Al-Maa’uun wants its services to be better known
Across the city, many Christian-based organizations work to support the needs of their communities. Al-Maa’uun seeks to be the leading Muslim faith-based organization to address the lack of resources for the North Side of Minneapolis.
Their mission is “to alleviate poverty and oppression within Black and communities of color in North Minneapolis,” said board member Keith Holloman on August 8. Members, staff, and supporters gathered at Minneapolis Urban League to celebrate their successes and hear an appeal for resources to advance their mission.
“Al-Maa’uun is still one of the best-kept secrets in the community,” their executive director, Makram El-Amin, began. He is also the Imam of North Minneapolis’ Masjid An-Nur, where Al-Maa’uun is housed. “We want to bring [Al-Maa’uun] to the consciousness and partner with others.”
Over a year ago, Al-Maa’uun held a community discussion with staff, clients, and community partners. They developed ways to measure their success other than the number of people they served.
“After so long, you have diminishing returns,” El-Amin explained. “We want to shift our focus to how many ways we can touch individuals, families [and] households to drive impact.”
This involves the five pillars of support: food service, affordable housing, employment services, mentorship, and peer recovery services. “A person can come through any of those pathways and be exposed to everything we do,” he explained.
As a result, they have trained and employed 125 community members in livable-wage jobs at an average of $20 per hour. Five days a week, they provide 160 seniors with Halal meals delivered to their door.
They offer 30 beds of transitional housing. This past spring, they took their first youth group on an HBCU tour. At Thursday’s event, two community members, Ali and Kevin, testified about how Al-Maa’uun changed their lives.
Ali came to the organization through their recovery program. He presented sobering statistics, citing that over three years, 108,000 individuals died of opioid use. “That’s roughly nine deaths a day,” he said. “Those are people’s sons, daughters, family members, fathers [and] mothers.”
Al-Maa’uun’s faith-based housing was essential to his recovery. “When I was introduced to Al-Maa’uun in 2022, I went to the sober living house. I was scared out of my mind,” he explained.
“For someone in recovery, it is essential that [faith-based] criteria get met,” he continued. “Because if they don’t get met, it’s easy to indulge in other things.”
Since arriving at Al-Maa’uun, he has enrolled in college and has been a sober living house manager since December of last year. “There is a therapeutic value in being able to help another.”
Kevin came to Al-Maa’uun after spending several years in prison. “I spent about 14 years in prison, and it was 14 years of a two-life sentence plus 30 years for a nonviolent crime in a federal prison,” he explained.
Kevin said in federal prison, “A life sentence means that when you die, they hold your body for 24 hours before releasing it to your family. I thought that would happen to me as I served my time.”
He had exhausted all possibilities of appeal and said he accepted his fate. “I never thought in a million years I would be standing right here before you.” Upon his release, Al-Maa’uun offered him opportunities he couldn’t find elsewhere.
“Everybody was offering me the bag, and I had just come from a life sentence.” The bag represents quick but illegal ways of making money. “I was having problems with my housing. They took that off my shoulders. Then, I had problems with employment. They took that off my shoulders.”
Kevin is now a supervisor in the construction industry, making a wage that supports his needs. He also regularly meets with others being released from prison and shares relatable experiences and advice.
“The best way that Satan gets us is he threatens us with poverty,” he explained. “Guys like me who come from the streets, that think that [we] don’t know nothing but the streets, we tend to go back there.”
Al-Maa’uun works to break the cycle for Northside families experiencing barriers similar to Ali’s and Kevin’s. “Imagine being part of a mission that not only feeds the hungry but empowers communities to break free from the chains of poverty and oppression,” El-Amin said.
“We are dedicated to transforming lives, particularly within the Black and brown communities.”
For more information, contact Al-Maa’uun, at 612-326-5851. Visit their website at www.almaauun.org.