What public records or IRS filings exist for Hopewell Fund grants mentioning Minnesota projects?
Executive summary
The Hopewell Fund’s primary public records are its IRS Form 990 filings and associated schedules, which are available through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer and the IRS data releases (Form 990 page images and XML) that ProPublica republishes [1] [2]. Those filings include grant details disclosed on Schedule I and narrative program descriptions, but the materials provided to this review do not contain an explicit, cited list of grants that name Minnesota-specific projects [3] [4].
1. What public filings exist and where they are published
Hopewell’s tax returns — annual Form 990s, the machine-readable XML data and page-image PDFs — are publicly available through the IRS and republished by ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, which reconstructs those returns for researcher use [1] [2]. ProPublica hosts full filings and individual schedules (for example, Schedule I, which is the IRS schedule used to report grants and allocations to organizations and projects), and it provides downloads of specific year filings including the 2018 Form 990 for Hopewell [3] [4]. The IRS also distributes bulk Form 990 XML files for filings processed since 2017; ProPublica’s pages are a reconstruction of that raw IRS data [1].
2. What the Form 990s and Schedule I typically show about Hopewell grants
Form 990s for fiscal sponsors like Hopewell commonly disclose program service descriptions, lists of officers and key employees, and, crucially for grant-tracking, Schedule I entries that record grants and other assistance to organizations [3] [4]. Hopewell’s public descriptions and services emphasize fiscal sponsorship and granting — accepting donations into restricted funds and then making grants to sponsored projects that may not yet be tax-exempt [5] [6]. Where Hopewell has made grants to other organizations or projects, those payments can appear on Schedule I lines or in grant listings within the 990’s supporting schedules [3].
3. What the available records say specifically about Minnesota projects (and what they do not say)
The reporting and documents supplied for this analysis include ProPublica-hosted Form 990s and Schedule I pages for Hopewell but contain no explicit citation naming Minnesota projects in the excerpts provided here [3] [4]. ProPublica’s archive and the IRS raw data are the places to find any state-specific grantees if Hopewell reported them, but the sources available to this review do not show a Minnesota project line item or a publicized Minnesota grant in the sampled filings [1] [2] [3]. This absence in the provided sources is not proof that Hopewell never funded Minnesota work; it is a statement that the current dataset given for review does not include a clearly labeled Minnesota grant entry [1] [3].
4. How to locate Minnesota mentions or verify missing entries
To find whether Hopewell reported grants to Minnesota projects, researchers should download Hopewell’s full Form 990 filings and Schedule I pages from ProPublica’s organization page and inspect Schedule I entries and any grant lists for grantee names and addresses; the IRS XML files also allow text searches across years for “Minnesota,” specific city names, or project titles [1] [2] [3]. Additionally, Hopewell’s own project descriptions and fiscal sponsorship materials indicate that many projects operate under restricted funds and could be listed under project names rather than state identifiers, so cross-referencing project names from Hopewell’s project directory or an archived version of its site with grantee names on Schedule I may be necessary [5] [6].
5. Context, agendas and reporting caution
Third-party profiles and watchdog pieces, such as InfluenceWatch’s summary, highlight Hopewell’s role as a fiscal sponsor for politically active projects (narratives that sometimes carry advocacy framing), and they point to large grants and transfers in Hopewell’s filings without always listing state-specific grantees [7]. Because Hopewell functions as a fiscal sponsor, funds can flow to projects that later spin out or operate under different legal names — a structural fact that complicates simple “Minnesota project” searches in Form 990s [5] [6]. The sources reviewed here document where to find and read the filings (IRS/ProPublica) and explain Hopewell’s fiscal-sponsorship model, but they do not, in the provided excerpts, produce a confirmed list of Minnesota-located grantees; obtaining that level of specificity requires inspecting the full Schedule I entries and supporting docs across multiple years [1] [3] [4].