In mid-January, Gene Gelgelu made a down payment on a building along Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota, accomplishing two goals: combating gentrification in the increasingly popular Hamline-Midway neighborhood and laying the first steps of what will become the Little Africa Market and Food Business Incubator. Gelgelu had been dreaming of starting the incubator for some time, but financing was a challenge—until just recently.
Gelgelu’s African Economic Development Solutions (AEDS)—a nonprofit dedicated to building wealth in African immigrant communities—is one of the 20 organizations from around the country that received a total of $3 million in grant money from the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) in December. Earmarked from the 2014 Farm Bill and executed in partnership with the Reinvestment Fund, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program is designed to support projects that improve access to fresh and healthy food through retail.
Gene Gelgelu. (Photo courtesy of the Bush Foundation)
Gelgelu and AEDS applied to the program late last summer and found out they would be getting the $200,000 award this fall. Purchasing the nearly 8,200-square-foot building was the first step in developing what will become a Pan-African immigrant cooperative market.
Although the food incubator is still in its earliest stages, the vision for the space is a home for everything from food retail to a commercial kitchen and bakery below a new office headquarters, community meeting spaces, and a museum for African immigrant art.
The effort is fitting, as the Twin Cities’ African immigrant population has grown from roughly 35,000 in 2000 to over 90,000 in 2018. Minnesota is home to the nation’s largest Somali community, many of whom are concentrated in the two cities. Minneapolis boasts a Little Mogadishu in its Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, which Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American, called home.
However, Minnesota and the Twin Cities in particular are often seen as deeply inequitable places, where people of color experience gaping disparities across income, employment, education, and poverty levels compared to their white counterparts. Food access, of course, falls along the same lines, with 43 percent of African Americans experiencing food insecurity compared to 10 percent of white people, according to a 2019 survey.
Gelgelu hopes that the Little Africa Market and the building AEDS has now acquired for it will help address these challenges. “Finding this place played a critical role in helping us to even think of the possibilities of a co-op and a museum and an office,” Gelgelu says.
Community engagement will be key in defining what the pan-African food incubator will eventually look like, but the hope is to bring together a diverse selection of food production and other projects in one place. “How can we provide a space where [people] can learn from each other and share their culture?” Gelgelu says. “I think that’s really what inspired us.”
Bridging the Racial Wealth Gap
Gelgelu—an Ethiopian immigrant, 2017 Bush Fellow, and former operations analyst for the State of Minnesota—started AEDS at an almost unimaginably trying time, after the 2008 housing bubble collapse. “It was difficult for a nonprofit to start—for any business to start, but especially a nonprofit—but that’s when we started. And our mission was and still is wealth-building.”
AEDS focuses largely on business development and homeownership as the central ways to move people in African immigrant communities out of poverty.
Ribbon-cutting at Sabrina’s Cafe and Deli in St. Paul. (Photo courtesy of AEDS)
In 2015, the organization partnered with Bruce Corrie, an economics professor at St. Paul’s Concordia University, on a report titled “The Economic Potential of African Immigrants in Minnesota.” Corrie’s work found that 67 percent of African immigrant business owners identified securing a loan as a major obstacle to forming a business. He also found that African immigrant communities bring in nearly $2 billion in annual income and valued the African products markets at $281 million across the state.
“The wealth gap . . . exists because if you don’t have loans or financing, it’s difficult to sustain a business. They’re capital starved,” Gelgelu says of Minnesota’s African immigrant community. “This is why we needed to start our own lending program to fill that gap.”
That’s exactly what AEDS does—and then some. The organization offers a 12-week training program to help community members start or expand businesses as well as access to pro bono attorneys, microlending, homebuyer education, and financial education. In 2020 alone, AEDS served more than 1,000 people, including 100 participants in the homebuyer program, the majority of whom Gelgelu expects have bought a home as a result.
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