Tuesday May 19th we will be kicking off our garden season with a big planting day!
Come join us from 5-8pm at the youth garden (611 E Franklin Ave, the garden adjacent to the parking lot off of Oakland Ave used by Hope). In addition to all the seedlings we started in March, we will have food, music and fun!
We hope to see you there. RSVP here.
Join our Food, Land, and Community team in their Container Gardening Workshop, with facilitator Taya. You will learn how to make a container garden and take home your own plant to start the growing season off right! Free, open to all.
Wednesday, May 13 from 5-7pm
Hope Community, 611 E Franklin Ave, Minneapolis.
*Note there is construction on Franklin between Lyndale and Chicago and only one lane of eastbound traffic.
Our voices are powerful; our creativity is necessary.
Please join us together in putting our dissent to practice in the visual form of political poster making.
Starting May 2026, we are hosting a 4-part Political Poster series at Hope Community. We provide art materials and guidance on collaborative design and screen-printing with various methods.
Monday, May 18 from 6-9pm: Kick off Public Event: Power of Political Posters: An Evening with Artist Ricardo Levins Morales (in collaboration with Dio Cramer’s concurrent workshop series).
*Open to the public! Invite your people! If you cannot commit to all sessions, come to this event and get inspired. Register for this single event here.
Tuesday, May 19 from 6-9pm: Ground as a group, share ideas and discuss design elements for effective poster-making.
Tuesday, May 26 from 6-9pm: Pair up and design posters that reflect messages we care about.
Tuesday, June 2 from 6-9pm: Screen print our posters!
We strongly encourage also coming to the final showcase, Thursday, June 11 from 6-9pm. Participants will share their work with the public along with art made with Dio Cramer’s concurrent workshop series. Please note: unlike the prior events, this is held at a separate location– Transmission: 2521 27th Ave S., Minneapolis, MN 55406.
REGISTER HERE! Spots limited to 16 people for the full series.
We hope you join us for this year’s Spring Open House! This event is for everyone– participants, donors, funders, neighbors, and residents.
You can expect light refreshments, connecting with staff and learning what is up and coming with 2026 programming, and the opportunity to decorate and write a postcard with a message of hope.
Tuesday, April 21 from 5-6:30pm
The Commons at Hope Community, 611 E Franklin Ave
Parking and arrival: please check future emails as construction along Franklin Ave will distrupt normal routes and parking and we will send updated information/maps as needed.
Art is critical to movement work, and at Hope we continue to invest in art that speaks the community’s truth and develop artists to do similar, critical work.
At the end of 2025, our Art of Radical Collaboration team, Olivia Levins Holden, Samie Johnson, and Con Rice, made a collaborative screen print called “To Hope is Our Right”. The message of this print continues to be relevant, potent and inspiring here in Minneapolis and beyond.
We now have limited edition original prints available for sale!
Proceeds from print sales will go toward the development of our first dedicated art studio space that will focus on printmaking and mural making. Stay tuned for more on this exciting development later in 2026.
A statement from the artists:
Hope is a cultivated practice, a choiceful response to oppression.
In a time when those in power are intentionally attempting to take away our sense of possibility, agency, and power, we need to remember it is our right to dream, to imagine, and create our own solutions. We are inspired by the transformational ways Minnesotans and our global community are pulling together in mutual support, creating the pathways for new ways of relating and conceiving of the collective.
Reimagining Affordable Rental Housing
Transforming Affordable Housing from Subsity to Stability: A Five-Year Research Demonstration Project
Hope’s model centers residents and makes sure no one is cost burdened in affordable housing.
In a system that is so deeply entrenched in its ways, we need compelling research and data to bring about systemic change and alter the status quo.
The current funding model for affordable housing, typified by the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, while valuable, has documented inefficiencies in how public dollars translate to resident benefits. Our model directly challenges this dominant funding mechanism with an approach that could deliver more value per dollar invested.
Read more about our demonstration project plan PDF.
For questions or to invest, contact Will Delaney at wdelaney@hope-community.org
Learn about Hope’s recent impact in our 2024 Annual Report.
Please join us for a Spring Open House where we will have each of our community programs tabling with activities and ways to get involved. While you explore the different programs, you can connect in community and enjoy light refreshments.
RSVP here to help us ensure enough appetizers for all.
Thursday, March 27th
5-6:30pm
611 E Franklin Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55404
*free parking available in the lot off Oakland and on surrounding streets such as Portland.
Dear Friends of Hope,
It is with heavy hearts that we share with you that, on Thursday, April 4, there was a severe fire at one of Hope’s properties: the Dundry House, a 25-unit building located at 1829 5th Avenue South, which Hope has owned since 2002 and has been vacant since June 2023. We’re grateful for the response from the Minneapolis Fire Department, and for the fact that no one was hurt; however, the fire resulted in irreparable damage. We’re now taking the necessary steps of planning for demolition of the building. We are also deeply grieving the loss of this building, and all that it represents. This is a loss of desperately needed deeply affordable, supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness, and a building that has provided transformational homes for people in our community for decades. We are sad that this is how the Dundry’s story ends. We are holding space for these emotions for ourselves and our community.
In the short term, we are urgently pursuing a path to secure the site by removing the structure and any remaining safety threat it poses. Unfortunately, this is the continuation of a costly process that we began last year in June when we made the difficult decision to close the building and rehouse all residents. We had a supportive housing model in place at the Dundry for nearly 20 years; however, there have simply not been enough public resources invested in supportive housing to make that model viable for Hope to continue providing safe, dignified housing for our residents. Continuing to operate the Dundry without sufficient resources would have put all of Hope’s other work at risk. We continue to reach out to the city, our partners in the affordable housing sector, and our funders to get to a point where the site no longer poses a risk to health and safety.
Longer-term, we are committed to sharing the lessons of the Dundry as a case study of the convergence of systemic failures in a single site. This is a reverberation of the alarm we have been sounding for the last two years about the significant gaps in funding and services for affordable housing. We have joined fellow nonprofits, funders, and many others to advocate for those needed investments, testified before the State legislature, and continued to bring our experience to bear in shaping our housing system. Responding to the needs of our community with boarded buildings has never been and will never be the answer. With a strong civic will and collective response, we can do better.
One of Hope’s greatest strengths is creating a shared community vision for the future. Once the structure is removed, we see the opportunity for a collaborative process that honors the history of the Dundry and determines how the site can continue to serve the community in the future.
We hope you will join us as we reflect, name our aspirations for the future, and build a newvision for the Dundry site. Do you have memories of the Dundry or the people who called it home over the years? What are your hopes for the future of the site? Send us a message and keep watch for future invitations for ways to engage. We welcome your recollections and dreams.
To paraphrase a favorite saying of our dear founder Char Madigan, rebuilding at this site will take some collective “dreaming and scheming,” and we invite your support to help us both to dream and to help us realize that dream through action. Your continued financial support is especially appreciated and impactful at this difficult time. It means more than ever.
In community,
Chaka Mkali & Will Delaney
Co-Executive Directors (Interim)