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In May of 2020 news of George Floyd's murder ripped through Minneapolis and the world. The murder of the 46 year old father, friend, and black man over a counterfeit 20 dollar bill, sparked outrage and led to one of the largest protests and community uprisings in recent history. Our members served as critical gathering places and resource hubs for mutual-aid, supporting their communities as they moved through pain and trauma around racial justice and equity. MACC stood as a support for our members providing resources for their teams as they navigated trauma and grief as well as uplifting members who brought voice and leadership to the fight for racial justice and equity. George Floyd's murder was a catalyst for some small steps toward accountability, but MACC and our network remain committed to the work that remains undone.
2020 transformed MACC's HR team into a Global Pandemic Response Team. MACC's Human Resources team connected our network to the most up to date info about COVID protections, emerging policies, and best practices. They shared different organizational approaches to shared challenges to build our network's collective COVID knowledge. The pandemic brought with it new policies: emergency sick leave, PPP loans, PPE, mask mandates, remote work, vaccination, and more. MACC HR met the equity and logistical challenges of frontline worker safety and remote work with well-researched guidance so members could make the best decisions possible. They helped members navigate the high-speed changes fairly and compassionately and continually adapt to keep everyone safe and productive. The pandemic, economic, and racial injustice trauma of 2020 took its toll on staff and leadership across the network. MACC HR stepped up connecting members, managers, and employees with resources to help people safeguard their mental health and wellbeing. From leveraging Employee Assistance Programs, to trainings, to partnering with leadership to create strategies to best support their teams – MACC HR helped members leverage their collective wisdom to navigate a year without precedent.
When COVID lockdown came to Minnesota a big task fell to MACC's IT team: make sure MACC and our IT members were fully operational for remote work within a matter of days. MACC itself was quickly able to leverage our existing cloud applications and collaboration platforms for almost seamless operational continuity. This allowed MACC's IT team to focus energy on our members facing extreme new technology demands. As the whole world scrambled to equip their teams with laptops and Zoom accounts, global equipment shortages meant members and MACC had to get creative. Our new virtual world came with new security and privacy concerns. Members providing mental health services needed solutions for therapists to see their clients. Schools needed laptops for their students to be able to attend classes virtually. Our IT Team helped members navigate through it all - tracking down equipment, finding the best tools, and sharing knowledge so members could learn from each other as we all navigated this intense shift in our workplaces.
2020 turned everything upside down and left our network and communities reeling. MACC stepped up to meet the crisis with deeper collaboration, enhanced technical assistance, and peer learning designed to support our members through this ever-evolving crisis. We created an online COVID resource hub to keep our members up to date on special COVID funding, policy changes and operational adaptations. We transformed our annual member event into an emergency COVID Summit connecting our network to health experts and launched an initiative called "Ask MACC" to expand access to MACC's technical expertise and help our members get answers to the HR, financial, and operations questions that were popping up a mile a minute. As part of that initiative we created an ongoing virtual space where our network could "Zoom In” on emerging issues like PPP loans, COVID program adaptations, safely reopening and more. Additionally in response to the enormous pressures on our network MACC stepped into the advocacy space elevating the vital role of nonprofits in frontline pandemic response. We also were able to leverage our network’s role in pandemic response to tap into emergency grant funds from the Minnesota Council on Foundations Minnesota Disaster Recovery Fund, giving members access to mini-grants to target their critical, but often un-funded program and operational costs during this crisis. Lastly, thanks to a grant from the Minnesota Council on Foundations Minnesota Disaster Recovery Fund, we were able to offer $100,000 in mini-grants to our network to target the critical but often un-funded operational and program adaptations needed to respond to the ongoing COVID-19 health and economic crises, and racial injustice harming our communities.
The pandemic changed the way nonprofits could deliver services. As food shelves and other programs pivoted to socially distanced, drive through, or even virtual forms of service delivery, streamlining everything became critical. Working together with MACC's Data team, our members applied an equity lens to the crisis. The goal - get food to folks faster. In a lot of ways the 'drive up' model we now take for granted at stores like Target, was literally an emergency, lifesaving adaptation for folks who couldn't go to a grocery store. Drive through models allowed our members to safely meet skyrocketing food need, but it meant the status quo in-person, conversation based intake model wasn't an option. Our data team and members worked collaboratively to eliminate unnecessary or duplicate data collection allowing members to focus on what was most important and still track their work! The data team also partnered with members to create flexible web-based forms and allow online signatures to support contactless & mobile intake, keeping frontline works and community members safe.
In 2020 our network saw an outpouring of special pandemic relief funding from government, philanthropy and donors. We saw the government step up in a big way to invest in our communities through the American Rescue Plan Act, PPP loans, and all sorts of special COVID government funds. These funds were critical to our sector's ability to support community wellbeing during the pandemic. However, with new funding comes new tracking, coding, and reporting requirements for managing those funds! MACC's finance team stepped up collaborating deeply with members to understand the new reporting and compliance requirements these funds brought with them. MACC’s Finance Team supported many members through their applications for PPP Loans, which offered a critical financial bridge while many organizations were required to close their doors and reevaluate how they deliver services. The team helped our network finance members successfully leverage these powerful and critical pandemic supports.
Human service organizations have long needed a better mobile technology infrastructure that would enable real-time engagement with clients in ways that are familiar and convenient. COVID only increased the urgency for mobile technology integration. In 2021 MACC’s Data Team launched a collaborative pilot with a core group of members with Food Shelves to collaboratively take on developing and testing solutions for integrating mobile communications tools with our network's Client Track database platform. The MACC members in this pilot co-raised over $200,000 in grants to support the initial stages of the two-year pilot. The group has made significant strides in design, user experience mapping, and data interfaces and integrations. Their groundwork and learning is propelling MACC's Mobile Service Delivery strategy forward, opening the door for new investments and scaling across the network.
During the pandemic nonprofits stepped up big time meeting exponentially growing, pandemic-driven community needs, while simultaneously navigating funding shortfalls, workforce challenges, and massive COVID-related operating costs. In response, MACC stepped up our advocacy work, working in partnership with our broader nonprofit community to activate our network to reach out to legislators, connect with local media to tell their stories, build relationships with legislative leaders, and use their collective voice testifying at committee hearings. In March of 2021, a coalition of nonprofit partners, including MACC, co-authored and submitted a letter to Minnesota’s legislative leadership. This letter urgently recommended establishing a COVID-19 Nonprofit Resiliency & Recovery Fund to invest in the nonprofit organizations delivering essential services to Minnesotans across the state. What followed was a draft bill, and a series of op-eds, action alerts, and tools to help our MACC network and broader nonprofit community advocate for smart investments in our sector. We pushed to elevate the narrative of how vital nonprofits are, especially during a crisis, in rebuilding community resilience and wellbeing.
In 2021 Lissa Jones-Lofgren joined MACC as our official "Culture Coach in Residence" to accelerate MACC's IDEA (Inclusion Diversity Equity and Accessibility) work. MACC established a Culture Committee as a safe and open forum for staff to bring forward IDEA dilemmas, talk courageously about issues, try out creative ideas, and tackle hard things together. Since its formation, MACC's Culture Committee has tackled a range of projects including: connecting with local educator, and facilitator Justin Toliver to develop a series called "Expanding: Gender, Intersectionality and Ourselves", reviewing MACC's policies and employee handbook materials, creating an employee forum for staff to raise issues or opportunities at senior leadership meetings, crafting a new Parental Leave Policy, reviewing our process for allocating technology resources, and more!
In collaboration with members the MACC team has explored different ways IDEA (Inclusion Diversity Equity and Accessibility) shows up in our work. MACC's diverse network of data managers meet regularly to support and learn from each other, and strengthen the ways they collect and use data. The group was wrestling with the complexity and expense of funder required data reporting - reporting that continually drains staff resources. It became clear that "way things had always been" was trapping nonprofits and their communities in an extractive cycle of trading individual, personal data for access to basic resources on the community side, and critical funding dollars on the nonprofit side. A clear need for something better emerged – they decided to name it: Data Justice. The group began to co-create their vision. At its core Data Justice is resistance to the often oppressive and impersonal systems our communities interact with by collecting the minimum amount of data needed to effectively provide services. It ensures that everyone be held accountable for the data, and to the person who shared it. The group is using Data Justice as a lens to examine the power imbalances present in their work and explore transformative ways of using data for decision-making in collaboration with communities, leading to a new relationship with data, communities, nonprofits, and funders.
MACC's annual Member Summit is space where members can connect, learn from thought leaders, and tap into our collective brain-power to solve problems. In 2021, our network was weighed down with the collective weight of COVID, racial trauma, and the fragility of our economy and our democracy. After an isolating and heartbreaking year, it felt more important than ever to come together and reconnect. The necessity of going virtual due to COVID opened up the opportunity to bring national experts to our network. The event was designed in a way to address online event fatigue while giving some space for joy and a mental “reset.” The 2021 Member Summit was a place to invest in care and healing for our communities and ourselves, sort through what 2020 taught us, and find the inspiration we needed to fuel our fight forward. The success of our first intentionally virtual Summit created an exciting blueprint for new ways our network could engage and be more accessible to each other.
Pre-COVID, MACC began engaging members in mapping the deep business relationships between members and their county governments. In 2021, MACC partnered with the Future Services Institute to host a series of leadership exchange meetings with HCHS leadership and MACC CEOs designed to move beyond their transactional, contractual relationship to build stronger connections, and create space for a more generative relationship. These meetings generated exciting ideas for future work together and both groups committed to investing in strengthening this partnership and continuing to host this leadership forum.
In 2022 our organizations dealt with the same unprecedented turnover facing the private sector but with far fewer resources to absorb the disruption such transitions create. Our members are a critical anchor of stability in their communities, and MACC is an anchor of stability for our network. In 2022 around 20% of our network experienced a CEO transition, in addition to turnover in other leadership and key staff transitions as a result of exhaustion and a super-hot job market. We've been honored to be able to provide continuity for our network in critical operational functions like HR, IT, and Finance. We've been able to help new leaders get on board faster, so they can focus on their missions knowing MACC will ensure reports get run, monthly financials are closed, payroll gets processed, technology works the way it should, and more.
In 2022 MACC's Data Justice cohort began to share their expanding learning and thought leadership with the broader MACC network and our nonprofit sector. The cross-member group co-created principles of Data Justice and set the foundation for building up what Data Justice could mean for our network. The group continued to seek diverse perspectives to expand their understanding of the different ways Data Justice could inform their work including hosting Justin Toliver, a Black, Queer, and Gender Non-Conforming facilitator, trainer, and educator who helped them see ways of moving beyond binaries in data, and how day-to-day data collection, and storytelling intersects with gender and identity. MACC's Data team partnered with member leaders from the data cohort to present at conferences, sharing their Data Justice journey with our broader nonprofit sector. The group is continuing to build awareness of the ways data injustice can be dehumanizing and harm the relationships and the trust that is vital to our work in our communities.
2022 brought with it historic inflation and a red-hot job market. Nonprofits can't compete on wages the same way our for-profit counterparts can. MACC's HR team helped members re-think their approach to recruiting and retaining employees. Special pandemic funding gave many members the opportunity to increase compensation to match the pressures of inflation, but status-quo approaches quickly surfaced equity dilemmas. Lower paid staff usually receive lower bonuses, but are often the organization's frontline workers and roles disproportionally held by Black, Indigenous, and staff of Color. The HR team worked closely with several members to shift compensation structures to align more equitably with organization values. The conversation expanded to changing policies and culture to be more inclusive, and enticing for current and future staff. MACC’s HR team helped members work with their teams to identify what they value most - from more inclusive medical and family leave policies, to more flexibility with schedules and PTO policies. These changes required frank conversations about power within organizations, and with the HR Team’s virtual model members had more access and the team had more time to work through these deeper, critical conversations with members!
The MACC network's collective workforce- 3,500 strong- had our community's back through crisis after crisis the last few years. In 2022, the trauma, burnout, fatigue, and market pressures on our workforce converged to create an unprecedented set of workforce challenges for our organizations. In 2022, MACC began program development on an "Ask MACC: Workforce Crisis Solutions" initiative designed to bring the best new thinking about workforce development, strategy, and workplace culture to our members. We kicked off this work by partnering with Team Dynamics to deliver a series of workshops on ways we can center IDEA (Inclusion Diversity Equity and Accessibility) to revolutionize our approach to hiring and build innovative, inclusive solutions to our workforce crisis.
Throughout the pandemic MACC worked in coalition with MCN, MCF, and United Way to uplift the foundational role nonprofits play in rebuilding community wellbeing and the need for nonprofit-specific COVID relief. Then the Feeding our Future scandal broke and in response legislation emerged to limit nonprofits’ ability to access state funding through duplicative regulations and restrictions. In theory the legislation provided oversight to combat fraud, but in reality would make it even harder for nonprofits relying on state funds to deliver services and provide critical resources to oppressed and underserved communities. MACC played a key role in defeating this legislation by activating our network to contact legislative leaders and connecting our members to media covering the impacts of the legislation. The need to combat this harmful legislation and negative narrative took vital energy from the fight for a Nonprofit Relief fund, but strengthened our advocacy muscles as a network and built critical capacity and courage for future actions.
In 2019 the MN Department of Human Service's new Housing Stabilization program was a powerful step forward to help more Minnesotan's find and keep stable, safe housing, but it meant new reporting and tracking requirements for organizations doing the work! MACC members needed support adapting to the ways the program impacted their services, and the new opportunity it created to bill the State to cover more of the full cost of providing services. Fast forward to 2022, MACC members, working in partnership with our Client Data and Behavioral Health Billing teams have been able to leverage our shared network infrastructure to track their critical work in helping community members find and keep housing AND get their work paid for in a new way.