Case Study — GroundBreak Coalition
Overview
A Collective Effort to Close Racial Wealth Gaps
The McKnight Family Foundation is a grounding force in Minnesota with a mission to advance a more just, creative, and abundant future where people and the planet thrive. When George Floyd’s murder sent shockwaves through the nation, many regional leaders pledged to help build a future where our Black community can thrive. In May of 2022, the McKnight Foundation led the way by convening 40 leaders across the public, private, and philanthropic sectors to close racial wealth gaps in the region. They called themselves the GroundBreak Coalition.
OBJECTIVE
Focus on Building Black Wealth
The McKnight Foundation asked Imagine Deliver to join the GroundBreak Coalition project team for our equitable strategy and system design expertise. Our objective was to lead a process informed by Black wealth builders in the region. By immersing ourselves in the lived experiences of Black wealth builders trying to secure funding for business development and housing, we aimed to uncover the root causes of their challenges. Recognizing the power of those directly affected, we turned to our end users to help construct the most elegant solutions for how our capital system can make loans and grants more accessible. Together, we embarked on a mission to transform financial systems, ensuring that community members historically excluded from accessing such resources could find their path to prosperity.
STRATEGY
Setting Universal Goals to Lift the Genius of Black Wealth Builders
By setting universal goals using a targeted universalism approach and our User as Designer™ model, we tapped into the genius of the Black experience to strategically design lasting solutions. To close racial wealth gaps in the region by 2033, GroundBreak Coalition aimed to unlock the doors to generational wealth by creating 11,000 new Black homeowners, breaking ground for 60 vibrant, Black-led neighborhood commercial developments and launching 5,000 new Black entrepreneurs.
IMPACT
Delivering Equity-Centered Insights on Capital Solutions
As a result of our shared efforts to orchestrate complex transformational change across sectors with a clear, universal goal, GroundBreak Coalition partners are actively developing the innovative shared financial platform that will mobilize the full spectrum capital needed to fund the prototypes and scale them to meet the needs of Black wealth builders region-wide. This remarkable endeavor promises a new era of opportunity, where financing flows freely to build Black wealth in a repeatable, predictable, and efficient way. Groundbreak Coalition has caught the attention of outlets like the Star Tribune and Harvard Kennedy School, garnering press coverage and accolades from leading industry experts.
Orchestrating Solutions Across Industries
As a project team, we convened the expertise of nearly 170 renters, aspiring homeowners, commercial developers, and entrepreneurs of color and their supporting organizations to co-create a prosperous future for Black wealth builders.
A total of approximately 120 organizations – including banks, foundations, non-profits, private corporations, and government agencies –joined hands in this endeavor, embracing the power of collaboration to solve some of our most complex problems.
Through a series of twenty-three workshops inspired by human-centered design philosophy, a problem-solving technique that puts real people at the center of the solution process, we unleashed the ingenuity and creative potential of our workgroup members in service of Black wealth. As a result, workgroup members co-created nine preliminary models of financial products built for the unique needs of Black wealth builders called “capital prototypes”. Workgroup members also created the concept for the infrastructure necessary to ensure capital is readily available to deploy the capital prototypes at scale. This infrastructure is now called a “shared financial platform”.
Activating Solutions for Black Wealth
Energized by the momentum and promise of these capital solutions, GroundBreak Coalition leaders are exploring ways to sustain the effort by incorporating various practices designed to integrate shared core values and beliefs to ensure quality care when managing this new platform. With capital solutions in hand, GroundBreak Coalition is broadening its focus to include shaping public policy and empowering Black-led partners through capacity building. In doing so, the Coalition is expanding its capability to fundamentally transform the financial system by changing how we invest in Black communities.
CONCLUSION
Joining Hands to Bring About Systems Transformation
Our ongoing collaboration with GroundBreak Coalition has the potential to unlock the powerful potential of our vibrant, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities so we can thrive as one Minnesota. With the bright future of equitable and accessible capital in our sights, we united in our efforts to fundamentally transform how we –as financial, civic, corporate, philanthropic, and government institutions – support our local BIPOC communities.
Are you ready to collaborate across silos and drive once-in-a-lifetime systems transformation? Get in touch. Let’s orchestrate change together.
