{"id":4086,"date":"2026-06-25T17:03:41","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T17:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/?p=4086"},"modified":"2026-07-20T17:10:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T17:10:35","slug":"wealth-building-must-begin-before-a-child-can-spell-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/2026\/06\/25\/wealth-building-must-begin-before-a-child-can-spell-college\/","title":{"rendered":"Wealth building must begin before a child can spell college"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At the Capri Theater, Sondra Samuels<\/a> made the case that wealth-building in North Minneapolis cannot wait until adulthood. It must begin before a child can spell college, before a family opens its first investment account, and before another generation is taught to see poverty as destiny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen you start naming what your future\u2019s going to be, it can\u2019t not happen,\u201d said Samuels, president and CEO of the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ), a collaborative working to end multigenerational poverty in North Minneapolis through education, family stability and racial equity. NAZ<\/a> describes its model as prenatal-to-profession support for scholars and families, including parenting classes, coaching, early childhood support, academics, wellness, housing and financial education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conversation took place during The Conversation With Al McFarlane<\/em>, presented in partnership with U.S. Bank at the Capri Theater\u2019s Paradise Room. At the center of the conversation was Samuels, but McFarlane did not begin with program details. He began with story. Samuels traced her roots to New Jersey, to parents from sharecropper families in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, and to a mother who refused to let a school system track her daughters backward when they integrated a mostly white school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey said, \u2018We\u2019re going to need them to repeat their grade,\u2019\u201d Samuels recalled. \u201cAnd my mother said, \u2018Oh no, you test them. You don\u2019t track them.\u2019\u201d Still, Samuels said the message she absorbed as a Black girl was painful. \u201cWhat I heard was, Sandy\u2019s not smart enough,\u201d she said. \u201cThat stuck with me my whole career, always second-guessing myself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She told a story from college, when she was pledging Delta Sigma Theta and was asked what kind of car she would be. She loved BMWs, she said, but answered that she would be \u201ca lower BMW.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat was the struggle with esteem,\u201d Samuels said. \u201cI had borrowed beliefs of what a Black girl and boy could be in America, and inherited assumptions that were all wrong, but I had internalized it.\u201d That phrase, \u201cborrowed beliefs,\u201d became one of the central ideas of the hour. For Samuels, NAZ\u2019s work is not only about services. It is about replacing inherited deficit stories with identity, confidence, education and capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NAZ began, she said, from the Peace Foundation\u2019s work to end local violence. But violence, Samuels said, was not the root problem. It was tied to poor academic outcomes, family instability, poverty and systems that had failed children long before crisis arrived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The organization drew inspiration from the Harlem Children\u2019s Zone in New York. NAZ received a five-year, $28 million federal Promise Neighborhood grant in 2011, Samuels said, and grew rapidly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, she said, NAZ has about 59 employees, works with roughly 1,000 families and serves about 2,500 scholars. \u201cOur mission is to create a culture of achievement in North Minneapolis where we create generational wealth and all of our children are successful in school and in life,\u201d Samuels said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That mission has expanded through\u00a0Wealth Builds Minneapolis<\/a>, a new initiative developed by Harlem Children\u2019s Zone and tailored for North Minneapolis. NAZ says the program is designed to close the wealth gap and create generational wealth by combining prenatal-to-profession supports with financial education, college savings accounts and wealth-building investments.\u00a0Harlem Children\u2019s Zone<\/a>\u00a0says its broader Wealth Builds model uses financial education and capital investments to help young people prepare for college, trade school, homeownership and business ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Samuels said the program is built around human capital, social capital and financial capital. Children receive college savings accounts and some scholars receive investment accounts that cannot be used until adulthood and must go toward asset-building purposes such as buying a home, starting a business or furthering education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat must it feel like for a 5-year-old to know that he or she has an account with $500 or $10,000 in it?\u201d McFarlane asked. Samuels said the money changes more than a balance sheet. It changes the conversation at home.\u201cOur parents are talking to their children about money, about income, about savings and reducing debt and retirement,\u201d she said. \u201cThe conversations are now happening.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work is also being shaped by a broader partnership model. Greg Cunningham<\/a> of U.S. Bank said the bank\u2019s role in the series is to support and amplify community leaders already producing results, not to make itself the center of the conversation. He pointed to U.S. Bank\u2019s West Broadway branch, which has been rooted in the Northside for 33 years, and said the bank was proud to be an early funder of NAZ\u2019s Wealth Builds initiative with a commitment of about $1.5 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cunningham framed the investment as part of a wider call for banks, credit unions, CDFIs, corporations and small businesses to work together around a shared agenda for economic mobility. \u201cWe\u2019re here and we\u2019re not going anywhere,\u201d he said. \u201cNobody wins when communities aren\u2019t at their best.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those conversations matter in a city where Samuels said too many Black children are still told, directly or indirectly, that they are the problem. She pointed to Minneapolis reading disparities, saying that while most white students are reading at grade level, far fewer Black students are, and even fewer on the Northside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf white kids in this state, if only 10% were reading at grade level, this would be done,\u201d Samuels said. \u201cIt would be overdone, finished.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The issue, she argued, is not children. It is a system that has tolerated failure when the children most affected are Black.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are so many things that we could change to make education work for all, make the economy work for all, that we have been unwilling to do,\u201d Samuels said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conversation moved from education to wealth, from savings accounts to baby bonds, from tutoring to artificial intelligence. Samuels said she wants the African-American community to engage AI seriously, not fearfully, because technology could give every student a personalized tutor and every teacher an assistant, if used with justice and guardrails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAI is not going away,\u201d she said. \u201cHow can we be on the right side of change?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asked to imagine North Minneapolis 100 years from now, after the community has \u201cwon,\u201d Samuels described a neighborhood built on identity, dignity and ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019d have a community that was built on this understanding of who we were, our identity as divine, as worthy, as capable,\u201d she said. \u201cWe would have the best schools, pre-K all the way through to college.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She imagined jazz clubs, skating rinks, bowling alleys, dry cleaners, shoe repair shops, bookstores, coffee shops, businesses and real estate developments owned by the community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just about my success,\u201d Samuels said. \u201cIt\u2019s about our success.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Capri Theater, the message was clear: wealth is not only money. It is identity, expectation, education, ownership, memory and the courage to tell children the truth about who they are before the world tells them otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back, moving forward: Northside Achievement Zone launches $250K matching campaign<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Inspired by the Akan Sankofa tradition, the North Minneapolis cradle-to-career collaborative aims to unlock vital funding before the June 30 fiscal year deadline<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Insight News Staff <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ) marks a significant organizational milestone this fall, the cradle-to-career collaborative is drawing on ancestral wisdom to navigate a challenging economic and shifting philanthropic landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a powerful message to community partners, NAZ President and CEO Sondra Samuels highlighted the significance of the Sankofa bird \u2014 an Adinkra symbol from the Akan people of Ghana. Depicted with its head turned backward and its feet planted firmly forward, the bird carries a precious egg in its beak. The ancient teaching embedded in the symbol: society must retrieve the wisdom of the past in order to move purposefully into the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For NAZ, the egg represents years of accumulated knowledge, hard-won experience, and deep-rooted responsibility to Northside scholars and families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A legacy of resilience on the Northside<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since its founding in 2008 as an evolution of the PEACE Foundation, NAZ has built a nationally recognized support system designed to empower families and close persistent academic and economic gaps in North Minneapolis. That journey has not been without extraordinary trials. The organization has navigated:<\/p>\n\n\n\n