By Farrah Mina, The Imprint, August 16, 2020
Every last Sunday of the month, around 30 people gather in Minnesota’s Twin Cities to partake in the Black Civic Network’s community dinners. Over a shared meal, the network leads discussions about policies and issues that impact Black families in the state, like elections, reparations and child protection services.
Nick Muhammad founded the organization in 2017 with a mission to serve Black communities’ political and economic interests after feeling that Twin Cities organizations left them out. Part of its agenda will be support of a bill to shield Black families from having children taken into foster care in a state with alarmingly high disproportionality in its child welfare system.
The goal of the network is to foster intergenerational collaboration and “to create an organization filled with young people who can go to the Capitol, go into City Hall, go into these county meetings and be able to — not only advocate — but be on the ground level of creating policy,” said Thomas Barry, the network’s program director. “This is tedious work, but [founder Muhammad] saw it as a need.”
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