Neighborhood funding is small, its value is not

Linden Hills and Fulton neighbors came together for the "Drawn Together" chalk project in early June to draw messages of joy, love, kindness, and connection. The project was organized by the Fulton Neighborhood Association and Linden Hills Neighborhood Council.

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Minneapolis is facing a difficult budget year, and cuts are going to happen somewhere. But is neighborhood funding really the place where we want to save money? Especially when it represents such a small part of the City’s spending and produces so much value beyond what the City directly pays for. 

Despite how often elected officials, City staff and residents talk about how valuable neighborhood organizations are, they are treated like a nice little extra when budgets get difficult. 

After more than three decades of formal neighborhood-based work in Minneapolis, I do not think that makes sense anymore. 

Think about this from a business perspective. 

When money gets tight, you look hardest at your biggest expenses because that is where even modest efficiencies can actually change the numbers. 

Smaller programs should still be held to the same standards, but if something costs relatively little and consistently produces more value than it consumes, that is usually the thing you protect. 

Most people do not think much about the infrastructure behind why this City feels so connected. 

They see the neighborhood event, the newsletter, the local business getting promoted, the meeting about a development, somebody helping a resident figure out who to call, or a community organization pulling together resources for something that needs to get done. 

What they do not always see is the years of organizing, relationships, and unpaid work that make all of that possible. 

Minneapolis has had a formal neighborhood-based system for decades. The Neighborhood Revitalization Program began in 1989 around neighborhood-based priority setting, planning, and implementation. That structure has evolved over time into the system we have today. 

The problem is that the City is very good at seeing what this system costs and much less explicit about accounting for what it gets back. 

Neighborhood organizations bring in outside grants, donations, sponsorships, volunteer labor, partnerships and local relationships that the City does not have to build from scratch or pay for directly. 

A relatively small amount of public money becomes a much larger amount of actual work in the community, yet most of that added value never appears beside the original expense in the budget. 

The City of Minneapolis needs to formally quantify that return. Not every benefit can or should be converted into a dollar amount, but the City should at least be making a serious attempt to measure the return on this investment instead of repeatedly looking only at the cost. 

We ask neighborhood organizations to do a lot with very little already, including increasingly helping communities through situations that are much bigger than anything a neighborhood association was originally designed to handle. We also ask them to carry much of the emotional labor that comes with this work. 

Government is designed to remain more formal, procedural and removed. The emotional weight does not disappear simply because it is not sitting inside City Hall. Managing that weight is part of what makes both preventative and reparative work function unanimously.

So when those organizations step up, it feels backwards to treat the funding that keeps them functioning as optional. 

Minneapolis already spends enormous amounts of money responding to problems after they have become expensive. Public safety, emergency response, struggling commercial areas, economic recovery, and broader community crises all cost more once the damage has already been done. 

Prevention will never eliminate those costs, and neighborhood organizations cannot solve every crisis, but they can, and have proven to help keep more problems from getting to that point. 

People talk all the time about what makes Minneapolis feel connected, supportive, and a place where people know their neighborhoods. A lot of that has been built over decades through the neighborhood organization system, often with very little money and a tremendous amount of unpaid labor. 

I think it is time we are a lot louder about recognizing that work and the neighborhood organizations that make so much of it possible. 

If Minneapolis is serious about efficiency, return on investment should be one of the primary things we consider when making cuts. Neighborhood organizations are already stretching the City’s money, multiplying its reach and doing work the City benefits from every day. 

We should be very careful about putting something on the chopping block when it already gives us far more than what we pay for.