The Northwest Area Foundation is committed to helping communities reduce poverty for the long term. Through our three programs - Ventures, Connections, and Horizons - we work with rural, urban, American Indian, and rural Latino communities in Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. We also help our communties through program-related investment and mission-related investments. Our work is community focused. We believe communities are more likely to reduce poverty if they achieve each of the following four outcomes.

• Increased asset identification and development. A community’s ability to increase the local assets of low-income people, and the organizations that serve them, is a fundamental long-term indicator of progress in poverty reduction. A community’s ability to identify assets, and to take strategic action to increase them, are part of the asset development equation.
• Expanded economic opportunities. Economic opportunities increase in low-income/low-resource communities in urban settings most often by linking low-income communities to the economic opportunities already available in surrounding, more prosperous areas. However in rural settings, the focus is more on creating new or expanded economic strategies that produce living-wage jobs. In both settings, economic opportunity cannot be fully realized without related components such as skill development, transportation and civic engagement.
• Increased community capacity to reduce poverty. This refers to the community’s skills, resources and knowledge to develop and implement strategic approaches to long term poverty reduction. Examples of these capacities include civic engagement, contacts, a community that welcomes innovation, and skill-building organizations. We have found that communities that have greater capacity but fewer assets are much better candidates for the Foundation’s approach than communities where both assets and capacity are low.
• Increased community use of inclusive decision-making. Inclusiveness is critical to decision-making that will yield common vision, goals and ownership of sustainable strategies. It demands diversity at the table—representation by those who are poor as well as civic and business leaders, educators and religious leaders, service providers and policymakers.