"Change Has to Come From a Place": Inside the Northside Achievement Zone

Nearly eight weeks after George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer, Sondra Samuels was standing at a makeshift altar under a big white tent on West Broadway in north Minneapolis. She explained to the group the purpose of the event, called Healing Our City: 30 Days of Silent Prayer. “For the first 10 days, we asked people to concentrate on what they were grieving,” she said. “Now we are asking you to think about what you are open to changing.” 

The crowd, which included Black people and white people, devout Christians and agnostics, was socially distanced. Sondra was dressed in black shorts, flip-flops, and a magenta patterned shirt. After the greeting, she tapped a wooden mallet against a prayer bowl and all conversation dissolved into the silence under the tent and the sounds of cars streaming down West Broadway.

A cross between a vigil and a meditation session, the ritual was organized by Sondra and her husband, former city council member Don Samuels, in partnership with African American faith leaders and their congregations and other community members. The public was invited to drop in anytime between the hours of 10 am and 7 pm. Each day, different community members welcomed people to sit in the shade of the tent and take an 8-minute, 46-second pause—the reported length of time that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck—to reflect not just on what had happened to the man who was so brutally and callously killed but also on the future of our city. 

Nearby, the Family Dollar store was still boarded up, a reminder of the unrest that had been triggered by George Floyd’s killing; the Minneapolis chief of police had gone on record and called it a murder. So were Foot Locker and U.S. Bank and the Walgreens a few blocks away. 

Some people sat in folding chairs, while others opted for floor cushions. Sondra chose a kneeler that looked like it had been pulled from a confessional. She folded her hands and placed them to her forehead and didn’t look up until it was time to end the meditation. She had done this prayer more than 40 times, but afterward she said it still shocked her not just that Floyd’s torture had lasted so long but that Chauvin and the other three officers had had that much time to make another decision and didn’t. 

“No matter what race you are or community you are from, our pain and suffering is communal,” she said. “And our healing has to be communal. That’s why we are here under the same tent. The tent is here to change us.”

A mile away from the prayer tent on Broadway, the Northside Achievement Zone is another symbol of resilience and innovation for north Minneapolis—and it's also the brainchild of Sondra Samuels. Together with former NAZ Vice President of Collaboration and Innovation Michelle Martin, Sondra started the nonprofit more than a decade ago to reverse the cycle of multigenerational poverty and violence in a society that has left so many Black families behind. Now, residents of the neighborhood were traumatized and angry. Floyd’s murder was yet another example of one of their own being targeted by the police because of his race. 

Sondra began creating NAZ in 2008, with a goal to close the opportunity gap between white and Black Minnesotans by providing access to the kind of wraparound support—tutors, therapists, job coaches, housing advice—that middle-class families rely on. To achieve that goal, NAZ partnered with an extensive network of schools and local nonprofits, including Project for Pride in Living, Washburn Center for Children, and Reading Corps. During the 2018–19 school year, 990 families were enrolled in NAZ (most of which were paired with Family Achievement Coaches), touching 2,182 kids a year. NAZ’s annual operating budget is $11 million. 

NAZ also hosts parenting classes—including a course specifically for fathers—where instructors give advice for raising kids of every age. Just as important, they provide an alternative narrative to families who have been told by our culture that there is something wrong with them. At every baby class, newborns are given T-shirts emblazoned with the year they will graduate from a four-year college. Every student in the NAZ network is called a scholar. 

“We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure that our families understand what their power is and how to walk in it,” said Tiffany Wilson-Worsley, NAZ’s family achievement program director. 

That’s a tall order in a city where homeownership rates for Black families are one-third of what they are for white people. U.S. Census figures show that the average Black family in Minneapolis earns $38,000 a year, compared to an average household income of $84,500 for white families. Minnesota is also one of the worst states in the country for education achievement gaps when measured by race and socioeconomic status, according to a 2019 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. As leader after leader has noted, the state and the city need to do better. 

Sondra is NAZ’s president and CEO, the dynamic and extremely personable public face of the organization. Don is the CEO of MicroGrants, a nonprofit that helps low-income people develop businesses and stable employment. While their careers are separate, the mission of NAZ has always been a shared passion. And over the past three months, they have marched together in protests and hosted neighborhood meetings in their backyard—in addition to organizing the daily prayer meetings. 

The two also have a radio show together: Power to the Parents on KMOJ, 89.9 FM. A weekly check-in for Black moms and dads, the program delivers parenting advice on everything from the latest neuroscience breakthroughs to how much screen time is healthy to the ways the least nutritious foods are marketed to Black and Hispanic consumers. 

The Samuelses are known for being straight talkers who aren’t afraid to share their own parenting challenges and missteps. By putting those experiences in a larger social context, they hope to provide insights for other Black parents. 

“This show is not about shame and blame in your game,” Sondra said on the Father’s Day broadcast. “Too many of our kids experience trauma in the broader community and their own homes. What we have the most control over is our homes.” 

She told listeners about a nightmare she’d had where white supremacists were driving around Jordan, the north Minneapolis neighborhood where she and Don live. She tried to scream for help, but no sound came out. The dream was echoing reality: In the week after George Floyd was killed, cars with no license plates had been spotted in the area near the Samuelses’ home. They had chased one as it sped down their block. The next day, a neighbor spotted the same car, now abandoned. Inside, they found masks, crowbars, and gasoline. 

Hours after that show, Sondra talked to me about how she was faring. She said she hoped opportunities would arise now that our state—and the world—had woken up to the reality of being Black in the land of Minnesota Nice. One of the Samuelses’ gifts has been getting white Minnesotans to care about the issues on the north side. In the 10 years I’ve been going to NAZ events, I’ve grown used to hearing people turn to their tablemates and say that Sondra should go into politics. This isn’t because she’s an ace debater. Rather, it’s because her preternatural warmth, authenticity, and passion inspire people to want to be part of the solution. 

On this night, she was no less genuine, but she also admitted to being exhausted. It wasn’t her responsibility to explain to yet another white woman what she was going through. And yet, she said that our entire conversation would be on the record.

“Some people say they can’t deal with white people right now, and I go in and out of that,” she admitted. “So often with African Americans, if we really talked about what was going on for us and in our communities at dinner parties when our white friends invite us over, they wouldn’t invite us again [...] As soon as people start talking about their heritage and their family tree and we say, ‘Oh, we’re the descendants of enslaved Africans,’ that stops the party. Nobody’s having fun anymore.” 

As she spoke, Sondra started typing into her laptop. She told me about a neighbor across the street who had barely avoided a spray of bullets while she was in her car with her baby, and a 20-year-old friend of the family who had been shot in Farview Park by a 14-year-old reportedly wielding an MP5K. Seconds later, a photo of a young man with a soft smile appeared in my email. He was sitting in a backyard without a shirt; there were still stitches in the wounds along his Adam’s apple and clavicle where one bullet entered and exited. There was a gauze patch on his shoulder covering a wound where the second bullet struck. She also included a photo of the weapon, a paramilitary instrument. 

“I feel like such an impotent adult,” she said, nodding as I looked at the photos, “that I can’t protect the children of our community—not from racist police officers, not from other young men who look like them who don’t have daddies but have guns. And I can’t protect them from a school system that fails them, can’t protect them from environmental racism . . .” Her voice trailed off. 

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, was there anything she wanted white Minneapolis to understand? Sondra didn’t hesitate. “I’d love white Minnesotans to notice who’s not in the room, who’s not living next to them at their cabin, who’s not running around Bde Maka Ska, who’s not on the pontoon, who’s not at that nice restaurant,” she said. “Because once you start noticing, then you start asking the right questions and you start really getting at the opportunity gaps in Minnesota.” 

Getting to the Right Place 

Sondra Hollinger was born in 1965 in Newark, New Jersey, at the same hospital where both Queen Latifah and Whitney Houston came into the world. Sondra’s father, Richard, was a longshoreman, and her mother, Mary, was an executive assistant. Both had left the South in pursuit of a better life, although getting a secure job in an industry dominated by Italian Americans was not easy for a Black man with a ninth-grade education. Mary had been enrolled in an Alabama college, but she was forced out by the town’s white business league, which viewed any Black student who wasn’t from the immediate area as a potential civil rights agitator. Her ticket north was to become a nanny for a white family. 

By the time Sondra and her older sister, Tishunda, were born, the Hollingers had made it into Newark’s middle class. 

Discriminatory federal housing policies in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s made homeownership virtually impossible for Black Americans, a disparity that still plays out today because African Americans have not been able to build wealth through home equity on the same trajectory as generations of white Americans. Sondra remembers her young life in Newark—schools, friends, neighbors, shopkeepers—as being all Black. 

That changed in 1968, after legislation made it illegal to deny African American families the right to purchase homes in the suburbs. Four years later, the Hollingers moved a half-hour drive away to Scotch Plains, New Jersey. Almost immediately, homes started going up for sale around them, and Sondra started to realize that in her new world, “Black wasn’t OK.” The Hollinger sisters were made to take placement tests at their new school when the school wanted to hold them back—with no evidence of poor academic performance. Tishunda aced it, but Sondra said she struggled. 

It was a deeply distressing time for a young girl trying to piece together who she was. “My parents weren’t processing it with me,” she said. Then, when she was a young teenager, an African American man that she knew was murdered by another African American man, and a few years later the crack cocaine epidemic hit her community. These events were so traumatizing that she says she questioned whether Black Americans were, as white America constantly said, “less than as a people.”

Wanting to step into who she was as an African American woman led Sondra to enroll at Morgan State University, a historically Black college in Baltimore. She graduated in 1987 and went on to get her MBA from Clark Atlanta University, which also has a proud tradition of educating African American students. Both experiences helped her understand that racism wasn’t just about racist individuals but about systems and the American power structure. 

She moved to the Twin Cities in 1989 for a marketing job with Ford Motor Company. While she lived in Minnetonka and traveled constantly to the Dakotas for work, she was starting to spend more of her free time on the north side, where a young woman she was mentoring was living. At the time, the neighborhood’s challenges were intensified by public policy decisions that allowed Twin Cities suburbs to stop building affordable housing and an overall lack of development in the area.

“I was starting to really get the sense of understanding that inner city communities had been created by a real racist structure,” she said. “[North Minneapolis] had been isolated on purpose, had been given inferior resources on purpose, a lack of transportation on purpose, failing schools on purpose.” Sondra started to ask herself how she could be part of the solution to the glaring disparities between Black and white Minneapolis, but she wasn’t sure what the answer was.

A piece of that answer emerged in 1990, when she met Don Samuels at Pilgrim Baptist Church in St. Paul. A successful toy designer who’d grown up in Jamaica, Don was thoughtful and handsome and a devoted single father to his son, Andre, who was in junior high. He was also 40—16 years older than the chatty young woman who was trying to catch his attention. 

“Don paid me no attention,” Sondra said of their early encounters. “I mean, like, none.” (When asked to confirm this version of history, Don laughed and pointed out that she “looked like she was in high school and I had no reason to know she wasn’t.”) 

They continued to say hello at church for two years. When Sondra finally accepted that nothing was going to happen between them, she plotted the next stage of her life and joined the Peace Corps to do small business development in Botswana. In early 1992, she had her passport and plane ticket and was packing up her Twin Cities life. She planned on leaving Minnesota for good. 

And that’s when Don asked her out for coffee. After a three-month whirlwind romance, Sondra left for Botswana. And Don stayed in the Twin Cities to raise Andre. 

Today Sondra says the Peace Corps was the best experience of her life. Not only did she get to feel pride in her African heritage, but her perspective on America’s place in the world shifted. Once, she was with a group of friends there and commented that a world map was wrong—Africa had been placed in the center of the map. “North America should be in the middle,” she said, to which they all responded: “No, actually, your map is wrong!”

While she went to Africa in part to connect with her African roots, Sondra came to understand how much she had been shaped by America. Learning about Africa’s fragile democracies gave her an appreciation for how freely she could criticize her own country without fear of being harassed or shot. “In Botswana, not only did I learn to love who I was as a woman of African descent, but I also learned to love who I was as a woman who was an American.” 

She returned to the U.S. eager to be a part of the solution—and to reunite with Don. They married in 1996, united in their determination to reverse the patterns of both white and Black flight that had hampered American communities. While no realtors wanted to show them houses in north Minneapolis—claiming it wasn’t the right place to raise kids—the Samuelses eventually found a house in the Jordan neighborhood. They still live there.

“We didn’t move to Jordan to fix the inner city,” Sondra explained. “We felt like we were standing on the soft shoulders of men and women who had loved so much and fought hard for justice to happen. Both of us knew that place mattered, and change has to come from a place. It can’t be airlifted down—that’s not sustainable. You might get a relief, but you’re not going to have sustained transformation if people on the ground are not part of that transformation.”

Shortly after moving in, they heard a bang. When they went upstairs later, a bullet was lodged in the wall of the room they hoped would one day be for their baby. It only strengthened their resolve. “Yep, we’re in the right place,” they said to each other. 

Since then, their family has grown substantially. Their daughter Asante is now 21. Their younger daughter, Amani, is 19. Their daughter Zaina, who was born in Egypt and was adopted by the Samuelses when she was 14, is 26. Andre is 42 and lives in New York City. A neighborhood teenager named Marcus is currently living with them, a situation that Sondra describes as “mentoring in close quarters.”

Sondra and Don wasted no time getting involved as new residents. They started a block club and organized protests in front of the convenience stores that allowed drug dealers to sell their goods. They picketed the homes of landlords who were exploiting their neighbors and renting to dealers. In 2002, while protesting an incident of police brutality, they met R. T. Rybak, the city’s new mayor. After too many vigils to count, the Samuelses and Rybak and his wife, Megan O’Hara, became close friends. 

“It [NAZ] began with two community activists in north Minneapolis dedicating themselves to building power and capacity in a community that had been overlooked for too long,” Rybak said. 

The Growth of a Movement 

While both Sondra and Don Samuels were passionate about bringing stability to north Minneapolis, their early initiatives were led by Don, who served on the Minneapolis City Council from 2003 to 2015. In 2003, he cofounded the PEACE Foundation, a grassroots movement to reduce violence in north Minneapolis. When critics claimed that he was using the PEACE Foundation to expand his constituency beyond his ward boundaries, he asked his wife to take over. 

At first, Sondra resisted this idea. “She felt like the north side didn’t need another nonprofit, both in terms of the plethora of nonprofits that preexisted the PEACE Foundation and the fact that the nonprofit world was dominating the consciousness of our kids and becoming the way to go, to live, to work, to thrive, to engage the world,” Don said. “And so we weren’t producing enough for-profit consciousness in the community.” Sondra eventually said yes to leading the PEACE Foundation on a temporary basis. She became its president in 2005. 

It was at this time that the Samuelses learned more about the connection between academic failure and violence. The McKnight Foundation did a presentation about the Harlem Children’s Zone and its founder, Geoffrey Canada, showing how his organization’s high-touch support structures and his network of charter schools had improved the prospects for hundreds of children in Harlem. 

I’d love white Minnesotans to notice who’s not in the room, who’s not living next to them at their cabin, who’s not running around Bde Maka Ska, who’s not on the pontoon, who’s not at that nice restaurant. Because once you start noticing, then you start asking the right questions and you start really getting at the opportunity gaps in Minnesota.

The presentation was a light bulb moment for the Samuelses. The PEACE Foundation decided to use Harlem Children’s Zone’s approach as its model and transitioned into the Northside Achievement Zone. Knowing that Rybak had connections with the Obama administration, the Samuelses urged him to start promoting Minneapolis as one of the proposed “Promise Neighborhoods” that the Department of Education would select and fund.

Rybak, Sondra, and community members gave the proposal their all even though a majority-white city in the middle of the country didn’t seem to have much of a chance. Minneapolis is currently 60 percent white, 19 percent Black, 10 percent Hispanic, and 6 percent Asian, with the rest being American Indian and multiple races. 

“When you talked to a mayor in America during the first year of the Obama administration, they might have said hi, but the second thing would be, ‘How do I get a Promise Neighborhood grant?’” Rybak said. “Every single mayor in the country desperately wanted to get one.” 

It was a happy shock when, in December 2011, NAZ received a $28 million Promise Neighborhood implementation grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Rybak remembers being “euphorically stunned” by the news. “All these [plans and hopes] that Sondra had been talking about since those days on street corners when we were mourning kids who were dead began to have a possibility of coming true.”

Today, Canada is one of Sondra’s admirers, a list of luminaries that includes former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. “Her dedication and her relentless pursuit of excellence puts her in a class by herself,” Canada said. “She is unafraid to face the tough reality of the issues presented by urban poverty. She is also willing to take a hard, and sometimes disquieting, look at the intersection between race and class in the city, state, or country. Her results-oriented focus, her love of community, and her willingness to put in the years of struggle to bring change are what make her so unique.”

Shepherding NAZ was never going to be easy. For starters, the Promise Neighborhood grant was set to run out in 2016, after which the organization would have to be self-sustaining. In addition to the corporate funders who had signed on, including Target and General Mills, NAZ would have to get support from residents throughout the Twin Cities.

Fundraising appeals focused on the economics of NAZ’s work. “The research shows that if you provide a healthy and strong educational environment for kids in poverty at early ages, as early as birth—in fact as early as prenatal—they succeed in life,” said Art Rolnick, a former director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis who is now a senior fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Rolnick is such a believer in the NAZ model that he also serves on the organization’s board of directors. 

A 2015 return on investment study by Wilder Research determined that society gains $200,178 for every NAZ participant, at a cost of $32,711 per participant. The benefits include increased earnings as a result of higher educational achievements; improved health outcomes; and increased tax revenues.

As it found its footing, NAZ partnered with Catholic schools, charter schools, and the Minneapolis Public Schools. It was a controversial decision. Public school supporters often argue that charter schools siphon money out of neighborhood schools. Sondra refuses to get drawn into these arguments: The type of school a child, especially a child who lives in poverty, goes to is irrelevant. What matters is the ability to go to a school that gets results. 

That big-tent approach allows school leaders on the north side to collaborate with each other instead of seeing themselves as competitors. “I don’t care what organization you’re in, what industry you’re in—whenever you have more than two of anything, there’s always politics,” said Benito Matias, the principal of Ascension Catholic School, which educates more than 300 kids from kindergarten through eighth grade and is a NAZ partner school. “Our partnership with NAZ creates one of the only environments where we as a Catholic school get to interact in frequent and meaningful ways with traditional public schools and charter public schools.”

By early 2020, NAZ had raised $29.24 million of its $35 million fundraising goal to ensure the long-term sustainability of the organization. And it was touting some impressive results. Then came COVID-19, which has threatened to undo all of this progress. In May, Sondra emailed me a color-coded map of the Twin Cities that parsed CDC data about the coronavirus. Most of Near North was deep red, meaning residents had an average of three to seven underlying risk factors, ranging from asthma to diabetes to heart disease to obesity. Southwest, Macalester-Groveland, and parts of south Minneapolis were pale blue, indicating residents had few to no risk factors. 

The NAZ team understood that COVID-19 was going to exact a disproportionate toll on America’s Black communities, in terms of both the death rates and the long-term economic fallout. So they set to work. They distributed African-themed face masks and 250 Chromebooks and $300 worth of Visa gift cards for every NAZ family; a second distribution of $200 in gift cards per family was scheduled for early August. They transitioned the Family Academy and family coaching sessions online and have been invited to participate in a statewide initiative with partners that include Best Buy to ensure students in high-needs communities have tech devices and access to high-quality broadband. And they provided $175,000 in rent relief through their partnerships with Urban Homeworks and Project for Pride in Living. The Harlem Children’s Zone asked NAZ to be one of six partner organizations across the country for its COVID-19 Emergency Relief and Recovery initiative for Black Americans. As of late July, NAZ had also raised more than $500,000 for an emergency fund to support north side families. 

NAZ also hosted online forums to help all north side families cope with the pandemic. In the spring, shortly after Sondra emailed me that map, I joined more than 50 others on Zoom to listen to a panel of four NAZ moms share how they were adjusting to life during the pandemic. 

Sondra was the facilitator. She started the event with a moment of silence for Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old Black man who was chased and killed by armed white men while he was jogging through a neighborhood near his Georgia home in February. Footage had just emerged showing what exactly had happened, and the killing was now on the national radar, although the men were not then in custody. 

“For Ahmaud’s mother and Ahmaud and too many Black men that we know who have had a similar fate [...] I think we should remember, we should remember them,” Sondra said, her voice cracking. “And as Americans it is our patriotic duty to hold them right here.”

Then she turned the program over to the moms. Saleemah Shabazz Salahud-Din talked about raising four kids between the ages of 5 and 14. A native Minneapolitan—her Twin Cities lineage includes Van Freeman White, who was the first African American to be elected to the Minneapolis City Council—she had taken all the courses NAZ offers, from baby classes to getting ready for kindergarten to a class called Foundations, which offers support and encouragement to help moms and dads navigate the stresses of parenthood. Salahud-Din had also recently joined the NAZ Parent Advisory Board, which advocates at the legislature on issues impacting north side families. She loved her advocacy work. But first she had to get her kids though online school. 

“Distance learning is really not cut out for all my children,” she admitted. “I don’t allow my kids to have devices [...] Writing by tracing on a laptop, that’s not reality, that’s not real. It takes away basic fine motor skills that help with brain development.” Before the pandemic, Salahud-Din had been getting therapy with her children through Washburn Center for Children. She was eager for the telehealth appointments to begin. 

She was also worried about her own health. “I suffer from asthma,” she said, echoing the worries of the other moms on the panel. “There was a time when there was a waiting list for inhalers at Walgreens and CVS, to the point where they had to restrict them to who was actively [experiencing asthma] as the ones who had priority.” The north side has the highest hospitalization rate for asthma in Minneapolis, a legacy of environmental pollution in the area that included the Northern Metal Recycling plant. The company’s shredder was relocated to Becker, Minnesota, in 2019 after facing numerous air quality permit violations. 

“It’s just scary,” she said. “You’re trying not to be in a panic mode.”

A Tough Road Ahead

Less than three weeks after the parenting panel, my phone buzzed. It was Sondra. She’d been so busy dealing with the pandemic that it had been difficult to connect for our last conversation, but we’d settled on a time later that afternoon. I assumed she was confirming that we were still on, or maybe asking to switch the time. Instead, she told me she couldn’t do the interview. 

“Saleemah died,” she said, referring to the mom from the parenting panel.

Was it from COVID-19? Salahud-Din had been worried about the shortage of inhalers at local pharmacies. Sondra didn’t have any details—Salahud-Din’s family later confirmed that she died of an asthma attack. 

“Her babies are so little,” Sondra told me, her voice catching. A passionate and devoted mother of four was not scheduling her children’s telehealth appointments or working with them on their printing because she was dead. “You know she died because she was Black.” 

The call was brief. Sondra needed to get off the phone and figure out how to comfort her staff, who considered Salahud-Din—a vital member of the NAZ community—a close friend. They were all working from home, and she couldn’t be with them in person, much less give them hugs. But it’s likely they knew she was there for them. 

“A lot of times, in different organizations, people believe but they aren’t willing to do what it takes,” said Wilson-Worsley, who says she was inspired to work at NAZ in part because of Sondra’s passion and visceral love for the children. “We have what it takes, and I think it’s leaders like Sondra and others that can continue to build people to move in a unified way.” 

On July 30, Sondra was under the tent again, this time standing next to Don. It was the last day of the Healing Our City prayer event, and the socially distanced crowd was large enough that it spilled out into the parking lot. Members of the NAZ team were there, as were Rybak and O’Hara and the anti-violence group MAD DADS. 

For the past 30 days, visitors had been invited to make an intention and then tie a fabric prayer strip to one of the tent’s poles. Now, there were more than a thousand of them. When they caught the breeze, they hung in the air and then drifted back again, like sighs. 

The Samuelses welcomed the group to the final 8-minute, 46-second prayer. Sondra kept time on her phone. When it was over, they thanked the church leaders and other volunteers who made the past 30 days possible. “We will be the city that shows others how to recover from our biggest mistakes,” Don said.

There was clapping and even a bit of cheering. Nearby, a four-piece band was tuning up to entertain the crowd; a few people set up a free barbecue spread. It was time to celebrate, to mark the month’s progression from grief to uncertainty to hope. But first, Sondra had one last thought she wanted to share.

“Thank you, George Floyd,” she said. “Thank you for giving us the opportunity to see ourselves and to wake up.” 

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The Northside Achievement Zone: How it Works

When families are referred to NAZ or choose to get involved, many are matched with Family Achievement Coaches. These coaches partner with families and scholars to identify their goals, which can include anything from finding stable housing to job coaching to connecting with tutors and health support. 

Family Achievement Coaches work with families and school staff to ensure children are getting their academic needs met and meeting their learning goals. Coaches work with families from birth through high school. In 2020, NAZ celebrated 23 college graduates. 

NAZ also includes a Family Academy that offers parenting and empowerment classes for parents. The curricula combine evidence-based research with the real-life experiences of NAZ families. Classes include College Bound Babies, for parents with children between the ages of 0 and 3; Ready to Succeed, for parents with 4- and 5-year-olds; and College Bound Scholars, which is geared toward parents with kids in elementary school. Family Academy Foundations is for parents of children of all ages. 

The approach is showing results. According to a recent survey compiled by Wilder Research, the longer a child participates in NAZ, the better that child performs on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment; 38 percent of students with four years of involvement in NAZ are proficient in reading, compared with just 18 percent of students with less than a year of involvement with NAZ. The difference is even greater in math, with 35 percent of four-year NAZ scholars proficient, compared with only 9 percent of new NAZ scholars. NAZ scholars attending anchor schools in the NAZ network outperform NAZ scholars in other schools by 7 percentage points in reading proficiency and 14 percentage points in math proficiency. NAZ’s anchor schools are Nellie Stone Johnson, Patrick Henry High School, Ascension Catholic School, the Mastery School, KIPP North Star, and KIPP Legacy. 

Since 2017, NAZ had increased placements in high-quality early childhood learning environments by 47 percent, a key measure of success in elementary school. In 2018–19, 687 NAZ kids accessed at least one out-of-school service, 145 families sought support through NAZ to find stable housing, and 136 parents worked with NAZ’s career and finance specialists. 

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How to Get Involved

Due to COVID-19, the Northside Achievement Zone is not hosting any in-person events.

But you can make a donation at northsideachievement.org/join-us/donate.

Families who want to enroll in the NAZ network can learn more about the process at northsideachievement.org/join-us/enroll.

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Learn More 

Additional resources on discriminatory policies in Minneapolis and beyond 

Mapping Prejudice: Based in the Borchert Map Library at the University of Minnesota, this project explores the history of covenants and other racist housing practices in Minneapolis. mappingprejudice.org

Segregated By Design: A short film that examines how federal, state, and local governments unconstitutionally segregated every major American city. Based on the book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. segregatedbydesign.com

“Jim Crow of the North”: Produced by TPT, this documentary episode explores discriminatory real estate policies in Minneapolis, from the early 20th Century until the 1960s. tpt.org/minnesota-experience/video/jim-crow-of-the-north-stijws

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>>Read: Design for a Difference Minneapolis Team Selects Northside Achievement Zone