Lynne & Andrew Redleaf Foundation

Lynne & Andrew Redleaf Foundation

The Lynne & Andrew Redleaf Foundation was established in 2017 by Whitebox Advisors founder Andrew Redleaf and his wife, Lynne Singer Redleaf. Whitebox, launched in Minneapolis in 1999, grew into a multi-strategy alternative asset manager known for credit, long/short equity, and special-situations investing. The Redleafs structured their foundation as a Minnesota-based 501(c)(3) to deploy philanthropic capital primarily within the Twin Cities. The foundation concentrates its grantmaking on education, human services, and broader philanthropy and voluntarism efforts. Rather than operating its own programs, the Lynne & Andrew Redleaf Foundation functions as a funder of existing nonprofit infrastructure, writing checks to organizations that address educational access gaps and basic-needs services in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area. Its geographic footprint is intensely local — grant recipients are concentrated in Minnesota, with the foundation’s tax filings reflecting a place-based giving thesis. As a relatively recent entrant among Minnesota foundations, the Redleaf Foundation operates without a public website or dedicated professional staff, a lean structure consistent with many founder-driven private foundations. Andrew Redleaf retired from Whitebox Advisors in 2018, shortly after the foundation’s launch, shifting his focus to philanthropic governance alongside Lynne Redleaf. The Redleaf Foundation’s architecture is a straightforward single-wealth-event philanthropy — no donor-advised fund overlay, no multi-family structure, no program-related investment arm. Its structural distinction is its origin: a hedge-fund founder liquidating a portion of his partnership wealth into a vehicle oriented entirely toward place-based, operational-support grants, bypassing the endowment-model complexity that many larger peer foundations carry.