Twin Cities, MN

A Case Study of Community Wealth Building (CWB)

Community Profile

St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota make up the area more commonly known as the Twin Cities. Home to over 3.1 million people spread across seven counties, the Twin Cities are the most populous areas of the state named one of the best in the US (US News & World Report 2024).  

While the area is the most racially diverse in Minnesota (DEED Labor Market Information Office 2024), like many American metropolitan areas, the Twin Cities has been shaped by long-standing racial disparities. Median household income ranges from as low as $16,500 to as high as $250,000 while the rate of homeownership is less than 5% in some census tracts (Metropolitan Council 2024), the latter of which is the lowest among Black Americans of any US city (Miller 2020). Further, the poverty rate for Black residents in the Twin Cities is four times the rate as their white neighbors (Minneapolis 2040). In 2020, this decades-long tension culminated in the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of a group of white police officers (Hill et al 2020). 

Well before Floyd’s death and, perhaps, increasingly so as a result, residents of the Twin Cities are motivated to see change. From the collective ways of the Dakota peoples to the politics of social democracy brought over by early Scandinavian immigrants to the recent influx of Hmong immigrants, the ethos of the Twin Cities has been grounded in deep solidarity. Indeed, the Cities were at the epicenter of the food cooperative movement in the late twentieth century. According to Nexus Community Partners founder, President, and CEO, Repa Mekha, the region has been a sort of laboratory for progressivism, mimicking the state at large (Edelman 2023). Mekha shares that the sense of collaboration and camaraderie among residents is fertile ground for innovation. 

Background and History

Imitating the innovative spirit of its home, Nexus Community Partners has been the heartbeat of the Community Wealth Building (CWB) movement in the Twin Cities since its founding in 2004. Initially known as Payne-Lake Community Partners, Nexus was dedicated to accelerating small business development among BIPOC communities along Payne Avenue in St. Paul and Lake Street in Minneapolis. 

In 2007, when the Green Line threatened to plow through these two corridors, Nexus was quick to leverage their experience and expertise in community engagement to advocate for a more equitable transit project (HUD Office of Policy Development & Research n.d.). Arguing that local residents should not only be a part of the development of the extension but also considered owners—not just consumers—of the light rail, community groups came together with the support of the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative, building community power towards collective solutions for the region. 

Around this same time, Nexus was eager to learn from efforts around the country at the intersection of economic development and community engagement. As such, a cohort of 16 community leaders from philanthropy, government, higher education, and healthcare went to learn from The Democracy Collaborative and the “Cleveland Model” in Ohio. At the end of these efforts, one thing was clear: in order to effectively address the structural barriers faced by BIPOC entrepreneurs and local residents in the Twin Cities, a collective approach that centered ownership of land, labor, and capital was critical. Enter CWB (Nexus n.d.).

Overview of CWB in the Twin Cities, MN

Fair work and inclusive and democratic enterprise: cooperativism in the Twin Cities 

While cooperativism has a storied history in Minnesota (Upright 2020), Nexus, alongside local partners in BIPOC communities (e.g. African Career, Education, & Resource Inc), has supported the cultivation and spread of this ethic to supercharge the movement in the Twin Cities. In fact, from 2016 to 2025, Nexus helped start/convert seven cooperatives and incorporate seven others who are working towards launch. Cooperative economics is now seen as a core strategy to building inclusive and democratic enterprise with the Shared Ownership Center at Nexus (SOC@N) at the helm of cooperative development in the region. 

From supporting worker conversions amid the Silver Tsunami (a wealth transfer of approximately $84 trillion from older to younger generations in the next two decades or so)—an estimated 26,000 businesses employing more than 320,000 workers, nearly a third of whom are of color (Nexus 2017)—to supporting BIPOC entrepreneurs in starting up new cooperatives, Nexus works alongside the public and private sectors, community leaders, CDFIs, workforce investment boards, academic institutions, and media outlets to bring worker ownership to scale (Nexus 2019). To date, Nexus has supported five businesses to convert to worker-owned enterprises and two real estate cooperative start-ups in the Twin Cities. 

In one survey of nearly 100 Black alumni who participated in the organization’s North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship from 2017 through 2023, one participant shared, “Nexus is and can become the hub of thinking and supporting radical cooperative practices in the Twin Cities. We need that support and expertise here” (Nexus 2023). 

Just use of land and property: seeding BIPOC-led real estate investment cooperatives 

To combat displacement and support corridor revitalization in the region, Nexus also helps community members to purchase and own real estate in the form of real estate investment cooperatives (REICs). From the initial assessment to engaging with stakeholders and designing a process of co-governance to connecting leaders to legal and financial resources, Nexus has supported the launch of two REICs—including a group of 35 Black women who collectively purchased a shopping center in Brooklyn Park (Nexus 2020)—and is providing ongoing consultation to another eight at various stages of development in the region. Nexus has also been deeply involved with the organizing and fundraising efforts (by setting up a community investment fund) of the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI) who successfully stopped the demolition of a 230,000-square-foot Roof Depot warehouse site by buying back the land from the city and using the space to build a cooperatively-owned, solar-powered indoor farm and community housing hub in this predominantly Indigenous and working class neighborhood (EPNI 2023). Other partners to advance the just use of land and property in the region include the Northeast Investment Cooperative (NEIC), “a cooperative that allows residents of Minnesota to invest financially to collectively buy, rehab, and manage commercial and residential property in Northeast Minneapolis” (NEIC n.d.), and CRE Partners, a small, locally-owned commercial real estate company. 

Locally rooted finance: partnering for innovative capital stacks 

First and foremost, across all of their cooperative development work, Nexus—in partnership with other organizations—has worked tirelessly to innovate capital stacks that take full advantage of the broad spectrum of capital available to CWB activity in a particular place. By pulling in federal, state, and local grant dollars and partnering with CDFIs (e.g. Metropolitan Consortium of Community Developers, Shared Capital Cooperative) and local regional banks (e.g. Sunrise Banks) and coordinating efforts with other funders (e.g. the McKnight Foundation) and nonprofit organizations in the region, has been able to help finance close to a dozen BIPOC-owned cooperatives in the Twin Cities. 

Nexus also administers two funds—the Open Road Fund (financed by the Bush Foundation) and the Local Fund (launched by the City of St. Paul). The Open Road Fund is a commitment by the Bush Foundation to redistribute $100 million—half of which is and will be governed by Nexus and the other half by the NDN Collective—to Black and Indigenous communities across Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota to address the racial wealth gap (Nexus 2023). To date, the Fund has given $10 million in $50,000 gifts to 200 Black folks in the region (n.d.). The Local Fund, on the other hand, is a newer $2.5 million program of the City of St. Paul—erected using ARPA money—that includes technical assistance and grants for 1) worker cooperative start-ups, business conversions to worker ownership, and existing co-ops; as well as 2) predevelopment, acquisition, demolition, and rehabilitation of commercial and mixed-use vacant properties located in Qualified Census Tracts towards community-owned real estate. 

Progressive procurement: bringing hospitals and farmers together 

Though the work of progressive procurement is no longer the focus of Nexus Community Partners, the organization did have a three-year strategy, “Seeding, Cultivating, and Harvesting” that brought together hospitals—as local anchor institutions—with farmers in the Twin Cities area to support and relocalize the agricultural sector. Today, as a hub of CWB activity in the region, Nexus continues to bring together anchor institutions and small, local partners across all their programming and efforts. 

Challenges & Opportunities

Though the tide is shifting, there remains friction between more traditional, mainstream business development support and the shift towards cooperativism and shared ownership at both the national and local levels. As Benjamin Tsai, ​Director of the Shared Ownership Center at Nexus (SOC@N), shares, just because there have been a series of successful conversions (Becoming Employee Owned 2025) does not necessarily mean that all business owners are eager to transition their own enterprises to being worker-owned (Wiener 2024). Further, in the Twin Cities, introducing the cooperative model to racial affinity-based community and economic development centers has been an uphill battle. Funders, too, struggle with understanding the breadth of the model, often neglecting to provide program-related investments to real estate cooperatives in favor of other mainstream small businesses. When early stage, general operating capital is critical to the success of cooperatives, this misunderstanding can irreparably hobble these enterprises before they even begin. Ultimately, the goal is to complicate the cultural narratives of individuality that surround both the ethos and praxis of American entrepreneurship.  

But Mekha believes there is hope. A few years ago, Nexus brought together 19 funders in St. Paul to help finance ESOPs in the region. Today, CWB is one of the priority focus areas of this very group: the East Side Funders (n.d.)! Further, conversations around CWB have been picking up steam in the Twin Cities over the past year. In June of 2024, Nexus co-hosted the National Conference on Black Cooperative Agenda alongside the City of St. Paul and the Network for Developing Conscious Communities (Kanteh 2024). Later that year, in October, the City of St. Paul and Nexus partnered with Project Equity and Living Cities for the Shared Ownership Equity Summit (Nexus n.d.). Excitingly, both gatherings point to an increasing commitment from local government, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector to advance cooperative development and more equitable wealth building in the Twin Cities in the years to come.    

Community Stakeholders

Resources

  • A 2018 Nonprofit Quarterly article summarizing (and celebrating!) the efforts of Nexus to build community wealth in the Twin Cities