By TIPHERET PEÑA / Murphy News Service
Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC) is rebuilding and moving forward after an arson attack in April left their building in ashes.
On the morning of April 15, 2015, Wintana Melekin was late for a staff meeting at NOC’s central office located on West Broadway in north Minneapolis. She lay in bed, unaware that she was about to experience one of the worst days of her life.
NOC, whose acronym intentionally sounds like “knock,” is a grassroots organization that began four years ago and is the intersection of public policy, disruption, organizing and racial equity. The member-led organization was started by people who wanted to do authentic community organizing by knocking on doors and organizing around issues that community members identified themselves.
It wasn’t long before Melekin, civic and political engagement director at NOC, began receiving text messages and calls from friends and people she didn’t know telling her that NOC’s office was on fire.
“I just started driving as fast as I could and by the time I got there, the building was gone,” Melekin said.
About a month after the fire, NOC’s staff found out that the fire was caused by arson.
Four people were injured and sought medical treatment as a result of the fire but there were no casualties.
The case remains open as police are still investigating the incident. “We haven’t been able to figure out who it was or why they did it, but we just know it was an intentional fire to burn down the building,” Melekin said.
The fire, however, did anything but stop the organization from moving forward and pursuing its goals.
The organization is temporarily sharing space with Emerge, an employment agency located down the street from where NOC’s original office was.
“Within two hours we were inside Juxtaposition … an arts organization across the street, they let us have their board room and we had a huge rally of 1,500 people fighting for a $15 minimum wage,” Melekin said.
As they watched their building burn, NOC’s staff decided to start a fundraiser on their website to raise money for the 20 residents who lived in the same building as the NOC office. They raised $20,000 in 24 hours and gave all the money to the residents.
Over the past four years, NOC has engaged and organized over a variety of community issues in order to fulfill its goal of “building power in under-resourced communities and communities of color across the Twin Cities,” as identified on their website.
NOC focuses primarily on increasing voter turnout, restoring felon voter rights, environmental justice, education, worker’s rights, transit justice and police accountability.
The organization’s past efforts include a protest in 2013 at Wells Fargo’s corporate office in Minneapolis demanding the bank to turn over vacant homes for affordable housing, a Black Lives Matter protest following the verdict of the Michael Brown case in 2014 which led to the shutdown of 35W and most recently, a rally at Target Field demanding better wages and working conditions for concessions workers employed by temporary agencies.
Throughout all of their efforts, NOC’s primary goal is to make “racial equity the center of politics,” Melekin said.
Despite their successes, those efforts have not come easily to the organization.
In September 2014, one of NOC’s field organizers, Navell Gordon was arrested for talking to community members about NOC’s voting rights campaign in a Cub Foods parking lot. Gordon had been canvasing in the parking lot and was told by a police officer that what he was doing was illegal. As he was leaving, he stopped to talk to a friend and he was attacked by the officer.
“The officer … tackled him to the ground, cuffed him, arrested him; I arrived on the scene, I began to question the officer … he then arrested me,” Melekin said. “I’ve never been in trouble a day in my life … this officer decided that because I questioned his authority, I questioned his horrible tactics, he got upset and he arrested me.”
Though the charges placed on Gordon and Melekin for trespassing were later dropped, police interference with NOC became more and more frequent following the arrests, Melekin said.
In an attempt to expose the police harassment they were receiving and to show the reality of grassroots organizing, NOC invited Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges and Minneapolis Police Chief Janeé Harteau to canvas with them.
That day, the mayor and Gordon decided to take a picture together. They had looked at each other awkwardly before deciding to point at each other, Melekin said.
“It became a news story, KSTP ran it … they really decided to destroy this black man’s life for nothing other than ratings,” she said.
The story quickly became national news and trended on social media through the hashtag “#Pointergate,” and attracted the attention of Jon Stewart, who ran a five-minute segment on the controversy on his show in November of last year.
The story ran on Election Day, a day the organization spends increasing voter turnout throughout Minneapolis.
“We were up all night working on pointergate … making sure people called out the injustice that was happening,” Melekin said.
While NOC will continue to prioritize direct contact with community members through methods such as door-knocking and social media, currently the organization is focused on passing the Worker’s Bill of Rights at Minneapolis City Hall. The bill includes proposals for earned sick time and fair scheduling.
Although NOC is currently raising money to rebuild their office building, Melekin was unable to discuss the organization’s efforts to buy back the building at this time.
Melekin hopes that in the future, NOC will be able to change who is representing Minnesota in Congress and who is advocating for the communities NOC works for, in hopes to make state leadership more reflective of Minneapolis communities and people of color.
With or without a permanent building, NOC is an organization that can’t be stopped.
“NOC is movement, not a building,” Melekin said.
Tipheret Peña is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.