Nonprofit Mission Award for
Innovation

	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.
	Finalists AccountAbility Minnesota, St. Paul East African Women’s Resource Center – Confederation of Somali Communities in Minnesota, Minneapolis MACC CommonWealth, Minneapolis
	Vote for the Nonprofit Mission Award for Innovation.

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.

East African Women’s Center — Confederation of Somali Communities in Minnesota, Minneapolis

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.

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