The value of this kind of collaborative effort is echoed by Sondra Samuels, an African-American woman who heads up the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ). Although Samuels grew up in a middle-class family in New Jersey, a number of young African-American men in her family and among her childhood friends were murdered, and the painful memory of those deaths is part of what inspires the work she does today. In a May 2013 interview, she asked: “Why black boys? Why does it happen so often? Why are we okay with it? Why are we acting like it’s normal? What can be done about it? Is this a black problem? Or is this an American problem? How do we solve it? Does anybody care? Our questions actually lay a path for us. … That’s ultimately what led me to here” — here being the Northside, where she works and where she and her family live.

The Northside is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Minneapolis, home to a large black population from the Plains States and the South and, more recently, to a new generation of immigrants from Asia and Latin America. The majority of Northsiders, 59 percent, live below the poverty line, and the neighborhood faces all the challenges that go along with poverty including inadequate transportation connections to job centers, homelessness, violence, and failing schools.

Samuels had spent several years running an anti-violence organization on the Northside, but in 2008, when she concluded that change was not happening fast enough, she and other similarly stymied leaders of community groups joined together and decided to take a more holistic and collaborative approach that addressed the full range of challenges Northsiders faced, while focusing on education, because they view education as a critical factor in breaking the multigenerational cycle of poverty. With support from several philanthropies, they launched NAZ, an ambitious multi-million dollar effort to prepare the 2,500 children living in a 13 by 18 square block area on Minneapolis’s Northside for college. NAZ works with a large number of philanthropies as well as schools, non-profit organizations, and universities to make sure families and children have the necessary supports for learning, which include not just early childhood education, after-school programs, summer classes, and mentoring for children, but more stable housing, parenting education, and career and financial counseling for adults. NAZ’s annual report is explicit about its goal of “turning the social service model on its head. Families are shifting from recipients of services to leaders of a culture shift toward a college-going Northside community.” NAZ has been recognized as a national leader in these kinds of wrap-around services for families, winning a $28 million Promise Neighborhood grant from the U.S. Department of Education in 2011.

Implementing this ambitious model takes time, but NAZ assiduously tracks its impact, and its programs are starting to show results: For example, at the beginning of the 2013-14 school year 49 percent of the NAZ “scholars” who had been enrolled in pre-kindergarten NAZ programs were deemed ready for kindergarten versus 35 percent of the children in North Minneapolis as a whole. NAZ scholars also perform better on third grade reading assessments than their peers, with 22 percent reading at proficiency level compared to 18 percent in the neighborhood as whole, though clearly with figures like those both groups still face huge challenges. But the longer children stay in NAZ programs, the better they seem to do. Third, fourth, and fifth graders who have been enrolled in NAZ efforts for 18 months scored 50 percent higher on state tests than students enrolled with NAZ for less than 6 months. NAZ has not demonstrated the same levels of success for eighth graders, but it has done much less work with that age group, focusing most of its efforts to date on early childhood learning. It now has plans to ramp up its program offerings for older children, starting with extra academic coaching and summer programs.

“It was like an angel coming and sweeping me up and putting me in a place I needed to be.”

NAZ programs can benefit families in a number of ways. Forty-six percent of the unemployed parents who reached out to NAZ for help in their job search actually found work, and a third of the families enrolled in NAZ programs who were at risk of homelessness or serial moves found more stable housing. This last group includes Angela Avent, who enrolled in NAZ in November 2013; within two months she was put in touch with a NAZ partner organization that enrolled her in a subsidy program that reduced what she has to pay in rent to 10 percent of what she was paying before. After years of chaotic housing situations for herself and her four children, she says, “It was like an angel coming and sweeping me up and putting me in a place I needed to be.”

Avent has also benefited from NAZ parenting classes. She was skeptical about the classes at first, but now feels they have helped her become a better mother. She cites several examples of behavioral changes she learned in the classes. Because researchers have found that low-income children hear millions fewer words than children from middle and higher-income homes, and that this gap hurts them academically, the NAZ classes Avent took encouraged her to talk to her children much more, “adding a lot of vocabulary to open their brains,” as she puts it. NAZ classes also taught her to listen to her children — “The more you allow kids to talk, it helps them with emotional growth” — and to find more effective ways of disciplining them. “I can tell my children, ‘Momma doesn’t like it when you do this,’ and give them a [sense of] cause and effect with their actions.” Avent’s children all work with NAZ navigators at their schools and are thriving. Her eldest daughter, who had run away from home, has returned and is making As and Bs, and now tells Avent how proud she is of all her mother has accomplished. The 5-year-old, who had suffered from lead poisoning from a contaminated house they lived in earlier, is getting the speech therapy that he needs and “is a math whiz,” while the youngest will soon start full-time daycare through another NAZ partner organization so that Avent can go to school and pursue her dream of creating her own non-profit organization to support Northside families.

“Too often philanthropic efforts are under-funded and focused on the short-term, because there’s no understanding of how long it can take to achieve meaningful change and how much money is required.”

Some of the philanthropies that support NAZ are also among the 19 private, public, and corporate funders who operate under the umbrella of The Northside Funders Group, as are Hennepin County, LISC, and Nexus. Created in 2008 to change the way philanthropy works on the Northside, the Funders Group is headed by Tawanna Black, a native of Kansas, who came on as executive director in 2013. Black believes that well-targeted infusions of money can indeed alleviate some of the neighborhood’s problems, but she is clear-headed about the fact that it won’t be easy and that if money is not well spent it can sometimes exacerbate problems rather than solving them. “We start with the belief that philanthropy owns some of the problem in North Minneapolis,” Black says, explaining that too often philanthropic efforts are under-funded and focused on the short-term, because there’s no understanding of how long it can take to achieve meaningful change and how much money is required. “Foundation executives often worry that non-profit organizations will get too dependent on a single funder, so they limit their grants to a single year,” but “that doesn’t produce good results,” says Black. “The hard part,” she says, “is how deep a shift in thinking that requires. We’re not talking about a pilot program or a two-year effort. … We’re talking about a 5–10 year commitment, and [dollar] numbers much bigger than what you might have had in mind. … [Because] this problem is bigger and more systemic than most of us could imagine, solutions are more costly and require greater change than we might have thought.”