Four months after becoming an official organization, the East Bank Neighborhoods Partnership (EBNP) and its members are determined to make their neighborhood association merger a success.
Chris Lautenschlager, EBNP executive director, said he and the organization’s board members are acutely aware of the stakes in creating a new neighborhood organization.
“A lot of people recognize we made a big argument in the last year and a half, and we don’t want to see it not work,” Lautenschlager said. “There were criticisms, there were people that opposed a merger like this and we want to be right.”
Community members from Marcy-Holmes, Southeast Como and Nicollet Island voted to merge their individual neighborhood associations into a new conglomerate in October. Association leaders decided to merge to combine financial and staff resources in light of lost funding from the Minneapolis city government.
The new organization became operational on Nov. 4 when the Minnesota Secretary of State office approved it as a legal non-profit.
Lautenschlager said the organization spent the last four months ironing out the details on how to transition the three neighborhood associations’ financial and bureaucratic functions into the new merged association.
“Every day we uncover a new wrinkle in something that needs to be addressed fairly quickly,” Lautenschlager said. “But I think we’re much better established than we were a month ago, especially three months ago, when we thought, ‘Okay, we did this, now what happens?’”
An interim board of 15 people selected to represent each neighborhood is tasked with deciding how the new organization will function by the time it holds its first elections in the fall.
Katie Fournier, an EBNP board member and a Southeast Como resident of more than 50 years, said the biggest challenge to the planning process is figuring out how voting for future board member elections will work.
Lautenschlager said despite the past months’ slog of administrative work, he is excited by the EBNP’s interim board’s motivation to prove the merged organization a success.
“Certainly the biggest change is having 15 active, informed voices that are really wanting this to work,” Lautenschlager said. “That’s exciting that it’s not just a couple of people, but there’s a lot of energy involved.”
Siya Shelar, a second-year University of Minnesota student and one of two University student representatives on the EBNP board, said she wants her student perspective to offer realism for what other student residents want from the EBNP.
“Being on the younger side, it definitely is the perspective of what does our outreach genuinely look like?” Shelar, who is also the director of local affairs for Undergraduate Student Government at the University, said. “What is attainable and realistic for timelines and events people can actually go to?”
Shelar said that as the only person of color on the EBNP board, she values her ability to offer the EBNP a unique perspective on issues like food insecurity and public safety.
Lautenschlager said another guiding principle to the new organization is honoring the projects that individual neighborhoods worked on before merging.
The EBNP will have a membership meeting at the University Lutheran Church of Hope on March 18, open to all neighborhood residents and renters. They are also planning several Earth Day cleanup events throughout the East Bank neighborhoods on April 19.
Fournier said after more than a year of working on the merger, she is thrilled to see it coming to life.
“I’ve been a longtime advocate of trying to combine the neighborhoods of Southeast Minneapolis in some way, or at least get them to cooperate better with each other,” Fournier said. “So I was really very pleased to see all of us come together.”
Shelar said despite the challenges of building a new neighborhood organization, she is excited by the opportunity for community and strength the EBNP offers.
“It sounds so corny but genuinely public unity, and being like, ‘We can’t exist separately, but we can exist together,’” Shelar said. “And what does that look like?”
