The following are a set of tools that are instrumental in understanding Minnesota’s history of racism and discrimination. They include attitudes, policies, and practices that have led to our present and persistent racial disparities. In addition, includes several best practices and resources for undoing this wretched history.
If you asked a visitor for their impression of the Twin Cities, you would be likely to receive a positive response. A high quality of life, an educated workforce and a clean environment are things that our region is known for. But for nearly a quarter of the population—our region’s population of color and indigenous community—the Twin Cities do not live up to that promise. Despite our many resources, people of color here experience some of the worst disparities in the nation. The Alliance’s Race and Regionalism series examines some of the policy and practices that have supported these persistent disparities and also points out the promising work happening around the region that can reverse them.
In this article, author, activist, and theologian Mark Charles discusses the role that the Doctrine of Discovery played in the conquest and colonization of American Indian land. It is this initial injustice upon which all of the centuries of dehumanization and exploitation of American Indian people are predicated upon. Charles suggests that because the Doctrine of Discovery is not largely talked about, the basis for discrimination continues and invites readers into tough conversations that can move our nation forward.
Using a powerful storytelling style and previously unseen historical material, North Star uncovers the “hidden history” of African Americans who helped shape the North Star state of Minnesota. From fur trader George Bonga to the state’s first black woman lawyer, Lena Smith, the documentary provides a whole new perspective on Minnesota’s diverse and fascinating past.
Cornerstones: A History of North Minneapolis is a University of Minnesota documentary highlighting the rich history of one of Minnesota’s most important communities – North Minneapolis. Co-produced by the University of Minnesota Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center and tpt, Cornerstones tells the powerful stories of Northside life interwoven with complex dynamics and changes on the North Minneapolis landscape as told through place-based memories.
These resources, housed at the Minnesota Historical Society, tells the Rondo Community story – before, during, and after the construction of I-94.
This article by Andrea Smith discusses the myriad of ways that different groups of people of color are oppressed – American Indians, African Americans, and Immigrants of Color. Though each of these groups experience discrimination in ways that are distinct, Smith points out that they, along with heteropatriarchy, are essential pillars in keeping white supremacy alive.
The Case for Reparations, written by Ta-nehisi Coates of the Atlantic, provides an astute, comprehensive analysis about how cities grow wealth by intentionally excluding and exploiting people of color. The article also discusses what must be done to move forward.
A report from Dr. Bruce Corrie shows that political plate tectonics have shifted indicating the possibility of ALANA (African Latino Asian and Native American) communities now have the political muscle to create momentum to address wealth building and creation strategies beginning this legislative session. The report, ALANA Economic Interests by House and Senate District, indicates that at least 40 percent of Minnesota House and Senate legislators have 19 percent or more of their constituents from the ALANA (African Latino Asian and Native American) communities. This group represents a critical mass of legislators who together can develop and implement long term and coordinated economic development strategies to grow ALANA economic assets. ALANA communities make up 19 percent of the population of Minnesota with an ethnic economy an estimated $30 billion and pay an estimated $2 billion in Minnesota taxes.
The following are resources are tools that communities can use to combat gentrification and displacement. They call out structural barriers that make gentrification possible, point out where they are happening in the Twin Cities, and provide strategies that groups can tailor to their specific needs and interests.
In Minneapolis, over 3,000 evictions are filed in Hennepin County each year. These cases are disproportionately in a few zip codes. Evictions affect nearly half of renter households in North Minneapolis. Addressing high levels of eviction is critical for residents’ housing stability, access, and quality. This report conducted by the City of Minneapolis’ Innovation Team, in partnership with HOME Line and Housing Link, examines the underlying issues related to evictions and poses key questions to help policymakers and community members address these disturbing patterns.
These maps compiled by the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy highlight areas in the Twin Cities region that are susceptible to gentrification. The goal of these maps, based on a study from Portland, OR by Lisa Bates, is two-fold: to lay the groundwork to develop a policy strategy for to address gentrification and to identify neighborhoods susceptible to gentrification.
This report from the National Coalition of for Asian Pacific American Community Development and Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement points out the challenges of displacement and equitable development, and also highlights the innovative work happening on the ground to respond with the power of community activism.
The Urban Displacement Project is a research and action initiative of UC Berkeley in collaboration with researchers at UCLA, community based organizations, regional planning agencies and the State of California’s Air Resources Board (ARB). The project aims to understand the nature of gentrification and displacement in the Bay Area, yet its lessons can be applied to the ongoing efforts in the Twin Cities to push back against gentrification.
The Community Reinvestment Act, passed by Congress in 1977, can be a powerful tool in reversing decades of disinvestment due to redlining and other predatory bank practices. Specially, it helps bring billions of dollars in bank capital to low- and moderate-income communities every year that can be directed towards affordable housing, social enterprises, and…
Inclusionary zoning policies encourage the production of affordable housing by requiring or encouraging housing developers to build residential developments where a certain percentage of the housing units are affordable to low or moderate income residents. This affordable housing is offered in exchange for building incentives, such as density bonuses that allow developers to build a greater number of units than is otherwise allowed, or fast-track permitting that allow for a faster pace of development. This resource from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty provides several examples of how inclusionary zoning has been used nationwide to secure more housing options for low wealth households.
Behind every social movement, you will find people who help define the strategies that community members organize around. These leaders are instrumental in securing tangible racial, economic and environmental justice wins for their communities.
Behind every social movement, you will find people who help define the strategies that community members organize around. These leaders are instrumental in securing tangible racial, economic and environmental justice wins for their communities.
This resource from the Community Leadership Project in the San Francisco Bay Area lifts up three primary strategies to supporting leaders of color in organizing work: “The primary strategy is “regranting” to provide core financial support and tailored organizational development assistance and coaching to small to mid-size organizations. Technical assistance is the second strategy with focused supports around issues such as finances, and technology. The third strategy is leadership development which can come in various capacities including providing organizational leaders with access to various leadership supports and opportunities.”
Leaders of movement-building organizations face specific and complex obstacles. They deal with keeping their organizations funded, their staff and community engaged, and the media honest and informed. At the same time, they are trying to develop effective organizing strategies and resolve their organizations’ conflicts. For leaders of color, racial issues exacerbate these challenges, and silence concerning race from other parts of society further complicates the nature of their movement-building work. This resource from the Research Center for Leadership in Action at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, which centers the experience and expertise of leaders of color across six (6) U.S. cities, looks at how movement-building organizations led by people of color can be strengthened and sustained.
Leaders across nonprofit, philanthropic, government, and private sectors all understand that cross sector, cross cultural collaboration is necessary in order to achieve anything of significance in our society. No single entity, organization, or individual for that matter, can face the enormity of the structural inequities before us. Research is beginning to show that a specific type of collaboration, collective impact, can be a powerful tool to tackle the root cause of our racial and economic disparities. Collective impact, versus other forms of collaboration, calls for multiple organisations across various sectors to adopt a single agenda in order to secure one specific goal that can be consistently approved over time. This series of tools show how this specific skill can be further leveraged to create sustained social change.
Collective Impact is a framework to tackle deeply entrenched and complex social problems. It is an innovative and structured approach to making collaboration work across government, business, philanthropy, non-profit organisations and citizens to achieve significant and lasting social change. This resource from Collaboration for Impact identifies five essential elements of this process.
This tool from Grantmakers from Effective Organizations surveys the most popular forms of collaboration within the nonprofit sector, including coalitions, networks, movements, and collective impact. Additionally, it provides a framework on when each of these strategies can be effective in shaping lasting outcomes.
This article from Community Wealth emphasizes that many collaborative models do not necessarily start out with collective impact but evolves into more defined partnerships over time.
This set of tools highlights various work being done at the local level to create living economies in communities of color and American Indian communities.
Video: Grow Food
This music video featuring North Minneapolis youth highlights the work that Appetite for Change is doing to provide greater education on the importance of actively choosing healthy food.
Minneapolis: First Staple Food Ordinance in the Nation
In 2014, the City of Minneapolis approved important changes to an innovative 2008 staple foods ordinance, which will significantly increase the amount of healthy food options available in licensed grocery stores.
This collection of articles highlights work in Hmong communities to increase the accessibility of locally, grown food.
Hmong American Farmers Association Cultivates Profits, Productivity, Community
Hmong Farmers Work to Get Twin Cities Area Produce in Stores, Schools
Farming Into the Future: Hmong American Farm
Cooperatives have a deep history of wealth-building in the black community in the United States, and they are increasingly relevant in today’s economy.
How Co-ops Helped Produce Foot Soldiers for Civil Rights
Black Co-ops Were a Method of Survival
The Road Not Taken: Alternative Strategies for Black Economic Development in the United States
The Working Poor: From the Economic Margins to Asset Building
In the World of Community-Wealth Building, Ownership Has Its Privileges
Community Land Trusts are a viable way of building wealth for low-income families. These articles provide strategies for organizations who are interested in this method of wealth creation.
How to Start a Community Land Trust
This set of tools highlights organizations doing work to preserve and create Cultural Corridors in communities of color and American Indian communities.
This article by Tara Yosso conceptualizes community cultural wealth as a critical race theory (CRT) challenge to traditional interpretations of cultural capital. CRT shifts the research lens away from a deficit view of Communities of Color as places full of cultural poverty disadvantages, and instead focuses on and learns from the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups that often go unrecognized and unacknowledged.
This resource from the National Urban Indian Family Coalition ‘Making the invisible Visible’ is a critical resource in stopping cycles of inequity. In a continuing effort to daylight the lived realities of Native peoples in the 21st century, this policy brief serves to report findings from a broad scale effort to conduct policy roundtables across 11 urban Native communities. These roundtables reflected diverse cross-sections of stakeholders and perspectives offering important insights to inform and shape policy agendas.
The National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development is dedicated to addressing the housing, supportive service, community, and economic development needs of Asian Americans and Pacific Islander communities. They aim to promote economic vitality, civic and political participation, and racial equity. Their specialized programs provide a great model for unifying a community and effectively leveraging cultural capital.
Main Street America works to revitalize downtown areas, creating vibrant neighborhoods with thriving local economies. Their Roadmap to Revitalization recommends community-based initiatives with adaptable frameworks that are easily tailored to a community’s unique assets.
The World Cultural Heritage District of Saint Paul is working to develop a visitor destination that celebrates, enhances, preserves, and connects the cultures represented there. From Little Mekong to District del Sol, the WCHD aims to enrich the many culturally diverse neighborhoods along the Green Line light rail transitway.
This video showcases Little Africa, a business and cultural corridor on Snelling Avenue in Saint Paul. Staff at African Economic Development Solutions nurture Little Africa through creative place-making, an intersection of arts, economic development, culture, and community. The intentionality of this community uplifts the cultural capital of the African diaspora in the Twin Cities, celebrating shared traditions and generating economic opportunity.
This set of tools provides important context for understanding the lack of workforce diversity and steps that can be taken to close the racial employment gap.
This resource from the Government Alliance for Racial Equity provides a common approach to furthering the field of practice of contracting for equity within government.
A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute confirms what we have long known to be true: People of color will become a majority of the American working class in 2032.
This report from the Center for American Progress focuses on the challenges to entrepreneurship that people of color and women face.
This analysis from PolicyLink analyzes racial and spatial inequalities in unemployment across the largest 150 metropolitan regions (metros) in the United States using 2015 five-year pooled American Community Survey data released in December 2016.
This resource from the Minnesota Department of Administration highlights the economic outcomes from 17 different cultural groups in Minnesota. The data analyzes outcomes relating to things like geographic mobility, educational attainment, labor force participation and median annual earnings of full-time workers.
This report from Results Minneapolis highlights strategies for getting to the bottom of the city’s racial disparities in employment.
This set of tools provides a way for policy makers, community members, and private sector leaders to evaluate their efforts in creating racial equity and measure the outcomes.
The Equitable Development Scorecard was created by community leaders, with the support of the Alliance, to make sure that the principles and practices of equitable development, environmental justice, and affordability are available to all communities as they plan new developments.
Developed by Wilder Research of St. Paul, MN and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Metrics for Healthy Communities is a site to get practitioners across multiple sectors started in planning for and measuring the impact of initiatives funded and developed to improve community health and well-being.
This tool developed by Nexus Community Partners’ Building the Field initiative elevates the importance of evaluation as it relates to community engagement.
This document from UNICEF is comprised of a range of papers focused on evaluation for equitable development. Put together by evaluation specialists, they present strategic evaluation findings, lessons learned and innovative approaches and methodologies.
The Network’s Common Indicators Project provides a much-needed baseline of indicators to measure health and community development work.
The 500 Cities Project provides city- and census-tract-level small area estimates for chronic disease risk factors, health outcomes, and clinical preventive service use for the largest 500 cities in the United States.
This article examines how community development financial institutions (CDFIs) can shape community health and how the application of a health lens has influenced the way some CDFIs in Minnesota are approaching their work.
This set of tools will help community-based organizations and residents learn about community benefits agreements and community compacts.
The Alliance released this report on community benefits agreements to further develop local understanding of the potential for CBAs to yield significant, community-desired results from large-scale developments.
This report details how the Digital Inclusion Coalition, convened by the Alliance, used a CBA to help close the digital divide in the Twin Cities region.
The Southwest LRT Equity Commitments, created by an Alliance-convened coalition, offers targeted strategies that will use this major infrastructure development to create wealth and economic opportunity.
This online toolkit provides step by step instructions for conceptualizing, designing and implementing a community benefits agreement.
This resource from the Partnership for Working Families notes that after more than a decade of work in the community benefits movement, many important challenges have emerged that can be avoided for those working on CBAs in the future. It argues that strong, authentic, and diverse community representation are key to negotiating legally enforceable agreements.
This article in Shelterforce tells how West Harlem Local Development Corporation was able to secure a Community Benefits Agreement with Columbia University when they announced a $6.3 billion plan to expand its campus into 17 acres of West Harlem.
This resource from the Institute for Sustainable Communities examines the Baltimore Red Line’s Community Compact. It represents a model for community engagement and the integration of social equity concerns and economic development in the design and construction of a large transit project— lessons that can be applied to similar projects throughout the Twin Cities region.
