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Across the country, housing consolidation has made it harder for families to buy their first home. Here in Minnesota, partners are showing what's possible when communities come together to take a different approach. Brick By Brick Housing Corp is helping return more than 300 homes to local ownership, creating pathways to homeownership, community wealth, and generational opportunity. It's a powerful example of how flexible, mission-aligned capital can help strengthen neighborhoods and expand opportunity for families and our collective future. 📖 Link in comments to read more about Brick by Brick's impact, the lessons emerging from this innovative effort, and McKnight's role in helping make it possible. #AffordableHousing #CommunityOwnership #Housing #Minnesota

What does it take to prepare communities before a crisis arrives? As Francisco Segovia and Carolina Ortiz of COPAL write, "The response did not begin when the crisis arrived. It began months earlier..." Their recent Stanford Social Innovation Review essay, "Resilience Is Built Before the Crisis," shares how Minnesota's Immigrant Defense Network united more than 100 organizations, faith communities, advocates, and community leaders around a shared purpose: building trust, leadership, and community infrastructure long before it was urgently needed. Their message is clear: preparedness is more than a plan. It's the result of years spent building the relationships and systems that enable communities to respond, adapt, and lead together. For philanthropy, the lesson is just as clear. Lasting resilience comes from investing in community organizations, networks, and leaders before a crisis demands them. When communities have the infrastructure to act together, they can do more than respond to challenges—they can build power for the future.

Three cities. The same hard-won lessons on what it takes to protect a community—and stay ready for whatever comes next. Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis each lived through large-scale federal immigration enforcement that took lives, separated families, and tested the limits of their civic infrastructure. In this essay for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, McKnight President Tonya Allen joins John Palfrey of the MacArthur Foundation and Miguel Santana of the California Community Foundation to draw out what Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis learned under real strain: we must invest in communities years before a crisis hits, trust the people closest to the need, and use our own platforms and voices to make the human cost impossible to ignore.

When communities face crisis, our instinct to help kicks in almost immediately. The challenge is whether our institutions are built to keep up. That's the question at the heart of this essay, part of our Stanford Social Innovation Review series exploring what philanthropy can learn from Minnesota's response to Operation Metro Surge. Ashley Fairbanks writes not from the perspective of a foundation leader, but as a community member who helped create Stand With Minnesota, a platform that directed more than $40 million to mutual aid, community organizations, and emergency support during the crisis. As Ashley writes, "Giving can be simple. Giving is human. Community knows what it needs." Her essay challenges philanthropy to evolve to move at the "speed of need" by trusting community leadership, removing barriers, and investing in the people and organizations already doing the work. The takeaway isn't that philanthropy should lead every response. It's that philanthropy is most effective when it invests in and strengthens the leadership communities already possess.

What actually protects a community when fear and division are being used against it? In their recent Stanford Social Innovation Review essay, "Protecting Our Neighbors," by JaNaé Bates and Lilly Sasse of ISAIAH, Faith in Minnesota, and We Choose Us, Fear and anger are a natural response to a community under threat. People want to act. But a surge of emotion doesn’t automatically turn into power. Fear isolates, and urgency scatters, as Bates and Sasse say. What holds is something built well before a crisis ever arrives: years spent training, building relationships, and forming coalitions strong enough to move together when it counts. As seen in the response to Operation Metro Surge, that groundwork is what protects people most. It's what enabled nearly 5,000 Minnesotans to volunteer for a full-day training to learn how they could strengthen democracy and protect their neighbors just 25 days before Renee Good was killed, and more than 100 clergy to organize to respond powerfully from beyond their pulpits and out in community. When the moment becomes urgent, what does it actually take to protect our neighbors? For philanthropy, it means investing in the organizing and coordination that make fast action possible, long before urgency arrives.

When Operation Metro Surge unfolded in Minnesota, many people asked how communities mobilized so quickly. The better question is: what had they been building all along? Tens of thousands of people organized across neighborhoods, cultures, faith communities, and generations to support one another during one of the largest immigration enforcement operations in U.S. history. To many watching from afar, that response looked spontaneous. It wasn't. In his recent essay for Stanford Social Innovation Review, McKnight Vice President of Programs Neeraj Mehta challenges us to rethink where civic power is built. The organizations that sustain communities aren't always the ones making headlines. They're the neighborhood groups, worker centers, faith communities, and culturally rooted organizations that spend years building trust before a crisis ever arrives.