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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.

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.

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

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)

PDF: Dundry fire update

Click to read Hope’s statement in solidarity with the people of Palestine

Read more about Hope’s most recent leadership transition update