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Insight News • June 29, 2026 - July 05, 2026 • Page 1
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June 29, 2026 - July 05, 2026
Vol. 53 No. 26 • The Journal For Community News, Business & The Arts • insightnews.com
Northside Achievement Zone launches $250K matching campaign Inspired by the Akan Sankofa tradition, the North Minneapolis cradle-to-career collaborative aims to unlock vital funding before the June 30 fiscal year deadline
Sondra Samuels, president and CEO of the Northside Achievement Zone
Wealth building must begin before a child can spell college By Pulane Choane Contributing Writer At the Capri Theater, Sondra Samuels made the case that wealth-building in North Minneapolis cannot wait until adulthood. It must begin before a child can spell college, before a family opens its first investment account, and before another generation is taught to see poverty as destiny. “When you start naming what your future’s going to be, it can’t not happen,” said Samuels, president and CEO of the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ), a collaborative working to end multigenerational poverty in North Minneapolis through education, family stability and racial equity. NAZ describes its model as prenatal-to-profession support for scholars and families, including parenting classes, coaching, early childhood support, academics, wellness, housing and financial education. The conversation took place during The Conversation With Al McFarlane, presented in partnership with U.S. Bank at the Capri Theater’s Paradise Room. At the center of the conversation was Samuels, but McFarlane did not begin with program details. He began with story. Samuels traced her roots to New Jersey, to parents from sharecropper families in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, and to a mother who refused to let a school system track her daughters backward when they integrated a mostly white school. “They said, ‘We’re going to need them to repeat their grade,’” Samuels recalled. “And my mother said, ‘Oh no, you test them. You don’t track them.’” Still, Samuels said the message she absorbed as a
Black girl was painful. “What I heard was, Sandy’s not smart enough,” she said. “That stuck with me my whole career, always second-guessing myself.” She told a story from college, when she was pledging Delta Sigma Theta and was asked what kind of car she would be. She loved BMWs, she said, but answered that she would be “a lower BMW.” “That was the struggle with esteem,” Samuels said. “I had borrowed beliefs of what a Black girl and boy could be in America, and inherited assumptions that were all wrong, but I had internalized it.” That phrase, “borrowed beliefs,” became one of the central ideas of the hour. For Samuels, NAZ’s work is not only about services. It is about replacing inherited deficit stories with identity, confidence, education and capital. NAZ began, she said, from the Peace Foundation’s work to end local violence. But violence, Samuels said, was not the root problem. It was tied to poor academic outcomes, family instability, poverty and systems that had failed children long before crisis arrived. The organization drew inspiration from the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York. NAZ received a five-year, $28 million federal Promise
Neighborhood grant in 2011, Samuels said, and grew rapidly. Today, she said, NAZ has about 59 employees, works with roughly 1,000 families and serves about 2,500 scholars. “Our mission is to create a culture of achievement in North Minneapolis where we create generational wealth and all of our children are successful in school and in life,” Samuels said. That mission has expanded through Wealth Builds Minneapolis, a new initiative developed by Harlem Children’s Zone and tailored for North Minneapolis. NAZ says the program is designed to close the wealth gap and create generational wealth by combining prenatal-to-profession supports with financial education, college savings accounts and wealth-building investments. Harlem Children’s Zone says its broader Wealth Builds model uses financial education and capital investments to help young people prepare for college, trade school, homeownership and business ownership. Samuels said the program is built around human capital, social capital and financial capital. Children receive college savings accounts and some scholars receive investment ac-
counts that cannot be used until adulthood and must go toward asset-building purposes such as buying a home, starting a business or furthering education. “What must it feel like for a 5-year-old to know that he or she has an account with $500 or $10,000 in it?” McFarlane asked. Samuels said the money changes more than a balance sheet. It changes the conversation at home.“Our parents are talking to their children about money, about income, about savings and reducing debt and retirement,” she said. “The conversations are now happening.” The work is also being shaped by a broader partnership model. Greg Cunningham of U.S. Bank said the bank’s role in the series is to support and amplify community leaders already producing results, not to make itself the center of the conversation. He pointed to U.S. Bank’s West Broadway branch, which has been rooted in the Northside for 33 years, and said the bank was proud to be an early funder of NAZ’s Wealth Builds initiative with a commitment of about $1.5 million.
WEALTH 4
As the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ) marks a significant organizational milestone this fall, the cradle-to-career collaborative is drawing on ancestral wisdom to navigate a challenging economic and shifting philanthropic landscape. In a powerful message to community partners, NAZ President and CEO Sondra Samuels highlighted the significance of the Sankofa bird — an Adinkra symbol from the Akan people of Ghana. Depicted with its head turned backward and its feet planted firmly forward, the bird carries a precious egg in its beak. The ancient teaching embedded in the symbol: society must retrieve the wisdom of the past in order to move purposefully into the future. For NAZ, the egg represents years of accumulated knowledge, hard-won experience, and deep-rooted responsibility to Northside scholars and families.
A legacy of resilience on the Northside
Since its founding in 2008 as an evolution of the PEACE Foundation, NAZ has built a nationally recognized support system designed to empower families and close persistent academic and economic gaps in North Minneapolis. That journey has not been without extraordinary trials. The organization has navigated: • The devastating impacts of a global pandemic on early childhood learning and family stability. • Widespread community upheaval following the murder of George Floyd and the civil unrest that followed. • The direct, destabilizing effects of federal immigration enforcement activity in and around Northside neighborhoods — an issue Samuels has addressed publicly in partnership with other education leaders. "Along the way, we have weathered extraordinary challenges," Samuels has noted, adding that those experiences have only deepened NAZ's understanding of what local scholars and families truly need to thrive.
Navigating a changing funding landscape
The milestone arrives at a critical juncture for com-
Credit: www.northsideachievement.org/naz-programs
munity-based nonprofits nationwide. Organizations across the sector are navigating heightened economic uncertainty, political polarization, and rapidly evolving donor priorities — even as the day-to-day needs of families intensify. In North Minneapolis, these macro-trends are anything but abstract. They land directly in classrooms, in households, and in the daily lives of the hundreds of children who rely on the NAZ ecosystem of schools and partner organizations. With days remaining in the current fiscal year, NAZ is making a strong push to stabilize and secure its future programming. "Like the Sankofa bird, we refuse to leave our children — or our hard-earned lessons — behind. But we cannot do this work alone."
The June 30 dollar-fordollar match
An anonymous donor has stepped forward with a major challenge grant. All fiscal year-end gifts received by Tuesday, June 30, 2026, will be matched dollar-for-dollar — up to $250,000. The funds will directly support the goals of NAZ's newly adopted 2030 Strategic Business Plan, which is organized around three pillars: • Early Childhood: Expanding prenatal and early childhood support systems for families across the Northside. • Academic Acceleration: Deploying evidence-based interventions, including high-dosage tutoring, to rapidly close post-pandemic learning gaps. • Mobility Pathways: Structuring robust pipelines to college, sustainable careers, and long-term economic mobility for Northside scholars.
How to support
Community members, partners, and allies can double their impact by contributing to the campaign before the June 30 deadline. Gifts of any size will be matched until the goal is reached. To make a tax-deductible donation or learn more about NAZ's 2030 Strategic Plan, visit the Northside Achievement Zone at northsideachievement.org.