and ethnic groups experience additional oppression and discrimination. PFund demonstrates its commitment to queer people of color through its programs.

Queer People in Rural Areas

Transgender, gender-expansive and nonbinary individuals and teens face the targets of discriminatory legislation at the regional and national level. In response, PFund launched the ASCEND Campaign.

Gender-Expansive People

LGBTQ+ people living in rural settings face a unique set of challenges. Rural LGBTQ+ environments are often actively hostile to queer and trans individuals, with fewer nonprofit relationships tying queer communities together.

PFund’s History

In 1987, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, four gay friends in Minneapolis pooled $2,000 of their own money to establish a permanent endowment fund to provide support for gay and lesbian people in Minnesota experiencing hardships because of the AIDS epidemic.

The idea for the foundation originated during the process of estate planning. They approached local mainstream community foundations hoping they would provide the safekeeping and administration for such a cause. They were denied. The mainstream foundations’ policies at the time did not include support for LGBTQ-specific causes, nor did they approve of terminology such as “gay, queer or homosexual” in the mission of naming funds. Not to be stopped, they forged ahead and established the Philanthrofund Foundation which today is known as PFund Foundation.

Over the years, PFund has grown with the support of small and large contributions as well as sustaining contributions from individuals. The founders hoped in time that contributions would follow from the broader non-gay and lesbian community and they were correct in that belief.

Today, PFund has expanded beyond its modest roots to become the only queer community foundation serving the upper Midwest region of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa and the First Nations therein. In keeping with the spirit of community support that the founders envisioned, PFund builds community and provides resources and support for LGBTQ+ organizations and individuals through grants and scholarships, developing leaders and by inspiring giving.

Interviews of several founders conducted by board members Scott Cabalka and Dan Livak, 2023