Sauer Family Foundation Grant

The Sauer Family Foundation is a Minnesota-based private foundation focused on improving outcomes for children who face adversity, especially in the form of trauma, abuse, neglect, or educational barriers. Its mission centers on ensuring that children experience well-being in environments where they are supported, safe, resilient, academically successful, and thriving within their families and communities. As part of a planned sunset of operations by 2027, the foundation is concentrating its remaining resources on deepening and completing work with existing grantee partners, particularly in its core funding areas. However, it continues to accept inquiries for two of its priority areas: Strong Family Relationships and Emotional Wellbeing. The foundation provides grants to a wide array of entities, including schools, early childhood centers, nonprofits, research institutions, government agencies, collaboratives, and community networks. Its geographic focus is limited to the state of Minnesota, with priority given to organizations operating in the seven-county Twin Cities metro area. The foundation does not provide funding to individuals or for purposes such as political activity, advertising, debt reduction, endowments, or individual mental health services. Funding is currently being accepted in two main areas. The first is “Building Strong Family Relationships,” which supports preventative and intervention efforts in child welfare. This includes funding for community-based initiatives that use a whole-family approach to prevent child abuse, services to keep children safe at home through family support and treatment, and relational permanence strategies for children in foster care. Efforts to elevate the voices of foster youth and public awareness campaigns about the foster care experience are also eligible. The second area, “Building Supportive Environments that Promote Emotional Safety for Children & Youth,” funds programs in PreK–12 schools that foster emotional safety, offer group interventions for children who’ve experienced adversity, build communication skills around emotional health, and provide professional development on trauma-responsive practices for youth-serving professionals. Applicants interested in these two active funding areas must begin by sending an inquiry email to the designated staff contact—Sheri Hixon for Family Relationships and Emma Mogendorff for Emotional Wellbeing—to determine alignment. If the foundation finds the inquiry a good fit, it will issue a username and password for the online grant system where applicants can submit a full proposal. The foundation does not accept unsolicited applications for its other two focus areas—Educational Success and Diverse Workforce—which are invitation-only through 2027. The foundation will hold two grant rounds in 2026. The first application deadline is February 27, 2026, and the second is September 25, 2026. Based on the stated recurrence and these dates, the program is considered recurring, and applicants should anticipate similar timelines in future years. Interested applicants should begin engagement early, as the process requires initial email contact and potential invitation before full application access is granted. For more information and updates, applicants are directed to the Sauer Family Foundation website and the appropriate contacts listed for each funding area.