Council on American-Islamic Relations, Minnesota
Report date
November 2022
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
We worked with St Cloud, Mankato, and Rural Communities to help gain access to grants from the Federal Department of Homeland Security of above $350K for rural Mosques. Our work is now expanding to provide this support for others with limited capacity in 2022. This specific activity will be fundamental in providing fundraising resources to the community as one part of the Hate Crime Preparedness Toolkit to help the community obtain the resources needed, for instance, to cover potential loss and prevent an incident of Islamophobia. The support we are giving to leaders through this activity has established a set of guidelines, knowledge, and tools that the community can use to equip themselves with what they need to respond and prevent the impact of hate crimes. Additionally, during the pandemic, our ongoing leadership meetings requested us to help find resources to address the impact of the pandemic. We worked with Propel for Non-Profits and the Minnesota Council of Foundation to unlock $250K to support over 43 Mosques and Islamic centers across the state with 90% support to mosques in greater Minnesota.
Complementary Community Trainings have also been fundamental in our progress in reducing and addressing islamophobia. On Jan 19th, 2021 we trained over 150 rural allies providing Islamophobia training to rural community activists in partnership with Blandin Foundation’s training: “When Hate Comes to Town.” We are curating this session for the TRUE Partnership, which is an informal alliance of organizations: Blandin: Foundation, University of Minnesota Extension Center for Community Vitality, Minnesota Council on Foundations, Minnesota Humanities Center, Region Five Development Commission, Region Nine Development Commission, Southwest Initiative Foundation, and Voices For Racial Justice. The training is laying the foundation to equip the community to address islamophobia together as a community and individually providing the techniques essential to tackle it in a safe and efficient manner. Additionally, we are working with larger security and a tool kit for both internal community needs as well as ally training to strengthen overall community resistance. We anticipate launching this training and toolkit by the fall of 2022.
Key lessons learned
In working in the St. Cloud area, we engaged in multi-generation and intersectional community conversations and exploration on addressing the most pressing community needs to underscore developing and emerging issues. We organized five different engagements with leaders during the first year of the project and through these activities we learned, not only the reasons for the achievement gaps and lack of representation, but we discovered key future steps on how to efficiently tackle the issue by collaborating with such key stakeholders. One community leader reported that the first Somali employee for the city of St. Cloud was hired in 2020 and prior to that, the city had no known staff members pertaining to one of the largest entities in the area. We also learned how to reach such individuals and introduce our projects best. Through our work with the various stakeholders including state officials, we uncovered the extent of the achievement gap in public schools and the overwhelming lack of representation of the immigrant community in any of the major for-profit and nonprofit institutions critical in the St. Cloud area.
The impediment of COVID-19 created difficulties in responding and prioritizing the goals of our project, however, we found ways to be impactful and engage even if the conversation and work were pulled outside the core objectives of our project. We saw that as a failure in reaching our goals by a set timeline, however, we were surprised that the COVID-19 pandemic has in other ways helped increase engagement. Nevertheless, it was very difficult to conduct the amount of civic engagement which we had originally envisioned along with addressing systemic school bullying. In addition, identifying and reaching out to the community presented itself as a challenge due to the pandemic. When planning our pilot program we learned that community leaders were not the only key members that would help us in our work. Through our engagements, we realized we had to include the apartment complex leaders, mothers, and daughters in the community as well. They were key in organizing and helping lead the movement as they could communicate with renters at their complexes through Ipads allowing us to achieve our goals more efficiently, achieve a greater impact and reach the community to a wider extent.
Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving
The inclusive aspect has been key in our progress including reducing Islamophobia, engaging the community and increasing community capacity. Helping understand the key gaps in community connections and re-imaging what proactive engagement looks like to address Islamophobia was welcomed by community leaders. It was essential in understanding and mapping the community as well. CAIR-MN worked with the Minnesota Council on Foundations to provide COVID-19 relief to mosques in St. Cloud and the state of Minnesota. CAIR-MN worked with two of the core Muslim organizations granting them over $10K in financial support from the MN Disaster Relief Fund. Collaborating with broader interfaith and social justice groups like Unite Cloud and Local St Cloud Mosque has made us progress in our work when reviewing the growing threat from organized hate in the St. Cloud area and reviewing strategies to address it. We are continuing to co-learn strategies. Since we began the implementation, we have conducted over 15 different stakeholder meetings including our leadership briefings and continued to increase these in order to address a multitude of issues, some rising from the impacts of the pandemic.
Other key elements of Community Innovation
The credibility of CAIR-Minnesota’s work helps bridge the gap for the community in ensuring that the organization is recognized as a thought leader in challenging Islamophobia. Its vast resources of 35 chapters and experience in dealing with the issue also help us have this key element of credibility useful in gaining trust within the community. This is critical to help understand the challenges and to also avoid critical steps and challenges when interpreting a lack of needs. Additionally, CAIR-Minnesota is unique in addressing Islamophobia due to our ongoing nationally recognized Challenging Islamophobia Conference that brings international and national experts in working to address Islamophobia. This project also positions CAIR-Minnesota as a leader in sourcing ideas and understandings on challenging Islamophobia.
Understanding the problem
In St. Cloud, we discovered the extent of the lack of understanding by Muslim Leaders of how islamophobia is deeply rooted in schools, housing facilities, work offices, etc. We also reached clarity over the community’s overwhelming feeling of paralysis in proactively responding to these issues. Prior to the project, we understood it as the result of Internalized Islamophobia which cripples Muslims to accept and feel overwhelmed by the impacts of Islamophobia. This was exacerbated by the Trump Presidency due to an increase in outspoken violence toward the community. As a result, our goals of creating a resilient community and the importance of using methods of healing and understanding as key methods to build strong communities became clear. Furthermore, when 400 Muslim workers in the Pilgrims Chicken plant in Cold Spring, Minnesota worked despite contracting and having signs of COVID-19, we saw how fears became evident when employees did not want to challenge the company even when promised confidentiality. However, 5 brave employees worked with us to file OSHA Complaints resulting in immediate changes and relief to all workers regardless of being part of the Muslim Community.
If you could do it all over again...
It is important to comprehend that rural communities have a different pace when engaging in proactive initiatives. We were blinded to this difference of paces, because of our usual hyper-response engagements which often came due to crisis response. Therefore, when building, we have to move at a much slower pace. Additionally, recognize the limited capacity that many in these communities have and respond to those challenges as part of the growth of the project and its outcomes. Therefore, we have learned to be more patient in our responses.
One last thought
CAIR-MN’s civil rights department protected and monitored cases of discrimination arising from the unprecedented and rapidly-changing circumstances of the pandemic, including in the areas of provision of services, public and worker safety policies, and bias-motivated crimes targeting immigrants and other minorities. We scaled up anti-bias efforts and awareness campaigns to impact communities in the St. Cloud area as well as advocated for victims of hate crimes. CAIR-MN, along with Propel Nonprofits, secured $250,000 in funding on behalf of 43 Mosques from the Minnesota Disaster Recovery Fund facilitated through the Minnesota Council on Foundations. We also offered training with the partnership of MCN and limited support for filing for federal programs to minority nonprofits. During lockdown, CAIR-MN brought on 3 new hires, a Community Advocacy Manager and a Deputy Director, and a talented young graduate for the greater Minnesota staff. We also worked with the St. Cloud Muslim Community and their allies to advocate for a new community building as it was going through the city council process to pass a new land use zoning requirement which had previously faced hostility and denial.