At Nexus Community Partners, we nurture the prosperity of our communities — and in this prosperity, our health, joy, peace, love, safety and the needs of future generations come first. To dismantle the rigged rules that amass wealth and power in fewer and whiter hands, we must approach community wealth-building from a reparative framework rooted in Black culture. Economic development efforts that ignore culture are unsustainable and lead to inevitable harm. Our culture itself is a critical resource for sustainable wealth creation.
We launched the North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship in 2017 to start living into a future of Black wealth: self-governance, spaces for healing, and an abundance of resources.
After six successful years, we wanted to re-engage alumni, see where they were in their journeys, and learn about the impacts of North Star and how we can continue to improve the program. We sent a survey to alumni from Cohorts 1-6 and collected responses between Sept. 12 – Oct. 10, 2023. One alumnus reflected:
“My major takeaway is that there are so many of us working for a freer and more cooperative future for our communities. We can work together and support/uplift the work each group is doing in different sectors; it all brings the collective closer to living the dream. The learning I use from North Star is cooperative-specific language and connections to people across the Twin Cities and the country doing this work.”
North Star wants to acknowledge and thank Sida Ly-Xiong, who helped us with the analysis, and the Nexus communications team, Elly Fireside-Ostergaard and Jamie Bernard, who helped create, design, and share the slide deck below.
View the Survey Results
