By many measures, life is more difficult for black residents in Minneapolis than it is for whites. Blacks are less likely, for instance, to obtain a high-school diploma or buy a home and more likely to be poor. The city has become more segregated, and the shooting deaths by police of Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, and Thurman Blevins have inflamed the distrust some black residents have of law-enforcement officers.
Chanda Smith Baker, vice president for impact at the Minneapolis Foundation, is bringing residents together to discuss the city’s toughest issues head on. And to do that, she’s fighting “Minnesota nice” — the tendency for people to steer clear of unpleasant topics and avoid making others feel uncomfortable.
“I didn’t come to the Minneapolis Foundation to put out grant money. I came to make a difference,” she says. “Our role is helping the community achieve its best.”
Smith Baker’s tools to promote greater dialogue include a podcast and a series of live events, which have featured high-profile speakers like Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, and Yusef Salaam, who spent nearly seven years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit when he was convicted as one of the Central Park Five.
For one conversation, Smith Baker took the stage with Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, and Minneapolis Police Chief Medarria Arradondo. Three days earlier, police had fatally shot Thurman Blevins. People in Minneapolis were outraged, Smith Baker remembers, and some participants, she said, worried that if the chief showed up wearing his cap, badge, and holstered gun, it would be considered an insult.
Onstage, Smith Baker asked Castile if the chief’s regalia made her feel uneasy.
“The uniform didn’t shoot him,” Smith Baker recalls Castile saying as she reached out for the police chief’s hand. “This is my brother.”
Moments of grace like Castile’s treatment of the chief can help build the trust needed to change the city’s criminal-justice system, Smith Baker says. Specifically, Smith Baker is working with elected officials, law-enforcement leaders, and nonprofit executives to craft better pretrial policies. The conversations, she says, have helped the policy push gain momentum because they’ve given people who might otherwise be afraid of appearing racist or problematic a “safe space” to learn from one another and seek solutions.
“The things we need to dig up and bring out to move forward on are just sitting there laying dormant and creating an illness across our communities,” she says. “By creating a space to do this, people can be better informed on the decisions they need to make.”
‘Trial by Fire’
Smith Baker has a long track record of working to improve Minneapolis. Born and bred on the North Side — her family has lived in the predominantly black neighborhood for five generations — she worked in local nonprofits for 20 years before joining the foundation in 2017.
It was trial by fire when she became CEO of Pillsbury United Communities, a nonprofit that provides job training, arts, and educational programs in the city. A few weeks after she took the helm, in 2011, a tornado ripped through the North Side, damaging four of Pillsbury’s buildings and Smith Baker’s home. She was feeling overwhelmed and living in a hotel when then Mayor R.T. Rybak asked her to lead the response to the disaster in the neighborhood, recognizing her deep ties in the community.
Six years later after Rybak had become CEO of the Minneapolis Foundation, he turned to Smith Baker again to help the grant maker deepen its connection to city residents.
“As a 63-year-old white man, certain things I can successfully lead, and sometimes I have to stand back and let those who are closer to the work move to the front,” Rybak says.
It seems to be working.
Danyika Leonard, policy director at the nonprofit Education Evolving, remembers feeling a knot in the pit of her stomach when Smith Baker left Pillsbury because she had been such an effective leader there. But since then, seeing Smith Baker ask residents to face up to things like police brutality, white supremacy, and systemic injustices in the criminal-justice system has made Leonard want to learn more about the Minneapolis Foundation. The podcasts and live events, she says, suggest the foundation isn’t just doing “lightweight” grant making and is instead trying to tackle difficult issues.
Smith Baker has been a guide for Leonard personally. When Leonard was at her lowest, feeling burned out in her work, beaten up on all sides, and ineffective as a leader, Smith Baker dropped what she was doing, came for a visit, and told Leonard she had felt the same way on many occasions.
The validation, Leonard says, freed her from thinking that she was the problem and helped her acknowledge that the work she was doing was, in fact, difficult. Sometimes — like when Smith Baker was living out of a hotel after the tornado — things are rough. Her advice was to just be who you are, unapologetically.
“She’s a great reminder that you don’t have to put on a face to be a leader,” Leonard says.
