Beth Johnson

Dear Hope Community friends and partners,

I’m pleased to be writing on behalf of Hope’s Board of Directors to share an important and exciting update: Hope Community has finalized a permanent, shared executive leadership structure!

Hope has long modeled leadership as a collective responsibility, grounded in collaboration and community-centered decision-making. This new structure formalizes what many of you have experienced from Hope over the years. Through this change, our mission, values, and commitments remain the same. We will continue showing up alongside neighbors, residents, program participants, partners, and supporters with the same focus and care.

Hope’s work is complex and deeply relational. We support stable housing, strengthening community, and advancing systems change over the long term. Shared leadership helps Hope meet that complexity with resilience.

This structure is designed to:

• Strengthen continuity and sustainability, so Hope can be steady, responsive, and enduring for neighbors and community partners.
• Support staff wellbeing, recognizing that leadership is bigger than any one person. Sharing responsibility helps every part of Hope’s work be better attended to.
• Reflect Hope’s values and “walk the Hope talk” by practicing distributed leadership throughout the organization and alongside community.

Hope’s executive leadership team includes four co-leaders:

• Chaka Mkali: Co-Executive Director, leads organizing & community building
• Rachel Martinez: Co-Executive Director, leads HR & organizational culture
• Betsy Sohn: Co-Executive Director, leads fund development & impact evaluation
• Will Delaney: Co-Executive Director, leads finance, real estate & wealth creationThese leaders bring deep experience with Hope’s work and relationships across key functional areas. Collectively, they have dedicated nearly 67 years to Hope. During the interim period with Co-Executive Directors, the team of four have been leading together, demonstrating that this approach works for Hope and for the community we serve.

The decision to continue with a shared leadership structure comes after a thoughtful discernment process led by Hope’s Board, with outside facilitation support from Propel Nonprofits. Over the interim leadership period, shared leadership proved effective for Hope; at the same time, a traditional single-executive search did not produce the right fit for this season.

The Board ultimately chose a model aligned with Hope’s culture, values, and long-term sustainability.

On behalf of the Board, I want to express how proud we are of Hope’s staff and of the leadership they have shown throughout this transition. This process required learning, humility, and deep engagement by staff and board alike. We are confident in Hope’s future.

If you have questions or simply want to learn more about our process and approach, please feel free to reach out to me. I would love to connect. We are grateful for your trust, your partnership, and the many ways you help make Hope’s work possible.

With appreciation,

Ani Koch
Board Chair, Hope Community

When a community is disrupted—by current events, civic unrest, or violence—we rely on places and people who make us feel comfortable and cared for. At Hope, for eight teenagers, Young Men’s Group (YMG) is that. By definition, YMG offers cohort-based programming for young men focusing on leadership development and learning and exploring creative technology skills. In reality, YMG is this and so much more.

Facilitator Angel Sandro has deep experience in youth work and shows up to YMG as more than just a facilitator. He’s a navigator, a buddy, an advisor, and an educator. “I build brotherly community with the young men,” Angel describes. The activities that the young men do together are all dual purpose, both enriching their skills and feeding their minds.

Angel says, “Really, it’s about entrepreneurship, developing a skill in the tech center, but also just hanging out, just having a good time, expressing yourself, hanging out with your brothers. In the course of the years, I’ve introduced them to DJing, podcasting, branding, a little bit coding.” This intentional combination of hard skills and soft skills creates a space where, in times of both calm and distress, the young men can come together and just be.

Angel takes an expressly nonjudgmental approach to building relationships with these young men. “I let them be who they are,” he says. For Angel, the goal is primarily for each young person to find out more about himself. In the process, relationships are built, friendships bloom, and communication rises to the top.

Part of what makes Angel a good leader is how he embodies the experience that these young men are having. He describes keeping up with the lingo, the language of Gen Z, as a way to communicate respect for their style of speaking and to show he understands them when they talk.

During the recent ICE incursion in Minnesota, Angel knew that showing up was the best thing he could do for these young men. He says, “they needed a space to continue to have conversations. I’d just open the floor and ask, how are you feeling about this, what are you seeing in the community?” He adds, “I wanted to give them space to have conversations with each other, and I wanted to seewhat their thinking was—what are they seeing in the community, instead of just hearing it from the media. What’s really going on? How are you really feeling? How are you looking out for each other?”

Angel noticed that at a scary time, when ICE was extremely active, the young men’s resilience was fuel for his own. “All eight of them would come. For me it was a surprise, and I thought that was beautiful,” Angel says.

Learn about Hope’s recent impact in our latest annual report.