Living With and Serving the People That America Has Forgotten

By Don Samuels

Growing up in Jamaica in a poor family with 10 siblings, a Pentecostal preacher for dad and a seamstress for mom, I was deeply embedded in the constrained context of a life, sharply defined by my environment. But I felt the faint resonance of my deeper transcendent self, connecting across the trenches of my class, tribe, and even nationality.

My siblings and I were the first generation to experience a class transition from poor to middle and upper-middle class, minimal education to degreed. But I was always aware of the stabilizing impact that the presence of our striving family had on the culture of our street. Meanwhile, the transformative American Civil Rights Movement captured the attention of our country, and the church’s leadership role captured my imagination.

I arrived in the U.S. in 1970, at age 21, and studied Industrial Design at Pratt Institute. It was during those years that I made a commitment that has influenced the direction of my life like no other. I would only live in the low-income minority community, no matter the level of my income.

That decision has kept me in intimate relationship with people at the lowest levels of our economy and ultimately led me, after 30 years in the toy design field, to earn a Master of Divinity degree, run for office, serve on the Minneapolis City Council for 11 years, run for mayor, serve on the Minneapolis School Board, and lead MicroGrants, a micro-finance organization designed to spur low-income individuals into economic independence. Along the way, I founded and co-founded several organizations to address racial tensions, economic disparity, and social inequities.

Living with the wound is always an option, but it is the only way to become the healer. For unknown reasons, the story of the gospel had always occurred to me to be mostly about a man of great divine wisdom, capacity, and connection being among people at lowest levels and with the greatest needs, in their service and for their benefit. This is what attracts me most about the concept of an alternative system or “Kingdom.” It is a scandalous concept, that one should strive to be the best one can be, achieve a significant measure of success and yet choose to be among the shunned and avoided. It defies all value systems and hierarchies, upends the social norms, and opens up a life and the world for creative possibilities.

That is why I am so grateful for my wife Sondra, who agreed, when we married, to join me in this commitment. At that time, she was still a business consultant with an MBA, and I operated a design/ invention studio. We moved into the Jordan Neighborhood of North Minneapolis as newlyweds in 1996.

Within a week of moving, a bullet came through our baby’s bedroom window; we considered it a summons to accelerate the engagement with our neighbors and our neighborhood disparities. We started a block club, meeting monthly on Saturday mornings in our living room, with 15 of our neighbors.

	Don organized this campaign team of local students, who were about to set off on a community canvassing rally.

We banded together to address blight and crime always as a group. A good example of our approach occurred during a meeting to discuss a gang-occupied, drug-dealing home. After a half-hour discussion, we all went together to the problem house. Thirteen stood at the gate, while two knocked on the door. “Hi, we are your neighbors and we just had a meeting about your home and the problems here. We see drug dealing and lots of traffic and disruption and we are concerned for our children and families. Is there anything we can do to help?” Together, we were able to deal with drug dealers, slumlords, the precinct commander and even our political leaders, with great effectiveness, sharing the risks and building solidarity.

Slowly, we began to embrace the needs of the larger Jordan neighborhood of 9,000 residents. In 2002, a neighborhood riot against police and the press caught the attention of the city, state, and even nation. Our neighborhood group selected me to be our spokesperson. That led to several press interviews that thrust me into the limelight of the issues of livability and community violence, and ultimately led to a run for city council membership in a special election.
 

Don giving a tour of a revitalized drug node, with Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, and Senator Amy Klobuchar.

 
Weeks after election, I committed to daylong vigils, whenever someone was killed, which was quite a challenge in Minnesota Winters. I co-founded the PEACE Foundation (Public Engagement and Community Empowerment) to address violence by leading the community into strategic engagement of homicide and violence. We considered each act of violence a cry for help and each crime hotspot a wound to be healed. My wife, Sondra later assumed leadership of the organization as it hosted the vigils.

Don at PEACE Foundation days — one of the organization’s summer street parties — with twins from the neighborhood.

Each summer, the organization worked with police, using crime stats and observation to identify areas to hold family style community events. We recruited congregations to fund and host street parties, with petting zoos, rides, outdoor games, and always lots of food, precisely where crime was pervasive — and we used these events to recruit additional volunteers. We founded community athletic events called Peace Games and an annual weekend arts crawl, FLOW, that continues to this day, now sponsored by the business association.
 
 

In 2006, we stumbled upon a shocking statistic. 100 percent of homicides were committed by people who did not graduate from high school and 85 percent of the victims did not. We then began a shift from violence prevention to education as the final solution, rebranding the PEACE Foundation The Northside Achievement Zone. NAZ is a wraparound collaborative of 40 organizations that effectively supports low-income children of color to graduate from high school prepared for college. In 2011, NAZ was one of five organizations to receive an Obama administration Promise Neighborhood Grant of $28.5 million for five years. Today, NAZ has a $10 million budget and successfully serves 1,100 families and 2,300 children with transformative academic outcomes.

At each homicide vigil, there was a book for attendees to write a note to the mayor, city council, and police chief, with their emotional reaction to the homicide and their expectation of the civic leadership. Back at the office, I would copy these and distribute to 12 of my peers, the mayor, and police chief. After four years of about 20 packets (homicides) per year and thousands of heartbreaking responses, the mayor, council, and chief began a shift to prioritizing North Minneapolis with projects and dollars. For example, during the economic recession and waves of foreclosures, the federal government poured about $110 million into Minneapolis to address the housing crisis. Over 90 percent of those funds were assigned to North Minneapolis, which had less than one-fifth of the population of the city. It saved our community from the disaster many similar communities experienced across the country. This “imbalance” was fully supported by the rest of the council.
 

A vigil for a slain neighbor. Don would gather a list of names to provide dinner for the grieving family each day for a month. Also, attendees would write a paragraph to the mayor, the council, and the police chief, about how the murder impacted them.

 
These successes and our dramatic decline in violent crime eventually brought the first sitting president to our low-income community and made mitigation of our disparities a priority of the business and political leadership of the region and state.

After losing a run for mayor in 2013, I ran for and joined the Minneapolis School Board and simultaneously became CEO of MicroGrants, which gives small grants to low-income people of potential. MicroGrants helps launch grantees, after quality preparation by our 40 partner agencies, into business or a career.

In 2017, Philando Castile, a local, exemplary young black man, was pulled over by police for having a broken brake light. A few seconds later, he was shot to death while reaching for his wallet. He had previously been stopped 49 times in 13 years. The relationship between police and the community reached an all-time low. We sat with this problem for 10 minutes at a MicroGrants board meeting and decided to do something to help the young men of color, being dunned and gunned by police.

Weeks later, I called the police chiefs of 21 metro cities. Within three weeks, 20 of them agreed to our proposal. Today, all their officers carry MicroGrants’ Lights On vouchers in their cars. Whenever they stop a driver for a light out, instead of a ticket, they give drivers a voucher to our partner, Bobby and Steve’s Auto World, a chain of nine metro-wide repair shops. Their light is replaced free, paid for by MicroGrants. We raise those dollars through crowdfunding and word of mouth. Currently, four cities are working to replicate Lights On and Iowa City has already implemented it under the name BULBS. We are working with app designers and researchers to roll out this program nationally. Click here to read a July 2018 Washington Post article about Lights On — and click here to see an NBC News segment on the program.

Prayerful presence in the place of pain has changed even our family. Our eldest daughter was a youth participant in the PEACE Foundation when we met and adopted her. She is now an independent adult. Our home and family continue to be impacted in this way, as we allow ourselves to be moved into action where we can be helpful.

	Don with President Barack Obama.

Prayerful presence has moved our many resourced friends to enter into a relationship with our community, to become present in various useful ways. There is a biblical quote that I personalize in this way: The Samuels Family, even though we are resourced and well connected, are choosing not to optimize these assets for our comfort and benefit, but rather, foregoing benefits of prime real estate, a tranquil and leafy community, exemplary neighbors for our daughters and a great school district, we have given up those things to be with the people that America has forgotten, so that, in the end, we might be part of the evolution of our nation and join the great many whose sacrifices have given us undeserved quality of life and improved our society significantly.

Don Samuels spent 27 years in the toy industry as an R&D executive and an independent inventor/designer. An ordained minister, Don evolved from community leader to become a 3-term Minneapolis council member and a Minneapolis School Board member. He also served as chair of the Public Safety Committee and on the Zoning and Community Development Committees.

Don is CEO of MicroGrants, which spurs economic self-sufficiency by giving business and career grants to low-income people of potential through the partner agencies that train them.

Don co-founded the PEACE Foundation in 2003 to address community violence; it now does business as the Northside Achievement Zone, transforming educational outcomes for 1,000 families and 2,300 children. He also co-founded Hope Collaborative, which identified the top-performing urban schools across the nation in low-income communities of color. Over a 2-year period, the collaborative hosted and presented 10 of these school’s leaders to the Minneapolis community.

Don now serves on the board of St. Paul, Minnesota-based Luther Seminary, Twin Cities Rise, Alafia Place, Rock ‘n Read, and Minneapolis Youth Coordinating Board. He is a recent graduate of The Living School.

Don is married to Sondra Hollinger Samuels. They live in the Jordan Neighborhood of North Minneapolis with the youngest of their three daughters. Another daughter is in college, and their adult daughter and son live in New York City.