WHITTIER ALLIANCE
10 East 25th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55404 www.whittieralliance.org

---

Organizations Filed Purposes: The Whittier Alliance is dedicated to building a flourishing and distinctive neighborhood.

Whittier Alliance has been maintaining a regular in-person presence at Karmel Mall in partnership with Frayeo, a non-profit organization based out the 4th floor at Karmel, our community outreach coordinator has been flyering and tabling in an effort to build familiarity and relationships with business owners and patrons of the shopping center who live in the area. Fartun continues to help coordinate regular gatherings of all types of organizations serving Whittier youth and the faith leaders coalition in and near Whittier to share information with their congregations. Our Housing Issues Committee worked with the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs to develop and launch a neighborhood-wide survey aimed at giving us a representative sample of issues and concerns related to livability in Whittier, opportunities to further engage with respondents indicating specific needs or interests, and just generally build our base of volunteers and a neighborhood network with which to build new leaders. We hired a project-specific Latinx organizer to help us reach Spanish-speaking neighbors who we often to do not hear from through our regular communications channels. She grew up in Whittier herself and was able to leverage her deep connections to begin building new relationships in that community for WA, as well as to pull the overall demographics of our survey respondents into a much closer alignment to our actual neighborhood makeup in terms of race, household income, education level, and other key metrics. We hope to bring her staff on in a regular part-time capacity in 2020. In 2019, we spent a lot of staff and board member time and effort on building relationships with business owners with whom we have had a language and/or cultural barrier to engaging meaningfully with in the past. Our outreach staff and nonprofit board member who offices out of Karmel Mall provided considerable 1:1 support for two sisters who own Dini Kitchen, located on the 4th floor of Karmel Mall, to learn the City processes, develop menus, and generally prepare to participate as a food vendor in their first outdoor event at our Eat Street Food, Music, & Arts Festival. We subsidized their participation by covering the cost of equipment rentals, delivery, and registration fee so that they could build the skills to pursue other events on their own throughout the City if they wish to. This brought them face to face outside Karmel with a brand new audience of thousands, trying their vegan Somali dishes for the first time. We have found that direct, 1:1 outreach that meets business owners physically where they are has been the most effective means of supporting them and ultimately securing their participation in this major event in particular.

---

---

Data for this page was sourced from XML published by IRS (public 990 form dataset) from: https://s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990/202013079349302536_public.xml