How neighborhood organizations empower, engage, and enrich people's lives

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In October, 2016, NCR requested approval from the City Council to develop Neighborhoods 2020 recommendations in partnership with NCEC and neighborhood organizations around the City. NCR committed to answer seven specific questions in its recommendations to City Council, the first of which is "What are the unique services provided by neighborhood organizations to residents and the City?"

While the Neighborhoods 2020 Roadmap only briefly identifies one of the findings from all of the Neighborhood Cafes held in 2017, it doesn't address at all most of the others.

How neighborhood organizations empower, engage, and enrich residents lives

Many of the highlighted comments from the Neighborhood Cafes identified a role for neighborhood organizations in empowering and advocating for residents. These comments addressed the role neighborhood organizations play in shaping public policy or advocating for community interests, and particularly in reaching out to and advocating for under-represented populations.

Neighborhood organizations have a long history in Minneapolis serving as advocacy organizations. As an example, Citizens for a Loring Park Community got its start in the early 1970's when residents organized to stop the Minneapolis Park Board from razing the historic Loring Park shelter. In the mid 1990s, CLPC again organized residents of Oak Grove Towers to fight against losing their homes when faced with massive rent increases.

More recently, several neighborhood organizations across the City collaborated to form the Minneapolis Renters Coalition. Neighborhood organizations responded to the crisis renters were facing when the City revoked rental licenses for properties owned by Spiro Zorbalis, Steve Frenz and Mahmood Kahn.

Example: Corcoran Neighborhood Organization and Minneapolis Renters Coalition

Corcoran Neighborhood Organization reported in 2017 that:

Through much of 2016, Minneapolis Renters Coalition (MRC) member Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia (IX) was engaged in a fair housing lawsuit against landlord Stephen Frenz. The lawsuit exposed not only significant livability and renters rights concerns raised by tenants, but also exposed the landlord’s efforts to defraud the court and the City of Minneapolis. These developments generated substantial press coverage and a broadened public awareness of the housing issues of greatest concern to the most vulnerable Minneapolis tenants. The work also exposed a highly profitable “slumlord” business model being practiced by Frenz -- one of the city’s largest operators, a former president of the Multi Housing Association who bragged of his credentials leading landlord trainings for the City of Minneapolis. Frenz was also the landlord who had been celebrated and recruited by City officials three years earlier to assume ownership and management of nearly 1,400 highly undercapitalized, unsubsidized apartment units, primarily occupied by immigrants and people of color who had suffered under the ownership of notorious landlord Spiros Zorbalas until revocation of his licenses by the City.

It should be noted that Corcoran Neighborhood Organization provided a much more detailed report on their work organizing renters in the face of ongoing struggles with their landlords.

Example: Hawthorne Neighborhood Council and Community Health and Well Being Dialogues

Hawthorne Neighborhood Council reported on its work to engage residents around health and wellness issues in North Minneapolis:

Health & Wellbeing continues to grow throughout all areas of Minneapolis. The request for a video focus was to interpret, legitimize and bring together cross-generational views of Health & Wellbeing. The purpose of the remedies book is to be able to relate to what medicines were available to our elders during their time. The exercise and healthy eating also comes from learning how to plant and grow vegetables and herbs that are good for you.

Several hundred people have been impacted with this initiative and it continues to grow.

Dialogue along with various meetings were held to get to the results.

HNC will continue to grow with this project and add various components that apply around Health & Wellbeing. ( Trauma, non-Smoking, Diabetic, etc.)