Nonprofit Mission Award for
Innovation
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Criteria
This
award recognizes creative applications and nontraditional
approaches to solving community challenges. Nominated
organizations should:
- Bring
creative solutions to community challenges;
- Employ
a variety of strategies in developing these solutions;
and
- Collaborate
with other nonprofit organizations, businesses
and governmental agencies in their efforts.
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Recipient:
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Other
Finalists:
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Recipient
Profile
East African
Women’s Center — Confederation of Somali Communities
in Minnesota, Minneapolis
The
East African Women’s Center is a program of the
Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota (CSCM)
and was created after a needs assessment showed CSCM that
their community was concerned about the elder women, girls
and mothers with small children living in south Minneapolis,
who were often isolated, rarely leaving their apartments,
and suffered from depression and loneliness.
CSCM
rented 2,000 square feet in the Riverside Plaza apartment
complex, which is located in Cedar-Riverside— the
heart of the Somali community. Here its staff had the
unique opportunity to tailor the physical space and programming
to the needs of the women and girls they were serving.
Culturally sensitive, the Center provides women with a
safe place to experiment with a new language and new customs.
At the same time, it respects the heritage and culture
the women bring from Africa.
The
Center gives women and girls a physical “place of
their own” where they can break their isolation,
learn new skills, build connections with mainstream society
and learn to successfully bridge two worlds—and
they can do it by taking an elevator to 1st floor and
walking across a plaza. The staff, mostly East African,
come from the community they serve and know firsthand
what the women are experiencing. Hands-on learning is
promoted and women know they can practice their English
without fear of ridicule.
 This
space gave CSCM the opportunity to reach out to women
and their families—especially those living in the
surrounding high-rises—in some nontraditional ways.
To entice women out of their apartments, the Center started
by offering sewing classes. Over time, the programming
has expanded. The Center now offers childcare for mothers
attending the Center’s ESL program. Its 5th Day
ESL/Family Literacy Program allows contextual language
learning for mothers through activities such as sewing,
cooking/nutrition and and child development/family literacy.
Through the childcare and 5th Day Programs, women learn
that they are their children’s first teachers and
that their children can learn a lot, even before they
go to school. The 5th Day Program also Women create Somali
weavings in the Women’s Textile Cooperative and
their work has been exhibited at the Textile Center of
Minnesota, Augsburg College and The McKnight Foundation.
Other programs include the Girls’ Group (for girls
ages 8 to 11) and cooking and nutrition education.
The
Center’s mission is to fill gaps in service and
provide education and support to East African women and
their families. The Center serves approximately 70 to
80 each week and functions as a bridge between women in
the refugee and mainstream communities and facilitates
cultural adjustment and integration. Although the Center’s
numbers are not huge, its influence is. At the Center,
women build confidence and regain the hope to dream.
East
African Women’s Center Web site: eawc.insourcemedia.com
Finalist Profiles
AccountAbility Minnesota
AccountAbility Minnesota (AAM) is a community-based
nonprofit that recruits and trains volunteers to provide
free tax assistance to low- and moderate-income taxpayers
in the Twin Cites’ area and across greater Minnesota.
AAM’s Taxpayer Services programs were established
in 1971 with the belief that an individual’s access
to tax assistance and, by extension, important financial
supports applied for through a tax return, should not
depend solely on his or her ability to pay for such services.
AAM engages a dedicated statewide
team of over 600 volunteer accountants and tax practitioners
to help thousands of low-income taxpayers navigate the
tax reporting system so they may satisfy a tax liability
or realize benefits they are due. Those directly impacted
by AAM’s programs are low-income taxpayers, with
an average annual income of just over $12,000. In the
2008 tax season, AAM volunteers served over 16,000 taxpayers
statewide and filed over 34,000 tax returns—putting
over $24.6 million in cash refunds into the hands of low-income
families in Minnesota.
Family-related tax credits offer essential
financial assistance to millions of this country’s
working poor—the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
takes an average of five million Americans above the poverty
line every year, and, in Minnesota, combined federal and
state refunds can add up to almost half of an individual’s
total annual income. Yet, the Internal Revenue Service
(IRS) estimates that only between 75 and 80 percent of
eligible households claim the ETIC.
 Often, federal tax credit money goes to
tax preparers who have targeted the population to take
advantage of the refunds by charging exorbitant fees and
interest for tax preparation and refund anticipation loans
(RALs). Instead of waiting for legislative action to address
the issue of RALs, AAM partnered with U.S. Federal Credit
Union to develop an alternative product to high-fee RALs—the
“Express Refund Loan & Savings Program.”
Since 2006, AAM has developed close partnerships with
five financial institutions across the state to provide
tax site customers interested in quick refunds with education
about their options for savings, incentives to open bank
accounts, and —when desired—quick access to
tax refunds without the high costs. Since the program
began, AAM has opened over 1,000 savings accounts, including
750 interest-free, no-fee express refund loans. Working
with banks, credit unions, community-based financial and
credit counseling services, AAM is expanding its customers’
access to a range of financial services and education
in order to help them begin to build assets as well as
increase income.
The refunds allow families to shore up
their needs, helping them to stay in the workforce and
off of welfare, and also benefit the local economies where
they live and work since much of the refund money is spent
immediately in the community.
AccountAbility Minnesota Web site:
www.accountabilitymn.org
MACC CommonWealth
MACC CommonWealth (MCW) is a member-operated
nonprofit formed as a management services organization
focusing on providing finance, human resources and information
technology services to its members. It began as a joint
venture agreement among five founding members: Family
& Children’s Service, MACC Alliance of Connected
Communities, Phyllis Wheatley Community Center, Pillsbury
United Communities and Plymouth Christian Youth Center).
MCW expanded in 2007 with two additional members, LDA
(Learning Disabilities Association) Minnesota and Neighborhood
House. By partnering together, MCW’s members are
better able to serve over 100,000 individuals annually
who are predominantly persons of color— 25 percent
of whom are new Americans.
MCW members, with annual budgets ranging
from $1 million to $13 million, have historically struggled
to maintain adequate administrative services. Their challenges
include staffing and supervising these functions appropriately.
Founding members shared a vision that they could better
meet these challenges collectively and chose to pool their
resources with a vision of achieving new capacity (collective
scale), new efficiencies (economies of scale), and new
levels of expertise. In 2006, MCW leadership—drawn
from the combined administrative teams of founding members—addressed
their challenges by designing new systems for all three
service areas. MCW developed a brand new cross-organizational
financial platform, reorganized human resources team and
completely rebuilt information technology/telecommunications
platform.
MCW’s scale allows it to explore
innovative solutions not previously available to its members.
After discovering that the metro area telecom market could
not provide affordable solutions for its needs, MCW worked
with a vendor to create data communications capacity which
has never existed in its market for small entities. The
problem required exacting due diligence, risk management
and technology engineering that was well beyond the capacity
of any of MCW’s members, but resulted in MCW’s
own mini-telephone company designed to meet its members
collective needs.
 Developing these shared solutions, and
achieving economies of scale, requires a rigorous process
of committing to shared solutions and driving out individual
member variance. The leadership of each member—from
CEOs to organizations’ boards of directors—has
committed to seek the common good and focus on sustainable
solutions for all members. MCW has succeeded repeatedly
in getting multiple boards of directors to make shared
decisions simultaneously and its approach has received
significant national attention— from other nonprofits
who are exploring similar directions to McKinsey &
Company, who advises a larger, Chicago-based consortium
of nonprofits.
MCW’s approach—which depends
on creating and sustaining deep collaboration among the
members—has its members looking for new ways to
collaborate in other dimensions. MCW’s members are
working actively on shared programmatic initiatives, joint
proposals and other ways to leverage our unique capacities
for the benefit of each member’s clients and communities
they serve.
MACC CommonWealth Web site: www.mcwmn.org
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