The Minneapolis Neighborhood and Community Relations Department is no longer focused on its mission of working productively with neighborhood organizations to help them thrive and achieve their goals. It has adopted instead an obstructive, parochial, and even punitive attitude toward neighborhood organizations, focusing on administrative and financial matters that place needless barriers in their way.

The result is that neighborhood organizations are deprived of the funding and support they need to address critical issues like affordable housing, violent crime, the opioid crisis, transit planning and commercial corridor improvements, and other important issues.

Instead, NCR creates and reinforces a false narrative about neighborhood organizations, has misplaced priorities, and fails to lead by example.

In the Neighborhoods 2020 Program Guidelines, NCR has created several strawman issues implying that neighborhood organizations are exclusive, resist participation, and routinely fail to file critical federal and state reports.

What does the data say?

• Neighborhood organizations have a long and well documented history of outreach and participation. They do not need NCR to force them to be participatory.
• Neighborhood organization boards are not dominated by a small number of board members who have stayed on for years and keep others off the board. The vast majority serve less than six years.
• Neighborhood organizations help facilitate, not hinder, City outreach and communication.
Neighborhood organizations assist County and State agencies in public participation.
• NCR has not demonstrated that neighborhood organizations routinely fail to file required documents to state and federal authorities, that they resist filing, or that this is a major hindrance to program goals.
• NCR has failed to help neighborhood organizations utilize millions of dollars in NRP funds, and NRP expenditures have fallen significantly since 2018.
• NCR failed to assist neighborhood organizations after the 2020 riots, with little communication, and failed to advocate for a role in the recovery process. This is in contrast to neighborhood organizations in New Orleans following Katrina in 2005 or Minneapolis tornado recovery in 2011.
• NCR itself has a failed history of community engagement, including failed Neighborhoods 2020 involvement.