Black Agenda For Change
The Black Agenda for Change is our way of turning lived experience into real solutions. It’s built from conversations in living rooms, community centers, churches, and classrooms—paired with research rooted in Black thought and imagination.
Each year, our policy team and Policy Entrepreneur Fellows take what we hear and turn it into policy that focuses on what matters most: education, health, environmental justice, public safety, economic opportunity, and generational wealth.
And through our Action Center, we help you take action—writing to lawmakers, voting, and supporting your preferred candidates and campaigns, while showing up for the issues that matter most to you.
This agenda doesn’t sit on a shelf. It moves with us because it comes from us.
2026 Policy
priorities
Our flagship initiative, the Black Agenda for Change, is a declaration of what Black Minnesotans deserve and what Minnesota can become. We co-create legislative priorities that move beyond incremental change through research and analysis, focus groups, design sessions, and large-scale convenings that share alternative perspectives and build understanding through ideation. We call for generation-shifting advancements shaped by community wisdom and made real through policy. Such collaboration is how we build power: by naming what’s possible, organizing what’s necessary, and demanding what’s overdue.
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A community’s prosperity depends on the health of its people. Black Minnesotans deserve long lives with dignity, joy, and care that reflects the full breadth of our experiences, including mental and behavioral health needs.
With rising healthcare costs and growing threats to access, we need statewide solutions that protect affordability, expand care, and innovate beyond the status quo.
- Advance statewide solutions that confront rising healthcare costs and expand access to affordable care so every Minnesotan can get the care they need to live healthy, dignified lives.
- Increase investments and pursue innovative models for mental and behavioral health services, so support is available, culturally responsive, and strong enough for the moment we’re in.
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When we have economic sovereignty, we can choose to build, invest, and create without barriers that limit our possibilities. Black communities have always generated value, talent, and innovation. The question is whether Minnesota’s policies will finally match that brilliance with investment, infrastructure, and access. In 2026, we call on policymakers to strengthen Black economic ecosystems so entrepreneurship, ownership, and community prosperity are not exceptions but expectations.
- Advance Community Benefit Ordinances that strengthen place-based investment strategies, prioritize community ownership, and protect residents from displacement as neighborhoods grow and change.
- Pass the GroundBreak Coalition Capital Access and Innovation Fund to provide flexible, catalytic funding that increases the number of Black entrepreneurs, commercial real estate developers, and homeowners across the region. Click here to access information from the latest testimony to get this passed.
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Generational wealth is more than homeownership. It’s the ability to pass forward stability, options, and legacy to the generations after us. It’s the difference between starting adulthood with a runway or starting at zero.
Black Minnesotans have always built value—through entrepreneurship, labor, land stewardship, creativity, and care. In 2026, we are advancing policies that honor that legacy and expand access to wealth-building assets across the life course: from early investments that grow over time to practical supports that help families build credit, buy homes, start businesses, and stay rooted.
- Strengthen rent payment reporting to credit bureaus so timely rent payments support credit building and increase readiness for homeownership. Follow the link to read our policy brief on Building Wealth Through Credit Equity.
- Expand flexible employer-sponsored housing savings accounts to help aspiring homeowners build down payment resources and long-term financial stability. Follow the link to read our policy brief on our proposed Employer-Sponsored Housing Savings Plan.
- Support a statewide Baby Bonds (Child Trust Accounts) initiative to seed wealth at birth. Advance publicly funded, automatically enrolled accounts with larger endowments for children in low-wealth households, invested over time. When young adults come of age, funds can be used for wealth-building assets such as homeownership, education or training, or entrepreneurship—creating a real on-ramp to ownership, mobility, and stability.
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Black youth deserve educational systems as dynamic as they are—systems designed for real life, real futures, and the full range of student needs. In 2026, we are advancing policy priorities that support flexible learning options, deepen student voice and self-expression, strengthen school infrastructure and technology, and ensure accountability to Black students, families, and community. Community identified three policy directions for reimagining education in Minnesota:
- Increase Black educators. Strengthen pathways to recruit, support, and retain Black teachers and leaders, and deepen community involvement in shaping school priorities—especially in technical and career-connected fields.
- Set clear, measurable education policy goals that reflect what Black students need to thrive. Advance Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-based (SMART) policy goals focused on teacher training, African American history, and student wellness, with transparent reporting on progress.
- Increase community governance in education by establishing a Black Education Review & Accountability Board. Create a community-rooted body, with formal decision-making power, to review policy alignment, track legislative commitments, and strengthen accountability for the education of African American students in Minnesota.
Support The Forum
The Forum drives for change by confronting racism and inequities, to improve the living standards of Black Minnesotans. Our Black-centered solutions are aimed at impacting the areas of economic prosperity, generational wealth building, education, public safety, environmental justice and health. Our work is rooted in ending racial injustice in all its forms in Minnesota.
All Donations help to support our mission to create a radical future for Black Minnesotans by advancing Black Centered policies and solutions that actualize true liberation. The African American Leadership Forum is a section 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization, EIN 47-220083