Kate Hoff Memorial Fund

On January 22, 2025, Kate Hoff passed away from complications from liver cancer at the age of 56. To honor Kate's life and her extraordinary contributions to this world, we are asking you to donate here to support three causes Kate cared about deeply: 1) Native American communities; 2) Farm Aid; and 3) Kate's hometown of Fergus Falls, MN. Funds will be dispersed to charitable organizations Kate supported that work on these issues.

--

Kate Hoff was born to Peter and Elizabeth Hoff on November 21, 1968 in Fergus Falls, MN, the eldest of four children.

Kate was raised on a hobby farm in Fergus Falls. When most girls ask for a pony, it’s an aspiration. But as presented to her parents – for whom Kate had already sourced the horse and everything it would need – it was a foregone conclusion. She loved horses and achieved the high honor of Town and Country Saddle Club Queen (one of her proudest achievements). Kate’s success acquiring her first horse was a sign of things to come – in life, Kate was extremely persuasive and usually got what she wanted.

Kate graduated from Fergus Falls High School in 1987. After two years at community college, Kate transferred to Augsburg College in Minneapolis, where she received a B.A. in Sociology. She later received a Masters in Nonprofit Management from Hamline University.

In 1993, Kate took a short-term temp job at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) and, as she described it, never left. Over the next 23 years, Kate advanced within the organization to become the Vice President of Development, working with colleagues (some of whom became her closest friends) to transform the food system and address the crisis for family farmers. Kate was never out front in her work – she provided what she called “visionary support”, giving leaders the support they needed to do great things. She counted herself lucky to have worked at IATP with someone she considered to be such a visionary, Mark Ritchie, who became her close friend and mentor (and later Minnesota’s Secretary of State).

Through this work, Kate became connected with the Farm Aid organization. Every year for 25 years (with two exceptions), Kate provided volunteer communications support to the annual Farm Aid benefit concert, connecting family farmers with media and giving these farmers a platform to tell their stories. Farm Aid was so important to Kate that she rescheduled the date of her wedding in 2007 to work at the concert.

In 2001, Kate suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm, a condition most people do not survive. This confrontation with her own mortality had a profound effect on Kate that she channeled into her art, becoming an accomplished printmaker. A primary focus of her work was printed reproductions of the scans of her brain hemorrhaging (some of which she made into “Kate’s Brain” t-shirts that her friends still wear today).

It was through her art that Kate first participated in the Minnesota Fringe Festival as a featured visual artist. She became an official blogger for the festival, was the subject of a Fringe show depicting the events leading up to her aneurysm, acted (naked) as a cast member in yet another Fringe show, and ultimately became chair of the Fringe Festival board.

In 2005, needing a consultant to manage IATP’s 20th anniversary endowment campaign, and not finding one in Minnesota who could capture the work of the organization, Kate was referred by a Rockefeller heir to what she would call a fancy New York consulting firm (Aaron Consulting), where a brilliant young consultant (and part-time rock opera composer) Bob Weidman was assigned to her account. When, in Kate’s telling, Bob was able to describe the organization better than she could, she had no choice but to marry him. After an 18-month courtship and engagement in Laos, Kate and Bob were married on September 30, 2007.

Kate and Bob were rarely apart. They worked together, first with IATP, and then as joint owners of their nonprofit fundraising consulting company; they traveled to exotic destinations (Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Iceland, Alaska, Europe, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Belize, Canada, and throughout the U.S.); were avid collectors and frequenters of estate sales; raised chickens; and built their dream cabin together near Fergus Falls on land settled by Kate’s forebears.

In 2015 Kate and Bob adopted their dog Abbie (full name Abbott McSnout), who Kate would say was the closest thing they had to a child. Abbie was fiercely protective of Kate through her health struggles, vigilantly watching over her on the bed in Kate’s “recovery lair” after her numerous surgeries and chemotherapy treatments. In 2022, Abbie was diagnosed with the same type of liver cancer Kate would be diagnosed with a month later. He passed away in November 2023 at the age of nine.

In her life as a fundraising consultant, Kate worked with a number of extraordinary organizations at the intersection of social/racial/economic/environmental/climate/food justice. The project she was most passionate about in her final years was working with James Beard Award-winning Chef Sean Sherman to stand-up and grow the nonprofit organization North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS), which is working to establish a pre-colonial food system to address the food-related health, economic, and social challenges facing Native American communities. In the year before she died, Kate raised more than $10 million to support NATIFS’ acquisition of a new building which will serve as the organization’s operations and expansion hub, a deal which was finalized the day before Kate was hospitalized for the last time. She was incredibly proud of this accomplishment.

Kate was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018 (which she beat), and with an unrelated liver cancer in 2022. Being Kate, the first thing she did on learning she had cancer was to start her widely read blog, www.CancerousKate.com , an extraordinarily honest and revealing (and often hilarious) account of her fight against cancer. Upon her passing, there were countless tributes from people who knew Kate only through her blog posts but noted what a profound impact her writing had on their lives.

Kate was a connector of people. She always knew the best shows on TV. She was an exceptional baker (taking after her mother) and an extraordinary storyteller (taking after her father). She loved clothes. She hated homophobia and racism. She loved to watch men working shirtless. She was the most efficient sourcer of household items on the planet. She was loyal to a fault. She was the funniest person Bob ever met.

Kate died of complications from metastasized liver cancer at Methodist Hospital in Minneapolis on January 22, 2025. She was 56 years old.

Kate is survived by her husband Bob Weidman, her parents Peter and Elizabeth Hoff, her mother-in-law Jane Weidman, her siblings Megan Olson, Molly Hoff, and Nathan Hoff, her many nieces/nephews and grandnieces/nephews, and her beloved dog Arzu and cats Balto and Oslo.

A memorial/celebration of life event for Kate will be held at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2400 3rd Avenue S in Minneapolis. on Saturday May 17th from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM. There will be a program followed by refreshments and a time to visit. A second memorial/celebration of life event will be held at Elk's Point in Fergus Falls on Saturday June 28th from 4 pm to 8 pm.