George Floyd: five years on
The New York Post dispatched a reporter to spend a week in Minneapolis to see how the city’s recovered five years after the summer of George Floyd. The Post headline:
Minneapolis still broken, divided and suffering 5 years after George Floyd death: ‘Black Lives Matter was never here’
Much of the local reaction to the Post‘s recent visit focuses on the comments of current Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara. He took over the department in 2022. He tells the Post:
O’Hara said he was accustomed to a very Democratic city after working in Newark, but said nothing prepared him for the ultra-liberal orthodoxy he encountered in Minneapolis.
“Here it’s very, very ideological and a lot of times it’s like reality and facts can’t get through the filter. It’s a very detached, bourgeois liberal mentality … It’s bizarre.”
He’s not wrong, if anything, O’Hara understates the underlying problem with Minneapolis politics. But I want to focus on the 2nd half of the Post headline above. What did happen to Black Lives Matter?
The headline refers to an interview done with a local businessman who wonders where did all the money and help go that was supposed to assist the city with recovery after the riots?
The Post catalogs the $27 million city settlement that went to Floyd’s family. The state legislature appropriated $133 million for rebuilding.
I’m more interested in about $80 million given by private donors to two private, 501c3 charities that capitalized on the 2020 unrest. The short answer to ‘where did the money go?’ is that they still have about half of it.
You will recall the Kamala Harris-backed Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF), set up to bail out of jail the mostly peaceful rioters arrested during the unrest. Those proved to be thin on the ground, so the Fund turned to bailing out garden-variety violent criminals. The Fund recently announced that it was getting out of the bail bond business.
The Fund took in a little over $41 million in 2020 and very little since. Of that $41 million, the Fund immediately sent $4.5 million to the Tides Center of San Francisco. The Tides is a far-left political funding group with seemingly little to do with the causes championed by the Fund.
The Fund ended 2020 with about $35 million in the bank. In 2022, in addition to the bail/bond business, the Fund began giving grants to other nonprofits, handing out more than $2.7 million to some 19 nonprofit groups.
At last report (2023), the Fund still had more than $18 million left, after paying internal costs and losses from bail jumpers. That $18 million should last the group a few years while it figures out what to do next, if anything.
In 2023, the Fund reports that four employees and one contractor were making six-figure-plus salaries.
Another group is even more puzzling. Black Visions Collective (BLVC) reports taking in $36 million in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 riots. They still retain (2023) about $20 million of the original amount. But BLVC isn’t a group, it’s a brand name belonging to TakeAction MN, a far-left political dark-money outfit based in St. Paul.
In 2021, TakeAction used $725,000 of the Black Visions money to support the “defund the police” ballot referendum in Minneapolis. It failed. TakeAction/Black Visions also sent $92,500 to a nonprofit called the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) of Walnut Creek, California.
In 2021, TakeAction/Black Visions made grants to forty-four (44) nonprofits in total, spreading cash throughout the left-wing nonprofit ecosystem. Other Black Visions grantees that year include the labor union SEIU Local 26 ($75,000) and another lefty dark-money nonprofit, Isaiah ($183,333).
In 2022, Black Visions gave out three smaller grants totaling $150,000. In 2023, Black Visions gave out just two grants, totaling $175,000.
Back to 2021, where more significantly, TakeAction/Black Visions also sent $7.2 million to a St. Paul nonprofit, Nexus Community Partners (NCP).
In 2023, the 2021 grantee Nexus reports no fewer than six employees earning six-figure-plus salaries. The CEO, alone, received compensation exceeding $410,000 in 2023.
In 2023, Nexus regifted $3.3 million to yet another brand-new nonprofit, the Minnesota Black Collective Foundation (MBCF).
MBCF was founded in August 2022. In 2023, MBCF reports regifting some $970,000 in small amounts spread across some 51 grantee nonprofits.
On May 19, 2025, TakeAction/BlackVisions announced a “new partnership” yet another nonprofit, this one the Minneapolis-based Headwaters Foundation for Justice. Headwaters exists to re-distribute grant money to other nonprofits. Last year (2024), Headwaters gave out nearly $4 million in grants spread among 62 other nonprofits.
The new Headwaters/Black Visions partnership intends to distribute an additional $2 million to nonprofits this year. And that’s not all:
If you will allow, I’d like to circle back to one of TakeAction/Black Vision’s 2021 grantees. The nonprofit Communities United Against Police Brutality (CUAPB) received $150,000 that year.
CUAPB was founded on June 25, 2020, exactly one month after the George Floyd incident.
CUAPB is housed in a small south Minneapolis office building, along with several other like-minded nonprofits. The $150,000 from Black Visions represented 1/10th of the nonprofit’s total haul that first year of operation. The bulk of the remaining funds, more than $1 million, were contributed to CUAPB by the Minnesota Freedom Fund.
In 2021, CUAPB, in turn, regifted $358,000 to another new nonprofit, Families Supporting Families Against Police Violence (FSFAPV), with a Maplewood address.
FSFAPV was founded on June 24, 2020. In 2024, the organization dropped the word “police” from the name. Regardless, in 2023 the IRS revoked the organization’s tax-exempt status for failure to ever file any tax returns.
Rebuilding a riot-torn city takes lots and lots of time and lots and lots of money.