Twins Community Fund Snapshot
When I was going through the All-Star Legacy Initiative numbers for the last post, one finding jumped out at me: the Rangers' $7 million investment in 2024. In digging further into the data, I learned that this wasn't the largest Legacy Initiative effort: that title belongs, somewhat surprisingly to me, to the Twins. In 2014, when Target Field hosted the All-Star Game, the press release put the total investment at over $8.5 million, and noted support not only from MLB Charities, the Twins organization, and the Twins Community Fund, but also The Pohlad Family Foundation. This brings us to my most recent snapshot, the Twins Community Fund.
The Twins Community Fund comes in below average on my IMPACT+ score, a 75.7 that lands them #18 of 29. But like the Phillies last week, the trajectory is trending positive. Grants paid have grown from $957K in 2020* to $1.6 million in 2024, and net assets have more than doubled over the same stretch, from $1.5 million to $3.6 million.
*There's no 2019 Form 990 for the Twins Community Fund anywhere I could find, including on ProPublica. Every other year from 2020 through 2024 is accounted for.
One of the things I still need to think through further is how to account for personal giving from ownership. I mentioned this in the Padres and Mets snapshot in reference to new owners who are philanthropic already taking over teams, but here is a unique situation where longtime owners have their own separate foundation that has incredible assets and impact - over $75 million in assets as of 2024, with roughly $14 million granted out that year alone, nearly nine times what the Community Fund gave away. And yet direct giving from the Pohlad Foundation to the Community Fund is modest: about $20,000 in a single year, and just over $100,000 total across 2020–2024.
Despite the seeming financial independence, there is definitely coordination. In November 2020, the Twins unveiled a new giving charter aimed at eliminating racial and socioeconomic opportunity gaps in K-12 education and youth development, developed in collaboration with the Pohlad Family Foundation and backed by an initial $380,000 in club and Community Fund gifts to 26 nonprofits. The team was explicit that the effort aligned with the Pohlad Foundation's own $25 million commitment to racial justice, announced five months earlier in the wake of George Floyd's murder (see: https://www.mlb.com/news/twins-announce-new-giving-charter-for-youth).
On the history side: the Community Fund wasn't incorporated as its own 501(c)(3) until 1991, seven years after Carl Pohlad purchased the team. However, the team's community programming traces back to 1961, the year the Washington Senators moved to Minnesota and became the Twins, primarily through offering free youth clinics.
The Fund also runs a set of named recognition awards to celebrate current and former players, coaches, staff, and community members that I haven't come across elsewhere in this series (the Diamondbacks Foundation may be the closest comparison with the Ken Kendrick Grand Slam Awards): the Carl R. Pohlad Award for current players and coaches (since 1993), the Kirby Puckett Award for alumni (since 2006), Mr. Baseball & Ms. Softball for the state's top high school players (since 2010), and the Terry Ryan Award for community volunteers (since 2006). Each comes with a $5,000 grant to a charity of the winner's choosing. A nice touch, if I may say so myself.
One more item worth flagging that caught my eye was how Carlos Correa's personal foundation received $250,000 from the Twins Community Fund in 2022, his first year with the team, then $180,000 in both 2023 and 2024 (the Astros Foundation gave $101,955 back in 2020, while he was still in Houston). I searched my dataset for similar situations, but it's unique. The Schwarber Family Foundation received a comparable $160,000 from Phillies Charities in 2024 (the same year he was nominated for the Roberto Clemente Award), but everything else I found for foundations run by players like Anthony Rizzo, Albert Pujols, Josh Donaldson, and a handful of others tops out in the $10K–$50K range, and none of them repeat at that level year over year the way Correa's has.
Rated on its own, the Twins Community Fund is a middle-of-the-pack foundation on a decent upward trend. Rated as part of the full Pohlad giving picture, the family's actual community investment looks considerably bigger than the story the Fund's data tells.