After 25 years of transformative work at The Alliance, Maura Brown has stepped down from her role as Associate Director. Community members, Alliance staff and board gathered earlier this month to celebrate, reflect on the incredible impact Maura’s work has had, and wish her well in her future endeavors.
“Organizers know that nothing happens because of one person, and The Alliance knows that nothing happens because of one organization,” Maura reflected. “The reason I stayed in the work at The Alliance for so long is because of all of you. You are really what sustains the movement and the ecosystem. There is lots of good work to be done ahead, and I know I will be seeing you all on the road to justice many times and many places.”
Maura played a central role in the transformation of The Alliance into an organization focused on racial justice at all levels, from the board and staff to the membership and campaigns. She shepherded the organization through many transitions, from the pandemic to periods of rapid growth, and made important contributions to the regional organizing landscape through The Alliance’s campaigns and coalitions.
Hiring equity
Her leadership on the HIRE MN campaign was important to the team’s success in advocating for increasing hiring equity in MN, resulting in increased diversity across the state, from over 19% BIPOC workers building the GReen Line LRT to 30% BIPOC building the Minnesota Vikings stadium and an estimated $41 million in wages for people of color.
Housing equity
Maura co-founded the Equity in Place coalition with Owen Duckworth, the Director of Organizing and Policy at The Alliance. Equity in Place is a diverse group of strategic partners from organizations led by Black, Indigenous, and people of color and housing advocacy organizations. Reflecting on Maura’s impact, Owen shared:
“We were able to significantly shift the entire framework of how institutions like the Met Council were discussing housing issues, who they saw as ‘experts’ on the issues, and better understood the need for continued investment in affordable housing in communities who had experienced decades of disinvestment. This was in no small part thanks to Maura’s vision, her leadership within the coalition, and through her supervision and support for me as an organizer.”
A profile on The Alliance in The Women’s Press shed light on Maura’s early organizing in North Minneapolis and her focus on relationship-building:
“Brown grew up in South Minneapolis, and attended college on the East Coast. While there, she read a description of her neighborhood as a ‘ghetto’ and wanted to know who had the right to define a community. She knew her home neighborhood to be supportive and nurturing of one another. When she returned, she went to work organizing with low- income tenants.
Essential to the work of The Alliance, Brown says, is developing respectful relationships so that everyone feels heard, which can mean ‘slowing down policy work to unpack power and other dynamics.’ It is about moving at the speed of trust.”
Community voices
Community members shared many tributes and well wishes at Maura’s going-away celebration:
“Maura has a sharp memory and outstanding organizing skills. She’s tough and she’s fearless. She truly knows how to ‘afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted,’ as the saying goes.”
Russ Adams, former Executive Director of The Alliance
“I remember Maura gently trying to agitate me (in a good way) when I was frustrated with the lack of BIPOC leadership on the issues we were organizing around. She explained what was possible if we continued to build a table of grassroots organizers working on housing issues and elevating more impacted community voices into decision making spaces where mostly white voices had dominated, often leading to misguided and harmful narratives, policies, and investment patterns”
Owen Duckworth, Director of Organizing and Policy at The Alliance
“This work requires you to endure a variety of ups and downs, the tedious pieces, it’s not just protests, it’s the details that allow you to build the infrastructure that allow people to come together to build power over time. Without Maura’s support, I don’t know if I would have made it through my first year in leadership.”
Larry Hiscock, former Director of the Harrison Neighborhood Association
“Maura has impacted me in so many ways in my time at the Alliance, from encouraging me to use my voice more and boosting my confidence in my skills and abilities, to being someone in the office who I can nerd out with on politics, and overall being an incredible mentor that has assisted me to become the organizer I am today. I wish Maura tremendous success and peace, and prosperity in all her next endeavors!”
Juan Luis Rivera Reyes, Coalition Organizer at The Alliance
You must be logged in to post a comment.