Our team is experienced in:

  • foundation start-up
    and operations
  • next generation
  • governance
  • areas of grantmaking including arts, education, social services, spirituality, leadership conducting research

FPA also manages several consultants with specific expertise and engages them on behalf of our clients, as needed.

FPA was founded in 1999 by Diane Neimann. In 2008, Teresa Bonner and long-term FPA employee Ellen George acquired the firm.


Teresa Bonner

Principal
teresa@fpadvisors.com
vCard: Teresa_Bonner.vcf

Teresa Bonner is a Principal in Family Philanthropy Advisors and brings twenty years’ professional experience in philanthropy, foundation and nonprofit management to FPA clients. Teresa has served as the director of the U.S. Bancorp Foundation, the Piper Jaffray Foundation, and two nonprofit organizations. As director of the U.S. Bancorp Foundation, Teresa managed $20 million in Foundation grantmaking annually and led the company’s community relations activities.

Prior to joining Family Philanthropy Advisors in 2008, Teresa was Senior Vice President and head of Business Development and Charitable Services for U.S. Bank’s Private Client Group, where she oversaw new business development and services offered to high-net worth clients, including private foundation services, grantmaking, endowment management and charitable services.

In addition to her foundation management roles, Teresa has served as Executive Director of Milkweed Editions, an acclaimed nonprofit literary publisher, and as Executive Director of the Library Foundation of Hennepin County, where she directed planning and implementation of marketing, fundraising, promotional, programming, public relations, grant administration and volunteer functions for one of the country’s largest library systems.  Prior to her work in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, Teresa was a partner in the Minneapolis law firm of Lindquist and Vennum, specializing in complex litigation.

Between 2001 and 2007, Teresa chaired the board of directors of MacPhail Center for Music, one of the country’s largest community music schools, where she led the transformation of that organization’s governance, successfully completed a major capital campaign for the creation of a new flagship facility, and chaired the Center’s grand opening celebrations.  She has served on several other nonprofit boards and has been a frequent panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.  Teresa won the “Woman Changemaker” award from the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal in 2004.

Teresa graduated magna cum laude from the University of North Dakota with a degree in journalism. After completing Law School at the University of Minnesota, she served as a judicial clerk for the Hon. Gerald Heaney of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

Teresa is a passionate music and theater-goer and an avid traveler. She enjoys cooking and talking about food with her daughter who is in culinary school in London, discussing world music with her other daughter who is working toward her PhD in Musicology at Princeton, and traveling in her vintage Bluebird RV with her husband.