I want to shout it from the rooftops!

- Pat Sauer

Great Results!

Family Supports

Family Resource Centers

Across the country, Family Resource Centers (FRCs) work with families in a strengths-based, family-centered approach to enhance parenting skills, and prevent child abuse. FRCs are developed to meet the local needs of families using shared standards of quality, and the five protective factors framework for strengthening families. This evidence-based model is supported nationally through the National Family Support Network (NFSN). Since 2021, the Sauer Family Foundation has been championing the development of Family Resource Centers in Minnesota. As of November 2025, over 40 counties are members of the Minnesota Community & Family Resource Network, a member-led community of practice that shares technical assistance, training, and best practices for implementing the NFSN model.

Guided by the lived experience of parents in each community, FRCs are serving 1,000s of Minnesota families each year to connect them with concrete supports, offer social connections and bolster parental resilience. Watch this video for more about the great work happening in Polk County.

Goodwill-Easter Seals MN – FATHER Project

Founded in 1999, GESMN’s FATHER (Fostering Actions To Help Earnings and Responsibility) Project has worked with low-income, non-custodial fathers to increase parenting skills, improve economic stability, and navigate legal challenges. In 2025, the project supported over 350 fathers in strengthening relationships with their children or reunifying with them. Recently, the project expanded regionally into Greater Minnesota communities including Rochester and St. Cloud, deepening collaboration with complementary programs focused on family stability and reentry. This expansion is supported by a 2-year, $1.5 million award from the MN Legislature in 2025.

Wayside

Wayside Recovery has long supported mothers impacted by substance use disorder with residential treatment through a whole-person wraparound approach. Services focus on substance use recovery, parenting, emotional health and housing stability. In 2022, Wayside launched and continues to maintain two No Refusal Family Crisis and Stabilization Services beds for women needing immediate access to support to ensure safety for themselves and their children. Since launching this initiative, Wayside has supported 169 women with children who may not have had access to treatment due to gaps in insurance coverage or other health care system challenges. They continue to consistently reduce barriers to care while aiding in family stabilization and reunification when necessary.

Educational Neglect: Elementary School Attendance in Minnesota

In Minnesota, educational neglect for children 11 years and younger triggers a school report to county child welfare services after 7 unexcused absences.
Between 2023 and 2025, Wilder Research evaluated family-centered support programs developed by Anoka, Olmstead, Scott, Washington and Wright Counties to understand educational concerns and attendance-related issues. They also looked at the services most likely to successfully keep children in school.

In October 2025, Wilder completed this report that illuminates barriers to attendance and support programs, identifying who is being served by support programming, and the outcome of those programs with the intent to inform service coordination and policy decision making across school districts.
Key findings show that families face complex challenges related to their children’s school attendance. Support programs provide services and resources for families, partnering with them to keep their children in school.

In addition to key findings, this report also provides recommendations for the following: State Policymakers, County Agencies, and School Staff.

Foster Youth

Augsburg Family Scholars

Created in 2022, the Augsburg Family Scholars (AFS) program supports foster youth in persisting in and completing their college degrees by supplementing Minnesota’s Fostering Independence Higher Education Grant with tailored academic, housing, and basic needs supports. To date, AFS has served 61 foster youth, including 39 grant recipients.

While the state grant reduces or eliminates tuition, room and board, and fees, AFS goes further by providing guaranteed year-round housing, laptops, basic needs assistance, and help navigating public benefits. The program also promotes academic success through faculty mentoring, access to student success resources, and community-building activities such as cohort events and peer mentoring. Together, these supports help students remain enrolled, engaged, and on track to graduate, and have encouraged some students who previously left college to return and complete their degrees.

Foster Advocates

What would it look like if Minnesota kept its promise to foster youth? After 2 years of listening to 120 foster youth across Minnesota, Foster Advocates presented the Minnesota Promise Report in 2025. It is a catalog of harm and a call to action. A Foster led vision for change and a road map detailing direction and next steps. This report builds upon the strong foundation that Foster Advocates created when they passed 8 laws in 7 years, strengthening their advocacy for Minnesota’s Foster community. The Minnesota Promise Report outlines action steps for state leaders, county agencies, and others to improve the lives of youth in foster care.

Emotional Well-Being

Boys & Girls Club

The Boys & Girls Club of the Twin Cities has integrated new tools, supports, and practices to prioritize mental well-being, and has created a shift among club youth in understanding that everyone benefits from mental wellness support. BGCTC Staff are observing positive impacts of elevated trauma-informed staff training, added resources of sensory rooms and trauma informed toolkits, and the normalization for youth and staff to ask for the support they need to cope, practice positive self-care, and move forward in positive ways. Using staff and community expertise, 98 adults received professional development in trauma-informed practices. Across 11 local clubs, nearly 1500 children learned resilience practices.

Conscious Discipline

In the 7 years that SFF has been funding Conscious Discipline implementation, we have seen amazing results. In one school district, 90% of 4 year olds increased their self-awareness and self-regulation skills. We know this makes a difference for children and their caregivers. In 2024, Minnesota had one Conscious Discipline trainer. That meant training and implementation could be slow and expensive.

The West Central Initiative Foundation, the MN Head Start Association and Minnesota Tribal Resources for Early Childhood Care, came together to recruit 50 providers ready to become endorsed facilitators in Conscious Discipline so that every corner of our State has access to the expertise needed to grow this evidence-based approach. This work was completed in 2025.

We’re excited to share this feedback from the new cohort: Miigwech for your kindness: I am able to be the best I can be for all those around me: Your support is game-changing for our State! Bright future ahead: Thank you for investing in us so that we can invest in the communities we serve.

Healing from Grief

1 in 15 children in Minnesota students will experience the death of a parent or sibling by age 18. School communities also face death related events of students or staff. Without appropriate support, this form of trauma can have a significant impact on mental health and success in school. The Park Nicollet Growing Through Grief program has supported 3,125 students and staff in the Burnsville-Savage School District through on-site counseling, debriefings, and educational materials. 232 school employees received free access to grief education and resources and 89% of attendees understood grief and the prevalence of childhood grief better. There were 15 grief groups with 93 students, providing 1,318 contact hours of grief support. This community response limits feelings of isolation for students facing grief and provides their peers and educators with the tools to talk about a difficult topic.

Students shared these impact statements: Before this group, I was skipping school half the days. I was failing all my classes, and I didn’t really care. But now I’m passing all my classes because of the support and encouragement from the group. I wouldn’t be where I am today without it: Having somebody to listen to you when you're going through something is something I’ve never ever ever ever ever had and Growing Through Grief always has a person to help: I know that I’m not alone and that there’s other people that also feel frustrated and other things and it’s just an understanding group: It’s so so so so so important because it helped me understand what I’m going through in ways that no one ever talks about.

Educational Success

Bridge to Read

As schools around Minnesota implement the READ Act, teachers are facing a familiar problem. How do they take all their new knowledge about how children learn to read and translate that into classroom instruction? Funding from SFF has helped ServeMinnesota create and scale a solution.

Bridge2Read is a highly aligned foundational literacy curriculum based on research that will help students learn to read. It delivers explicit, systematic daily instruction in phonemic awareness and word study. In a sample classroom, an experienced teacher utilizing B2R and receiving coaching saw profound growth. After only two months of implementation, the class went from 33% proficient to 80% proficient. When our team visit B2R classrooms, we see engaged students who are becoming confident readers. We’re excited to see these results replicated across the State.

Hunt Institute

System Interruption
We celebrate educators across Minnesota as they develop their knowledge and skills in reading instruction. We also know that it is not sustainable for schools and districts to offer this intensive professional development to each new generation of teachers. Led by the Hunt Institute, The Path Forward utilizes a cohort model to support states in their efforts to transform teacher preparation and teacher licensure programs to include the science of reading. In Minnesota, Sauer FF is supporting representatives from Education, Teacher Licensing, Higher Education, Community Agencies and Philanthropy to engage with National experts. They are creating an action plan for this essential knowledge to be embedded so that all newly licensed educators come into the classroom fully prepared to teach and support our emerging readers.

Bethany Lutheran College / Literacy Clinic

Dr. Carrie Pfeifer is leading systems change work in the Browne Intervention Clinic at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato. Her innovation pairs aspiring educators with struggling readers. This gives multiple benefits. Local students access 1:1 quality tutoring that can be prohibitively expensive for low-income families and improve their skills through interventions aligned with the science of reading. College students have an opportunity to put learning into practice before they head into classrooms. All this is under the watchful eye of Dr. Pfeifer. This model is now being replicated by colleges around the State.

Diverse Workforce

Since 2021, Sauer Family Foundation grants have supported over 1,200 aspiring and new career professionals as they enter the fields of Education, Social Work and Children’s Mental Health. In Education, the percentage of teachers identifying as American Indian or People of Color has risen from 5.54% in 2020 to 7.36% in the 2025 legislative report. For students enrolled in teacher preparation programs, that figure is now 18.46%. While there is still work to do to reach full representation, this is significant growth and demonstrates the impact when philanthropy, public policy, and public funding work together to create change.