Heritage Works Inc.

Grant seekers need to reset their expectations before approaching Heritage Works Inc.: this is not a conventional check-writing foundation. IRS filings show grants paid of $0 in every recent fiscal year (2019-2023, with only a token $1,391 recorded once, in 2015), even though the organization reports $211,883 to $340,277 a year in program spending. That spending funds Heritage Works' own activities — consulting, education, and advocacy for historic preservation and downtown revitalization in Dubuque County, Iowa — not sub-grants to outside nonprofits. Its own site confirms this: services on offer are National Register nomination support, state/federal/brownfield historic tax credit applications, project grant application assistance (i.e., helping a property owner apply to someone else's grant program), historic structure reports, and an Iowa Historic Tax Credit Partnership, delivered on a membership/consulting basis. Founded in 2015 with seed funding from local preservation advocates John and Alice Butler, the organization is small and hyper-local by design — a 'two-man' technical-assistance shop, per Encyclopedia Dubuque, that has helped catalyze more than $150 million in reinvestment across dozens of projects since inception. The organization is now navigating a leadership transition: founding President/CEO Duane Hagerty, whose background in tax and real estate law made him the driving force behind funding-mechanism strategy, died Dec. 28, 2025. Program Director Bill Doyle and Board Chair David Klavitter (Dupaco Community Credit Union) are the visible points of continuity. First-time applicants should understand the real 'ask': if you own or manage a historic property or catalytic redevelopment project physically located in Dubuque or Dubuque County, Heritage Works can be a paid technical partner that helps you win financing from tax-credit programs, state and federal preservation grants, and private capital — not a funder that issues its own competitive grant awards. Organizations outside Dubuque County, or seeking direct dollars rather than technical/financing assistance, are not a fit. The relationship typically starts as a direct consulting conversation with staff, not an LOI-to-board-decision cycle typical of grantmaking foundations.

Heritage Works' Form 990 data reads like an operating charity, not a grantmaking intermediary. Grants paid to other organizations were $0 in FY2019, FY2020, FY2021, FY2022, and FY2023 — the only year with any grants-paid figure at all is FY2015, at a negligible $1,391. Meanwhile, 'total giving' (its own program expenditure) ran $211,883 (FY2020, its lowest year, coinciding with pandemic-era revenue of just $113,485) up to $340,277 (FY2023, its highest), averaging roughly $282,500/year across the five most recently filed years (2019-2023) — money spent on Heritage Works' own preservation consulting, education (ArchiTREK tours, workshops), and advocacy work, not distributed as grants. Contributions received have ranged widely, from $28,368 (FY2019) to $204,850 (FY2021), with net investment income mostly negligible (under $50 in FY2020-2022) until FY2023, when it jumped to $135,801 — consistent with a much larger invested asset base. That asset base is the single biggest anomaly in the data: total assets sat at $39,637 in FY2022 and then registered $8,416,854 in FY2023 (essentially flat at $8,409,819 in FY2024) — a jump of more than 200x in one filing year, almost certainly reflecting a major real estate transfer, endowment gift, or capital campaign close rather than organic accumulation, since annual contributions never exceeded roughly $205,000 in any single year. Officer compensation rose steadily across the record — $78,750 (FY2019), $85,894 (FY2020), $86,826 (FY2021), $91,005 (FY2022), $152,323 (FY2023) — the FY2023 jump likely reflecting the addition of a second paid staff role (Doyle) alongside Hagerty rather than a single large raise. There is no grantee list, no geographic breakdown of outbound funding, and no program-area split to analyze, because the organization does not maintain a third-party grants portfolio — all of its 'total giving' is self-directed program spend in Dubuque County.

Heritage Works sits in a peer set of similarly small, single-market Arts & Culture-coded 501(c)(3)s with total assets clustered near $8.2-8.5 million — a bracket built purely on asset size, since none of these organizations' actual giving behavior is disclosed in this dataset beyond Heritage Works' own filings.

Heritage Works is distinguished from this peer set less by asset size — it sits squarely in the middle of the pack — than by mission specificity and geography: where the peers are broadly coded 'Arts & Culture,' Heritage Works is a single-county historic preservation and economic-development intermediary with a documented $0 third-party grants history, meaning it functions more like an operating nonprofit than a grantmaking foundation despite sharing a similar balance sheet. Grant seekers evaluating this peer set should not assume asset parity implies comparable grant-award capacity for any of these organizations without verifying each one's actual grants-paid history individually.

The dominant recent event is a leadership loss: founding President and CEO Duane Hagerty died Dec. 28, 2025, at age 69, after being diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma earlier that year and seeing it metastasize rapidly by mid-December. Local developer John Gronen told the Telegraph Herald that 'his fingerprints are all over Dubuque,' calling him the state's finest historic preservation leader; Hagerty's legal and real-estate background had made him the organization's de facto expert on financing mechanisms for preservation deals, including work on landmark projects like Steeple Square. The Heritage Works board has publicly committed to carrying forward 'Duane's lasting legacy,' but no named permanent successor as president/CEO was reported as of this research. Day-to-day continuity currently runs through Preservation & Program Director Bill Doyle (bdoyle@heritageworksdbq.com, 563-564-4080) and Board Chair David Klavitter of Dupaco Community Credit Union. On the programming side, Heritage Works' 2025 activity included leading walking tours such as 'Lots to See on Locust Street' (May 2025, with Dubuque County Historic Preservation Commission staff) and continued involvement with the Dubuque Area History Expo, which returned to the Loras College Alumni Campus Center in 2025 after its 2024 debut. No 2025-2026 press coverage of specific new grant awards, RFPs, or funding-priority announcements from Heritage Works was found in web search — consistent with the filings-based finding that this organization does not run a competitive grants program. The most consequential 'recent activity' for prospective partners is organizational: verify current staffing and authority before initiating a project conversation, since the org's primary preservation-finance expert is no longer available.

There is no formal grant application, LOI, or portal to submit to Heritage Works, because it does not disburse third-party grants (its 990 filings show $0 in grants paid in every year on record except a token $1,391 in 2015). The functional 'application' is a direct conversation with staff about a specific Dubuque County historic property or catalytic redevelopment project. Start with Preservation & Program Director Bill Doyle (bdoyle@heritageworksdbq.com, 563-564-4080) rather than trying to reach a program officer — the organization is small (two to three staff historically) and does not have a formal intake team. Come prepared with property-specific documentation: age and historic significance of the structure, current ownership, and what kind of assistance you actually need — National Register nomination, state/federal/brownfield historic tax credit application help, a historic structure report, or general project-grant-application support to a different funder. Because Heritage Works operates partly on a membership/consulting-fee model, be ready to discuss budget for its services; this is a paid technical partnership in most cases, not free money. The single biggest mistake an outside applicant can make right now is treating this like a normal 2026 grant cycle and waiting for an RFP — none has been publicized, and the org's founding funding expert, Duane Hagerty, died Dec. 28, 2025, so the internal process for evaluating and prioritizing project requests may itself be in flux; ask directly who is currently making these calls. A second common mistake is confusing domains: the website on file in most databases (heritageworks.org) is a Detroit, Michigan youth-arts nonprofit with no connection to this organization — always confirm you're on heritageworksdbq.com. For alignment language, frame your project around Heritage Works' own stated pillars — 'historic activation,' catalytic reinvestment, equitable and authentic placemaking, and adaptive reuse tied to economic development — rather than generic preservation language, since that is the vocabulary the organization uses to evaluate fit. Finally, if your project sits outside Dubuque or Dubuque County, do not pursue this org at all; redirect to state-level vehicles like the Iowa Historic Tax Credit program directly, the Iowa Barn Foundation, or the National Trust for Historic Preservation's grant programs.