2025 Highlights

This year, we brought together Black, Indigenous, Asian, African, Latine, immigrant and low-wealth communities to organize for our right to call Minnesota home.

Collectively, we fought displacement in many forms: evictions, rising rents, disinvestment, and urban planning processes that don’t listen to the voices of the people.

Check out some of the many highlights from our coalitions and our field-building work:

Fighting for housing justice

As a member of the Housing Justice League, we collaborated with organizations across Minneapolis to advocate for Tenant Opportunity to Purchase (TOPA). Although the City Council was unable to get the policy to a vote, we succeeded in expanding our base and deepening relationships with tenants across the city– and we’ll be showing up even more powerfully to fight for TOPA in the new year.

Our Equity In Place coalition successfully fought to defend tenant’s Right to Organize, which we passed in 2024, from legislative attacks. Our 2025 legislative focus was on passing Just Cause eviction protections, which will continue to be a top priority in the year to come.

We reached beyond our coalitions to launch Stable Ground, a program that will offer training and funding to support BIPOC-led housing justice organizing in underserved communities across the greater Twin Cities metro.

Resisting displacement

Our Blue Line Coalition’s (BLC) advocacy led to the appropriation of $10M in antidisplacement funds from the state legislature in 2024 and the formation of the Anti-Displacement Board, the first community-led board in the nation. This year, the BLC has had strong representation on the board while continuing to advocate for antidisplacement investments and policies to invest in legacy residents, small businesses, and BIPOC communities along the planned Blue Line LRT extension corridor. We rallied to demand accountability from Hennepin County, leading to a successful allocation of the first $2M in antidisplacement funds. We showed up, testified, and organized to make sure community voice was heard amidst the noise of disinformation, racist tropes, and anti-transit narratives.

Empowering BIPOC small businesses

Our Business Resource Collective partnered with the MN Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), to support local BIPOC small businesses in mapping opportunities and needs in the sector, in order to access and advocate for the tools we need to shape the future of Minnesota’s economy.

Alliance coalition organizers Charlie Barba and Ricardo Perez spoke on a national panel on Developing Small Business Coalitions in Response to Transit-Oriented Planning, convened by the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network.

Advancing environmental justice

As members of the Coalition for Clean Transportation, we pushed the state to expand electrification, ensure access to clean transit, and reduce environmental and public health harms caused by fossil fuels.

Field-building

Beyond our coalition organizing, we also brought communities and leaders together for shared learning, collective grounding, and power building, expanding the field of regional equity.

We celebrated a decade of Actualizing Equity gatherings by returning to meet in-person (with home-cooked meals from our staff!), focusing on the theme of Solidarity, Resistance and Resilience. We made intentional shifts to center QTBIPOC community leaders and organizers in leading hands-on, trauma-informed, generative dialogues, resulting in powerful new connections and emerging strategies to meet this moment.

We co-hosted the Healthy Regions Planning Exchange national convening with the Native American Community Development Institute and Regional Planning Association, bringing together national housing, transportation, small business, and climate leaders together for three days of learning, listening, and collective visioning.

We co-hosted a three-day summit on Antiracist Community Development together with Third Space Action Lab. This gathering was the first of its kind in the region, bringing over 50 traditional and nontraditional community development practitioners from across cultures, sectors, and geographies to map a regional vision of anti-racist community development, equity and inclusion.