A Conversation with Minneapolis Neighborhood Leader Tabitha Montgomery
The executive director of the Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association speaks with interdisciplinary artist PaviElle French on the work of putting people and community first
Interview by PaviElle French | May 1, 2023
Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association executive director Tabitha Montgomery. Photo by Chad Holder.
2023 PRINT ANNUAL
This feature appeared in the 2023 ENTER print annual, available for purchase here.
When Tabitha Montgomery joined Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association as executive director in 2015, it was her first professional step into the nonprofit world. But she brought with her a passion for mission-centered work, improving community health, and highlighting community needs in economic and community development. Her talents have served her well in advocating for neighborhood resources and in developing and strengthening relationships across the community.
PaviElle French, an ENTER contributing editor, is a 2022–2023 Artist-in-Residence with the American Composers Forum. During her residency, she facilitated workshops with BIPOC youth arts organizations based on the themes of Black Liberation in The SOVEREIGN Suite, a symphony she composed and performed at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul.
The two sat down to discuss affordable housing, patient capital, and investing in communities in ways that meet the needs of the people who live there.
PaviElle: May I ask, what is your vision for the future you want to live in?
Tabitha: My vision for the future is one devoid of judgment and fear. I think judging other people’s truths and choices and the fear of what their choices might mean to you produces every system of inequity. In judging a person who is struggling with addiction, or judging whether someone has paid their debt to society for something they’ve done, you make it difficult for them to find housing or a job. To find their way back to community.
When we stop judging other people’s experiences, and stop being angry that some people see the world differently than we do, we can focus on what we’re willing to do to serve each other. If there is work to do in our community, it is helping to cultivate and nurture love and service, and not just toward the people who think like us.
Man, we have perfected othering, because we want humanity to be something different than what it is. We want humanity to be uniform. Homogenous. One note. And PaviElle, you and I both know you couldn’t pull off The SOVEREIGN Suite with just one note.
PaviElle: Absolutely!
Tabitha: We need all the notes. All the intonation, all the sound, all the melodies. It all knits us together in this thing called the human experience.
Can I ask you a question? I remember a lot of what you said through The SOVEREIGN Suite. How would you describe your message in that work?
PaviElle: In the time after the murders of Mr. George Floyd and Ms. Breonna Taylor and the civil unrest, the ideas in The SOVEREIGN Suite were the whole of my thoughts. I felt that our ancestors showed up for me in these visions I had regarding justice, land repatriation, reparation, and creating spaces for Black people to have reprieve from systemic racism. The first half of the piece says, “This is my/our situation,” and the second half says, “Here is how I plan to liberate myself and others.” It’s creating a new framework of thought for moving forward. As an artist, I speak to the things that are happening to Black people. And I also want to create the type of art that speaks to unification, reclamation, and place-making.
Tabitha and PaviElle on the sidewalk outside the Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association office. Photo by Chad Holder.
Tabitha: How audacious and wonderful it is when we embrace the voice we’ve been given. There is so much tied to what you just said. I 100-percent accept and understand that it is hard to remain in a system when you need a completely new system. Sometimes, it’s like the equivalent of getting ready to go through a divorce and still recognizing that you’re going to be family with this person. You really do care about them, but the relationship needs to change.
PaviElle: Yes!
Tabitha: And that is not easy work. Are we willing to divorce ourselves from what we have allowed to be lifted up over and over in terms of process and doctrine, as opposed to service and love? Although I want to see changes to the philanthropic industrial complex that I’m part of, I don’t need to be angry at it. I need to put more energy toward helping to create what’s next. If we only put energy into the current state [of our institutions and systems], then we will continue to have what we have, which is everything and everyone under-resourced in a real and material way.
We need everybody to be able to see and desire to be a part what’s next. For me, what love and service looks like is being able to imagine what’s next.
PaviElle: I’m glad you reiterated imagining what’s next! Could you speak to the concept of patient capital, and to how the outcomes of investments in communities take time?
Tabitha: Thank you for asking me about this. There is the technical definition of patient capital—which is simply long-term capital—and then there is my definition. For me, patient capital is capital that meets the need and operates from a place of service and love.
Patient capital is more about achieving the goal than delivering a financial return to the investor. It’s about creating access to the right amount of funding that allows the project to come to life. And then continuing to assess what the project needs to be successful in that community.
“We need a lot more funders and people with capital to say, ‘This investment is about the outcome in the community. That’s the return.’”
But with our current financial institutions, it’s about the terms, not the intent. “Here, can you agree to these terms? Read over this 100-page document, guarantee us this return on our money back, and then we have a deal.” Banks also have a higher risk tolerance when lending to white businesses, white developers, than they do when lending to BIPOC or brown developers, brown business owners. Even when the projects look very much the same, if not identical. They are more patient with white developers because of systemic racism.
And with the philanthropic community, the contributions from individuals and foundations oftentimes aren’t nearly enough to meet the stated need. They are only a piece of what is needed. The donations allow you to say you’re operating in a particular space—an equity space, a housing space. But they are never enough to really drive affordable and accessible housing, or to drive equitable development for developers of color.
We need a lot more funders and people with capital to say, “This investment is about the outcome in the community. That’s the return.” I would love to see foundations adopt this mindset. Are you investing at a level for the impact to be felt? Or are you investing so that you can say that you helped 100, 200 different institutions or people at $5,000 or $10,000?
“For me, what love and service looks like is being able to imagine what’s next,” Tabitha told PaviElle. Photo by Chad Holder.
PaviElle: I see a lot of what you’re saying about return on investment in how foundations fund projects of Black/BIPOC artists. Funding artists is indeed great, but there is so much money that these foundations receive through the work of the artists. I’m like, “While you’re using my music and my pictures over the next 10 years to point toward your EDI efforts at this organization, how are you continuing to support me and my community?”
Tabitha: We do it to everybody with talent, right?
PaviElle: These organizations need to see thriving communities as the return and show solidarity and allyship by leveraging their power and resources and fostering authentic relationships. You know what I mean?
Tabitha: I do!
PaviElle: There’s one more thing I’d like to talk with you about—affordable housing.
Tabitha: If we really wanted to address affordable and accessible housing in this country, we would declare proudly that everyone deserves it. You don’t have to be working for it. You don’t have to make a certain amount of money to have or maintain it. Housing costs would be on a sliding scale.
The language of the housing crisis puts us in the position of not believing we have the power to deal with it. We don’t have a crisis; we have decisions that we are choosing not to make. What we have is the inability to decide that the human race should always come before any system. We won’t put the people first.
It’s snowing outside right now, PaviElle. It’s going down to 30 degrees tonight. People should be housed, and not just on public trains and buses.
PaviElle: Right!
Tabitha: We overengineer solutions so that those overengineered solutions don’t work. We don’t put enough money in the affordable housing trust fund, and then we say, “Well, we have the affordable housing trust fund.” Then we talk about “naturally occurring” affordable housing, but we know there’s not enough of it because we simply won’t declare that all housing will be affordable no matter a person’s station in life. And no matter whether they’re working or not.
There are clearly things we can do, but ultimately, we need to decide that humanity is worth it. Right now, we don’t believe that we are worth it. We believe institutions are worth it.
PaviElle: Exactly!
Tabitha: Stop running your report and look at the last choice you made that put people first. Stop putting your program, your family foundation, or your election aspirations first. Stop putting first your desire to walk around the park without seeing what you would call other people’s plights, because you don’t want the ills of the world to disrupt your view. What does love look like in practice? It doesn’t look like you judging and fearing who might live next to you because they don’t make what you make, and they don’t look how you look or talk how you talk. All of that.
The narrative is that the problems are so big that we can’t solve them. That there are not enough resources. And if we say that enough times, we will convince everyone that it’s true. And then we will have pulled off the greatest heist this country has ever seen.
PaviElle: Yes to all of that. Lastly, do you have any words of wisdom and encouragement for our youth?
Tabitha: Yeah. I say keep naming what you need and keep naming what you want this world to look like, and more of us are going to follow you. Don’t give way to what we say your future looks like. Because I’m telling you, most of us have lost our imagining of what it means not only to serve and to love but to have the communities that you deserve. So, don’t wait on us. Fall in love with your own vision of what your future looks like.
Related Articles
