Multi-Cultural Community Alliance (MCCA) - Building Cultural

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, MCCA mobilized immediately and at scale. Across the coalition, partners coordinated more than 200 food giveaway events and weekly hot meal distributions, reaching families across the Twin Cities metropolitan area. AMA alone, in partnership with the Chinese American Chamber of Commerce and area Asian restaurants, donated more than 52,800 pounds of produce and 9,000 Asian food boxes to families in need.

MCCA recognized early that standard food shelf offerings — refried beans, boxed mac-and-cheese, canned goods unfamiliar to immigrant and refugee families — were inadequate for the communities hardest hit by the pandemic. The coalition responded with culturally specific hot meal delivery programs sourcing jasmine rice, tofu, soy sauce, fish sauce, noodles, and other heritage ingredients through Hmongtown Market, Somali Mall, and area Asian suppliers. This approach honored the profound role that heritage food plays in comfort, cultural identity, and health — particularly for isolated elderly residents.

MCCA also administered cash relief to more than 400 families and food pantry support to more than 600 families during the early months of the pandemic, all with a volunteer-led, culturally grounded operational model. Senior services were expanded to include culturally specific hot meal delivery, produce prescription integration, COVID-19 vaccination and bone density screenings, and telehealth access support for limited English proficiency seniors.

Since 2013, MCCA has maintained one of the longest-running community-university research partnerships focused on immigrant and refugee health equity in Minnesota, collaborating with the University of Minnesota Research Networks - CURA, SoLaHmo, and UROC. This partnership is built on the CBPAR model in which community organizations are not passive research subjects but active co-designers, co-investigators, and co-disseminators of research findings.

MCCA brings the community relationships, cultural knowledge, multilingual capacity, and trust that university institutions alone cannot replicate. The University partners bring research infrastructure, data analysis capacity, IRB oversight, and academic publishing networks. Together, the partnership has produced community-informed research that has shaped health interventions, policy advocacy, and program design across multiple MCCA initiative areas.

The Multi-Cultural Community Alliance (MCCA) has developed the SankofaPOWER in 2024, as a community-driven food access, cultural resilience, and economic empowerment initiative serving the North/South Minneapolis neighborhoods of zip codes 55411, 55412, and 55407. Guided by the West African Akan principle of Sankofa — to look back and carry forward what is valuable — and grounded in MCCA's Bicultural Healthy Living Framework, SankofaPOWER combines a four-component digital platform (a real-time food resource directory, an interactive GIS-based community food digest, a neighborhood economic empowerment marketplace, and a cultural knowledge and policy advocacy archive) with physical Resilience Hubs and a train-the-trainer model that prepares under-served residents as trusted community educators and connectors. Rather than delivering food access as an outside service, SankofaPOWER builds the community-controlled infrastructure — digital, physical, and human — through which all neighbors can map, access, grow, share, and advocate for the fresh, culturally meaningful food they deserve, connecting seamlessly with existing resources including the City of Minneapolis Fruit & Vegetable Voucher Program, community gardens, urban farms, and produce prescription programs to restore North Minneapolis food systems from the ground up.

MCCA is now expanding its work from direct service programs toward the systemic infrastructure changes necessary for lasting equity. This shift reflects a fundamental conviction: that communities of color do not suffer from a lack of individual effort or cultural capacity. They suffer from systems — healthcare, food, housing, education, economic — that were not designed with them in mind and that continue to produce inequitable outcomes despite individual community resilience.