Case Study — GroundBreak Coalition
Overview
A Collective Effort to Create Opportunities
The McKnight Foundation (McKnight) 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 everyone in our community can thrive. In May of 2022, McKnight led the way by convening 40+ leaders across the region’s public, private, and philanthropic sectors to close wealth gaps. They called themselves the GroundBreak Coalition.
OBJECTIVE
Accelerate Black Opportunity By Creating Equitable Access To Homeownership, Entrepreneurship, And Commercial Real Estate In The Twin Cities
McKnight asked Imagine Deliver to join the GroundBreak Coalition project team for our engagement, strategy, and system design expertise. We focused on leading a process informed by a diverse audience of wealth builders in the region. By immersing ourselves in the experiences of Black wealth builders and others facing barriers to 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 and system partners 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 to help ensure that everyone can find their path to prosperity.
STRATEGY
Setting Universal Goals to Increase Prosperity
By setting shared goals and leveraging our User as Designer® model, we tapped into the genius of the diverse experiences with our capital system to design sustainable solutions for accessing capital. To significantly close 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, launching 5,000 new Black entrepreneurs, and stabilizing 23,500 families in affordable units.
IMPACT
Delivering User-Centered Insights on Capital Solutions
As a result of our shared efforts to orchestrate complex transformational change across sectors with a clear, unified goal, GroundBreak Coalition partners are actively developing the innovative financial system that will mobilize the full spectrum capital needed to fund the prototypes and scale them to meet the needs of wealth builders region-wide. This remarkable endeavor promises a new era of opportunity, where financing flows freely to build wealth, particularly Black wealth, in a repeatable, predictable, and efficient way. Groundbreak Coalition has caught the attention of outlets like the Star Tribune, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Sahan Journal, as well as institutions like Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Chambers of Commerce around the nation, 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 plan where our entire region can prosper. 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 our workgroup members’ ingenuity and creative potential in service of creating opportunities for more families to build generational wealth. As a result, workgroup members co-created nine preliminary models of financial products built to eliminate barriers to wealth building called “capital prototypes.” Workgroup members also created the concept for the infrastructure necessary to ensure capital is readily available to deploy the prototypes at scale. This infrastructure is now called a “shared financial system.”
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 system. With capital solutions in hand, GroundBreak Coalition is broadening its focus to include shaping public policy and empowering 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 the Black middle class – because when we build Black wealth, we not only uplift Black families but also strengthen entire 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 entire Minneapolis-St. Paul region so we can thrive as one Minnesota. With the bright future of fair and accessible capital in our sights, we are united in our efforts to fundamentally transform how we –as financial, civic, corporate, philanthropic, and government institutions – support our local communities.
Are you ready to collaborate across silos and drive once-in-a-lifetime systems transformation? Get in touch. Let’s orchestrate change together.
