If you believe it is possible to have both safety and justice — and have respect between those who protect us, and the people they serve — then I ask you to support Mark Klukow for Hennepin County Sheriff.

I got to know Mark very well during the time he served on my Mayoral security detail, and in the years since have seen him consistently show he knows how to protect communities while building the relationships so often missing in public safety today.

Safety:

Mark’s public safety career started in patrolling the highest crime neighborhoods in our region. He rose to command teams of officers and led planning for major incidents like the 35W bridge collapse, public festivals, Presidential visits, the Super Bowl and much more. He also developed critically important strategies to project communities during high-speed chases.

The Hennepin Sheriff must lead large teams deployed across a broad and diverse county, and Mark has unmatched command experience.

Justice:

Our next Sheriff needs to do more to deliver justice. Mark spent decades building relationships that ensure fairness — with young people as a community service officer working directly with students in schools, co-founder of the nationally-recognized Bike Cops For Kids, and as a long-time member of police-community mediation teams.

Mark was with me in many difficult incidents, including many tragic incidents involving young people, and I saw over and over the empathy he had for community, and the passion he has for fairness.

Respect:

Mark also knows when to buck the system when community values aren’t being protected. When George Floyd was murdered, and the Minneapolis Police Federation President shamefully defended Derek Chauvin’s actions, Mark Klukow stood up and spoke out; he led a group of officers who condemned the murder, apologized to community and called for reform.

Mark showed in that critical moment, and so many other times I’ve seen, that the status quo is no longer good enough.

Too many people are not safe.

Too many people aren’t getting justice, or respect.

We have to do more, and we can.

Support Mark Klukow for Hennepin County Sheriff.

We will learn a lot about how this specific incident happened; Why was there not enough security, especially in contrast to almost every protest demanding racial equity? Why were guards taking selfies with protestors and why were rioters disrupting our government allowed to simply walk out of the building?

All that and a whole lot more.

However it would be a horrendous mistake to believe this is about one incident, and an even bigger mistake to believe we can just address this in isolation and move on.

This was years, decades and generations in the making. Four years of a President spewing hate and inciting violence; his political and media enablers silent or egging him on for political and ratings gain. Anyone who was surprised by this was simply not paying attention.

It is also a mistake to stop here. This is not just about the President or even his complicit enablers:

Stand back with clear eyes and take this in within the context of an American history and its original sin of racism. From our founding on the backs of slave labor, every step of emancipation, every movement toward that “more perfect union” — -emancipation of slaves, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, first Black president — has been met with a backlash. Open your eyes: We are in one now and we have to, finally, make sure this one ends with justice.

History books I read growing up gave me the message that the noble cause of emancipating slaves created a racist backlash because the “radical Republicans” went too far too fast and scared white southerners. “Stony The Road”, Henry Louis Gates’ book about reconstruction taught me a very different story. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, the election of Black leaders at all levels, the creation of Black institutions (churches, schools, colleges) led directly to the hideous oppression of Jim Crow laws and the KKK.

The Democratic Party was at the center of that oppression, feeding aggrieved White Southerners the lie that they were the victims here, not the former slaves. Democrats led widespread voter suppression across the South. Woodrow Wilson screened “Birth of a Nation” in the White House. Franklin Rosevelt looked the other way because he needed Southern votes to pass the New Deal.

The unholy alliance broke apart with the Civil Rights movement, especially when President Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner who spent years at the center of a Democratic establishment feeding the racist lie, woke up. The Voting Rights Act, the Great Society’s massive investments in anti-poverty programs moved us forward.

Once again, creating fairness for Blacks was exploited by cynical politicians who told Whites they were the victims. A great book about this time, directly relevant today, is Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.” When White southerners saw themselves as victims deserted by their old Democratic allies, Nixon and many other Republicans were more than ready to feed them the victim lie. The roles of the parties flipped, and a whole lot of the “victims” flipped out when, of all things, we had a Black president.

Along comes Donald Trump, on the back of Birtherism, with a campaign centered on victimhood, taking it much further than anyone had before, at least in public. So many “good people” stayed quiet, so many politicians who objected to him at first suddenly fawned over him because they were afraid of his followers, an ecosystem of slated media outlets — they all did everything they could to make The Lie the Truth.

What did people honestly expect was going to happen? Cue the mobs storming the Capitol, complete with Confederate flag, hopped up on The Lie that they were victims in a fair election that was “stolen” from them.

Through this complex sweep of our country’s history there is one clear truth:

In complex times, with complex challenges, there will always be people attracted to the simple answer that you are the victim and it’s someone else’s fault. When race and racism enter the picture, it’s toxic.

Something even deeper is at work. A week ago — for escapism, I thought — I started reading Charles King’s “Gods of the Upper Air” about Margaret Mead and a group of other anthropologists a century ago. Suddenly I was right back in the issues we face today as I read about this group’s revolutionary work disproving the widely-believed premise Whites used to “prove” they were smarter than Blacks, and one culture after the other around the globe used to assert their own superiority.

We have created myths, we have told ourselves lies and we have to understand we often do this because of a fear we will lose our position and power. The myths and lies have been used to keep us from looking reality in the eye: A country built on white people having such an inequitable amount of power can only heal if the power is shared.

This tough but urgently needed conversation gets easier if we recognize power is not always a zero-sum game — -if you get more I get less. White people will have a smaller percentage of the power but there is the potential of us all having more when every person is able to have the freedom to use all their talents.

This is not an abstract theory to me. The largest body of my work over the past 15 years has been about building pipelines for young people of color into the workforce. I’ve gotten to know many of the 20,000 young people of color who had Step Up jobs, and so many other remarkable young people in programs like Urban Scholars, the Power of You and ConnextMSP. Seeing first-hand what happens when doors of opportunity open to this diverse generation coming behind gives me an extraordinarily inspiring picture of what our shared tomorrow looks like. I don’t have to be an aging white person clinging to my share of power. I see so clearly now that I, and my family, and all of us will be dramatically better off in this shared future.

I hold that unbelievably uplifting picture of tomorrow right next to the enraging picture of mobs swarming the Capitol because they are part of the same whole. They show us the stark choice we face.

We have stood at this point before in our history; when we could have moved boldly to a better place but didn’t do enough to challenge those pushing the lie of victimhood. That cannot happen again. Progress is possible, and in spite of each backlash, each wave of history has brought us closer.

If you don’t believe that, remember this:

At Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church — where Dr. Martin Luther King used to preach that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” — the Senior Pastor is a descendant of slaves whose mother picked other people’s cotton. In a few days he will walk into that same Capitol building ransacked by terrorists and Senator-elect Raphael Warnock will take the oath to represent Georgia, the heart of the old Confederacy.

Both of us loved cities intensely but he understood them better, saw them in much deeper layers and wrote about them more intuitively than I, or anyone else, ever could.

Over decades Jay wrote volumes of stories about the world’s great cities; extraordinary buildings, grand boulevards, and especially the places people gather. But Jay was neither an architecture critic nor a travel guide. For him it never was about the place but, instead, about how people animate the place. It was about finding what he called “the commons”, those magic parts of cities where we all belong. The places that we find all that we share that none of us has in isolation.

Jay and I got to know each other as young journalists who wrote about cities; me for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, him for Utne Reader, which he built to become one of the more influential publications in the country. I could have felt competitive but from the start I knew I’d met a greater talent and was grateful for the proximity.

In 1989 Jay and I volunteered together on Rip Rapson’s campaign for mayor of Minneapolis. It was a broad-based campaign where so many people spent so much time debating what we believed. Jay was the common thread. He would quietly observe another endless policy meeting then finally speak up with the phrase that brought it all together on a higher level. All these disparate people realized: “Yep, that’s exactly what we’re talking about…only a LOT better.”

Years later, when I was starting my own run for mayor, Jay and his wife Julie Ristau hosted an early fundraiser. After Jay’s introduction about how Minneapolis was a great city that could be so much more than we had settled for, I realized I had the theme of my campaign.

Over the years my wife Megan and I have come to know Jay and Julie well. Absolutely no one is better to ride bikes with around Minneapolis than Jay. I have lived in this city for more than six decades and door-knocked the place three times over, but Jay always sees something I’ve passed without noticing.

Fun as it has been to be with Jay, it has been even better to watch him from a distance. I would be driving by Jay on his bike, or me on my bike and him swimming in Lake Harriet: He got this expression on his face that showed he was totally open to the experience in a way few can. I would see his slightly head-in-the-clouds expression and wonder: What does he see that I can’t, because I know it’s good?

When I said goodbye to Jay for the last time, he had already slipped away. A face that had always been so full of life was now at peace. My mind flooded with gratitude for all the inspiration Jay had given me over so many years. The only thing I could get out of my mouth was a very deeply felt: “Thank you.”

After he died yesterday a few of us came together around a fire pit in Jay and Julie’s backyard. On the second longest, darkest night of the year masked and socially distanced, we couldn’t hug and struggled to even recognize each other. But those people in that place began to talk about what Jay meant to us and a very sad, cold night got a whole lot warmer as we found “the commons.”

Jay was right: It never was about the place.

Why would I publish a blog the day before the election when it will be read mostly after the election? Why write something that is almost immediately out of date?

Because it’s important to make a point that will not be changed regardless of what happened in the election or who won which race:

Our country, which proudly trumpets itself as the most functional democracy on the planet, which proudly sends teams around the world to tell others how to run their elections, is in very serious need of democratic reform. The list of needed reforms is long: How we vote, who gets to vote, whose votes are disqualified, how we draw legislative and congressional districts, …The list goes on, but one point is abundantly clear:

Our democracy never was fair and equal, and it may actually be getting worse.

That last line was painful for me to write because I grew up with such a glorified view of American democracy. I am embarrassed to admit, because it was so long ago, that the first time I was in a polling place was in 1960 when my mother took my five-year-old self into the voting booth. She moved the giant lever that pulled the curtain shut and there we were in a space as seemingly sacred it felt like as church. I saw myself as part of a ritual passed on from the Founding Fathers who, in those times, we regarded as nearly infallible.

Others may have also grown up with this reverential view of American democracy but that doesn’t mean we should treat our election practices like they were the Ten Commandments, written on stone tablets, never to be messed with. We now know those “nearly infallible” Founders who dreamed up the Electoral College and other gems were an elite group of white men who allowed slavery and considered slaves 3/5 of a person, didn’t allow women the vote and lived in only 13 states on land they took from native peoples, who they were in the process of trying to drive from the earth. Are we really supposed to treat their ideas from more than two centuries ago as sacred text for a wholly different world?

We have known we need change for decades but after so much talk and so little action, if change really possible? I believe it is and in fact, in just the last few months we have seen one long-standing impediment to fair elections fall: Election Day may be over!

Strange for me to say that because as someone who has campaigned almost since I could walk, and been a candidate myself, my adrenaline is programmed to surge into overdrive the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Problem is: it is unfair, inequitable, and really nonsensical to give people one single day to cast the vote. Start with how much harder it is for people working two jobs and/or single parents managing kids and work. Now, after an extraordinary early turnout in this election, there seems no going back. The genie is out of the bottle: Early voting, by mail or in person, is now a way of life and Election Day is rapidly on the way to being a thing of the past. That’s a good thing.

See, that wasn’t so hard; In just a few months we have put a stake on one of the most inequitable parts of the election ecosystem. Now let’s keep going. Voter registration: Why? We have multiple interactions with the government that require us to prove who we are — so why can’t we automatically be registered when we file taxes, get a driver’s license, pay taxes, graduate from high school, and much more. Or at the very least, why can’t every state follow Minnesota and have same-day registration?

Speaking of state election laws: Why? Does it make sense to have every state, county, and city have their own crazy quilt of laws and practices? Well, we know what that’s all about. Many of these local laws were expressly created to prevent some people from voting — notably people of color and young voters. It is also deeply disturbing to see these localized laws are becoming more restrictive and more targeted. The villain here, or at least the enabler of discriminatory voting laws, is the Supreme Court of 2013: It struck down the key part of the 1964 Voting Rights Act that prohibited communities with discriminatory histories from changing their voting laws unless they could prove they were fair. Now a person has to be discriminated against and then prove the discrimination after the fact. (This is the ruling that moved the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg to write her famous line that taking away that protection was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you aren’t getting wet.”)

RBG was right and once the “umbrella” was thrown away there was a whole world of rain. Since that ill-advised Supreme Court ruling, more than 1,500 polling places have been closed, which is a major reason why we are seeing the unconscionable 10-hour voting lines that, no surprise, are overwhelmingly in communities with the highest percentage of people of color. It’s also no surprise that there was a systemic effort in multiple states to move polling places off college campuses.

One of the bright spots in this election cycle was unexpected players helping to expand access, notably the National Basketball Association. The NBA worked in a number of cities to have their arenas become mass polling places. Progress, but having spent time this year trying unsuccessfully to help the Timberwolves create a voting site in Target Center, there are still too many hoops with what should have been a slam dunk.

Now let’s talk about how votes are counted:

Here’s a novel notion — what if every person’s vote counted the same? One person, One Vote. Great idea, but if you believe that then you have to be for eliminating the Electoral College. The Founders, who, as mentioned, were a pretty elite group, seemed to believe people like them were smarter than the rest of us. The idea was — in case people got too out of hand with, say, expressing who they wanted to lead them, the majority of voters could be overruled by “men of virtue” acting as the Electoral College. Seriously? Why is the only legit democracy on the planet with this barrier to direct representation even debating it anymore?

If you believe in One Person, One Vote then you should believe that when the new census data comes out every Congressional district should be redrawn by a nonpartisan commission, not whatever political party happens to be in power. The extreme polarization of the current Congress can be traced directly back to the egregious partisan redistricting enacted by the Congress and state legislatures that lurched to the right in the Tea Party elections of 2010. Ten years later, if Democrats get control in D.C. and more states, they could lurch redistricting to the left, and the cycle will go on and on. Another partisan round of gerrymandering, no matter by either party, will protect incumbent seats so most of the races will be decided before people even vote. Let’s not let either party rig this again. All that does is let incumbents protect their own jobs and, in the process, build extremism and polarization into a system that has proven it can’t get much of anything done. Let’s join a growing movement of states that are putting the power of drawing districts into non-partisan hands.

If you believe in One Person, One Vote, then you should be asking: Why do we give every state two senators, regardless of their population? That means on an issue where the Senate has tremendous power — like picking Supreme Court justices — one of the 40 million people of California has dramatically less representation than the 580,000 people of Wyoming. And, it means the people of Washington D.C., which has more people than Wyoming or Vermont, have no say at all — so, it’s time for D.C. statehood.

If you believe in One Person, One Vote, you also have to overturn Citizen’s United and reform campaign finance laws that have led to grotesque empowerment of super-rich donors. This, itself, is worth another full blog but I want to stop before you start thinking this is just another in the mountain of opinion pieces talking about common sense democracy reforms that never seem to happen. Is any of this possible in this political climate, especially if we try to do so much at once?

I believe, again, the answer is yes, especially because the extreme and obvious disenfranchisement we have seen in recent years has brought so many more rightfully outraged people into this fight. In fact, we have already seen action: After the 2018 midterm elections — when campaign spending was so out of whack and when statewide races (especially in Florida and Georgia) exposed clear examples of race-based voter suppression — the new Congress made democratic reforms their very first order of business. H.R. 1 was a sweeping body of legislation that addressing voter access, election integrity, election security, political spending, and ethics for the three branches of government. It specifically expands voter registration and voting access while limiting removing voters from voter rolls. It was passed quickly by the new House, but for two years nothing happened in the current Senate.

It appears H.R.1 will again be a high priority of the next House — very likely the first act they take up after COVID relief — and it is very possible the new Senate after this election will be more open to reforms. If you want to take one action in the next month, read more about H.R.1 so you are prepared to help advocate for it if/when it comes into play in about early February.

Those of us in Minnesota should also be preparing for action in the legislature where democracy reform legislation is being discussed for automatic voter registration, joining the National Popular Vote Compact to eliminate the Electoral College, enabling more vote by mail and online registration, adopting a non-partisan redistricting commission, restoring voting rights for those who have served their time and more.

In these next few months, the battle to make our democracy more fair and just will be fought in the halls of government in detailed debates around legislation like HR1 and whatever is moving in legislatures in Minnesota and elsewhere. While we are having those policy debates it will be important to elevate the discussion to the values we need to restore and rebuild; around why it matters so much to value every vote the same.

I see those values my mom passed on to me in that voting booth years ago very differently today. True, there were almost no barriers that kept her from voting in our almost all-white neighborhood in south Minneapolis. But I know that — especially in those days before the Voting Rights Act — there was massive race-based voter suppression across the South and, yes, here in Minnesota. I know I was standing with a woman who could only vote today because of decades of battles by other women to simply be given the same democratic rights as men.

I have learned that the electoral values I inherited were a privilege not provided to so many people of color and, increasingly, young voters. I saw that so clearly firsthand in 2012 when I was sent around the country to encourage people to vote and saw one barrier after another being erected in North and South Carolina, Mississippi, and across the South. Sadly, the worst abuses of access were in neighboring Wisconsin where we had to spend hours with black voters in Milwaukee and young voters in Madison to help them get around the new restrictions enacted specifically to keep them from voting.

The one exchange that stuck with me the most came on the Sunday before the election in Cleveland:

Ohio’s Governor and Secretary of State tried to close the early voting polling sites three days before the election. That sounded logical enough until you know that Sunday before Election Day in Ohio has historically been “Souls to the Polls”, when waves of black churchgoers finish their services and then head, en masse, to cast their votes. They had learned the hard way that safety in numbers was the best way to prevent voter suppression. We sued the state to reopen Sunday voting and won, so now I was standing in a bone-chilling drizzle with blocks of African Americans straight from church, ready to vote.

Being a Minnesotan, I tried to start a conversation with a woman in line by talking about the weather but before I could finish saying, “It sure is cold out here” she shot back “I’m. Not. Moving!” The look in her eye and the determination in her voice was all I needed to know that the voting traditions she grew up with were very different than mine. Her eyes told me plenty about obstacles she — and almost certainly her parents and grandparents — had to endure to simply have the right my mother so seamlessly observed when she walked into that polling place years ago. I came home so glad I was from Minnesota where we didn’t erect those barriers but a couple of nights later on Election eve, I was sent to Brooklyn Park to try to keep lines of mostly immigrant voters from leaving even though they had to wait for more than an hour. Then I got a call to go to a polling place near the University of Minnesota to do the same thing for an overcrowded polling place full of students.

Traditions are a wonderful thing, but some are meant to be broken. There was a tradition in my neighborhood growing up to burn your leaves in the street; I loved that smell of burning leaves, and it still reminds me of Fall, but we were smart enough to stop doing this. I loved the tradition of Election Day, but we are seeing that early voting and vote by mail means millions more people will be able to have their say.

American democracy is at a tipping point. It can part of a glorified past that our inability to act allowed to slowly sink into irrelevance. Or, we can grab the reins now, make the sweeping changes that are long overdue and finally start a new tradition: One Person. One Vote.

I like the sound of that.

(READ MORE:)

The six government reforms we need in 2021

Fighting Voter Suppression

Stanford scholar says major reforms are needed to save our democracy

7 Critical Democracy Reforms: Which Are Most Important to You?

5 Days Out — A Roundtable of Election Law Experts

Demand Justice Now

Sleepless and mortified, my heart melts in real-time as parts of the city I love so deeply burn away. Knowing these neighborhoods as I do I see way too clearly what is going up in smoke. While the TV showed things on fire, I saw flames getting closer to the first-generation entrepreneur who so proudly showed me the new business where he invested everything he had, the neighborhood kids who cheered so loudly at the opening of that library, and the seniors in that wonderful care facility where they must be trapped because of COVID.

It is nearly impossible to get these horrifying images out of our heads, but we must, because right now our eyes have to stay focused on one single image:

A human being, staring calmly off into the middle distance, while his knee suffocates another human being. Our repulsion should boil over as we see this is a white police officer, who took an oath to protect and serve that person on the ground, who is a black man, who we know would not be treated like that if he was white. We should be shocked again when we see other officers doing nothing to prevent a death.

And nothing should shock us more than the fact that we are no longer shocked, because this image is so familiar.

Until every one of us can see that image for what it is we cannot move another inch forward. Our country, and our beloved imperfect city, has tolerated two tiers of justice too long when we never should have tolerated it in the first place. We need to acknowledge that on some level, every one of us had a role in keeping this inequity in place.

I’ll go first, because after 12 years as mayor of this city, I should. My own efforts to change a police department and its culture failed badly. That will haunt me for the rest of my life, and it should. As each of us sees and acknowledges our own part it can be paralyzing. It was for me. But I was touched deeply yesterday by my colleague at the Minneapolis Foundation, Chanda Smith Baker. Having grown up and now raising a family as an African American in north Minneapolis, and leading Pillsbury United Communities for years, she has seen so many more of the consequences of our deep, endemic racism than I ever will. But as we surveyed the damage and pain in our community she said simply, and clearly: “We have no choice but to act.”

So act we will.

We will deploy $500,000 from The Minneapolis Foundation’s Fund for Safe Communities to support the people of Minneapolis as they strive for justice, equity and healing in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in police custody.

Money matters. But it is not the only tool that can and should be used by a community Foundation like the Minneapolis Foundation. The Foundation needs to use its visibility, privilege, and trust in the community to bring about change in policies and values. Most importantly, the Foundation needs to recognize that while raising its voice, it also needs to lift up the voices of the people who are closest to the issues. In addition, my responsibility goes beyond leading the Foundation to include the special obligation of a former Mayor who owes it to the city to be as blunt and sometimes dangerous in sharing what my experience tells me needs to be done right now.

So what can others do?

A very well-intentioned friend asked me yesterday what was the one thing he could do to make this situation better. I had to say, “there’s no one thing.” You can’t fully stop racism in policing without understanding the racism in the laws we ask our police to enforce, the racism in a criminal justice system that over-incarcerates black men, the racism in how we white Americans perceive a threat when we see someone who is black. An unjust economic system matters, and so does the issue where I focus most these days: the intolerable racial inequities in education.

It all matters and it’s all connected. But, right now, nothing matters more in Minneapolis than reforming the Minneapolis police. Obvious first steps include demilitarizing the training programs, building better tracking systems that intervene early in an officer's career before the behavior escalates into these tragic incidents, and overturning the “Stanek Amendment” - the legislature shoved down Minneapolis’ throat to prevent the city from requiring officers live in the city.

There are many more specific actions that can be taken but above it all is police culture. I know this city’s history well. There’s been something about police in Minneapolis — practically from the beginning. I’m often asked why does one of the most progressive cities in the country have so many racial issues with our police? First, this city that so proudly wears its progressive credentials has actually not been so progressive on issues of race — especially as race relates to police, housing, the economy, and more.

More important, after years of being a reporter covering the department; and after years serving as Mayor and getting to know many officers well; I have come to know that we have a majority of officers who let a minority of officers create a dominant us-vs-them culture steeped in racism.

Central to that is the toxic Federation President Bob Kroll who pushes every hot button, blames every victim, refuses to acknowledge any misbehavior, and plays to the deepest fears of his members. (If this is sounding familiar, it should.) Protesters have called for his resignation. But he is an elected official. And like any politician, you can only remove that person if the police officers who elected him rise up and say enough is enough. It is both shocking, and shockingly unsurprising, that we have not heard more officers speak out about George Floyd’s death. To the many good officers I know exist: I know the consequences of being shunned by your co-workers, but I also know you know in your heart that George Floyd should not be dead. Your silence is deafening and this city cannot move forward until we hear your voices.

I also truly believe our greatest hope is Police Chief Medaria Arradondo. I have known Rondo in many ways — as the incredibly effective chief of staff to a police chief, I tried to fire; as the officer who night after night I saw build rapport with residents living in fear; as the officer who sued the department for racial bias; as the precinct commander who built deep respect with both the officers and the community and now, as the chief who made the right call by immediately firing the officers involved in the death of George Floyd. His moral compass has never wavered. His empathy has never faltered. He is a child of our city whose roots and understanding run deep. He is exactly the right person at the right time. Rarely does the world present us with clear-cut choices but in this case, I can bluntly say: Rondo is the good guy, Kroll is the bad guy and I urge every person in the community to stand squarely behind Rondo at this critical time because he absolutely must win.

He is not alone. Mayor Jacob Frey stood rock solid with his chief when the tough decisions needed to be made and I know personally he has the moral clarity to do that again. Help him succeed where I failed.

He is also not alone. This city council has the guts and perspective to do what’s right. Specifically, this city that should rightfully feel such shame for letting this go so long should also be filled with pride in the inspirational leadership that Andrea Jenkins and Jeremiah Ellison, a kid from the north side, bring to our community.

We have stood at this place before, in Minneapolis and across the country. Another incident, a few days of promises and then…as the attention fades, so does the hope for change. Is change possible? I know it is because I have seen it before.

Forty-one years ago, I was a young crime reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune. Night after night, I covered a police department that had deep issues of trust with two communities: residents who were black, and residents who were gay.

All these years later one of those groups has seen enormous change. The Minneapolis Police, which back then routinely beat and humiliated gay residents, is now one of the most gay-friendly departments in the country with openly gay officers serving in every part of the force, including at one point, the chief role.

The fact that we have seen so much progress with gay residents and almost none with black residents says a lot about racism. We need to own that. But it does also say that change is possible, and now we have to prove that is true.

I finish writing this as the sun comes up. I hear a siren and shudder to think what has happened overnight. Teetering on the precipice with the city I love so deeply, I can only say: Hold that horrible image of the knee on the neck in your head to see clearly what is wrong that must be made right. Take the advice Chanda gave me that, “we have no option but to act.” And realize that sometimes when you fall over the edge you are actually going to a better place.

R.T. Rybak
Former Minneapolis Mayor (2002–2013)

Have you ever had one of those jobs where, after a month or so, you realize it is absolutely nothing like it was supposed to be? You realize you have two options: stick with it and change your expectations, or just leave.

I had one of those jobs once but I didn’t have the “leave” option because I had just been elected to a four year term as Mayor of Minneapolis. A few months into the job, my inbox overflowing and very little to show for it, I looked in the mirror and said, “There isn’t a damn thing I can get done all by myself.” I couldn’t pass a budget without the council, couldn’t reform City Hall without the workforce, couldn’t grow jobs without business, couldn’t mobilize public opinion without faith leaders and community activists, and on and on. The big fancy title meant everyone expected me to be able to solve everything but I couldn’t solve anything unless I got everyone to help.

The nice thing about looking in a mirror is it reflects everything back in reverse, and the reverse of “can’t do a thing on my own,” is “don’t have to do it all alone.” When I really thought through my predicament, I realized I was trying to hold up all this weight when there were hands in every direction ready to help. There were other political leaders, other layers of government, business, philanthropy, activists, faith leaders, academics and more were looking for a way to get closer, which made almost anything I wanted to do easier, and more impactful.

Doing that, however, was going to require a dramatic reset of the way I showed up. It meant less credit, less ego, more compromise and — here’s the real key — a whole lot more listening.

Sometimes I got this right, a lot of times I didn’t, but over the next 11 years I spent as Mayor, almost always when I got something done it wasn’t “I” who got something done. During that time I helped start a regional mayors association, a cross-sector leadership table creating a civic agenda, a business-led economic recruitment organization, a nonprofit focused on closing racial gaps in education, a data collaborative to create shared outcomes, task forces to attack homelessness and youth violence, and more.

It was true I couldn’t do a single thing on my own but it was even more true that I got a lot done by not trying to do it all myself.

I now see this in a different light from my current position as CEO of the Minneapolis Foundation, where a large part of my job involves structuring partnership with the public sector. Asking for partnership does not seem to be problem; I find there is not a shortage of requests for philanthropy to give money to the public sector, but there is a serious challenge setting boundaries. As government increasingly cuts back services while community needs increase, there is a dangerous assumption that philanthropy will backfill the gaps.

First, that is impossible, because philanthropic dollars are dwarfed by public spending; there is no way grants can make up the massive cuts being made by the public sector. Equally important, trying to pull philanthropy into core services challenges our ability to help fund needed system change. Simply: Government is a gas station (where you go regularly) while philanthropy is Jiffy Lube (where you go occasionally to help things work better.).

Since one person’s “gas station” can be another person’s “Jiffy Lube”, it’s important to have a shared understanding. To me that means clearly knowing government’s job is to provide the ongoing basic core services proving the common good. Philanthropy’s role is to help innovate how those services are delivered. Philanthropy can be especially helpful piloting high risk innovations where failure is harder to explain to the public, and, foundations are especially motivated today to invest in accelerating public actions that close equity gaps. To me that means: Government shouldn’t ask us to backfill cuts in affordable housing capital so, instead, we can fund job transition costs for establishing work readiness efforts directly inside the housing. Government should not ask us to fund a police officer position that has been cut so, instead, our dollars can pay for retraining officers to address mental health issues.

When I think of words associated with American mayors, “humility” is probably not the very first one that comes to mind but, increasingly, it should. You cannot build the partnerships necessary to succeed in office today without it. Voters need to get this, too, because we have to stop judging mayors’ success by how well they fit the image of the bull in a china shop “leading” by telling everyone it’s my way or the highway. The weightlifter can’t move a rock as far as the skinny guy who knows how to use a lever, and the mayor who just pounds the table doesn’t get as much done as the one whose table has a lot more chairs.

###

This essay is part of a series titled, Accelerate This! Government as Social Innovator, which features leaders at the intersection of philanthropy and government offering ideas about how non-public dollars can be used to drive innovation and systemic change on complex social issues. The Accelerate This! Government as Social Innovator national symposium will take on May 1, 2018 in Los Angeles and feature systems-changing innovations from cities that can be adapted for your community. The event is part of the City Accelerator, an initiative led by Living Cities and supported by the Citi Foundation. For more information, click here.

Why I Was so Happy “I” Couldn’t Do Anything Myself was originally published in Accelerate This! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.