As financial advisors, we have lots of conversations about what makes a truly rich life.
As we’re witnessing in Minneapolis, it is clear that this city and broader Minnesota is rich with community. With neighbors who truly care. With those willing to step up, and even put their lives on the line, for more vulnerable members of their community.
In these times of great distress and overwhelm, it’s easy to feel small. To feel paralyzed. But we can learn from our Minnesota neighbors. Their investment in community is paying dividends in the most literal, human sense. They’ve given us a gold standard for what community care and resistance can look like, and what it means to invest our care, our time, our attention, our skills, and our dollars in one another.
On the ground, state and local governments have been largely unable to intervene as federal immigration authorities operate in their neighborhoods and around their schools. So the response has not been led by institutions, it has been led by people. Across the metro, everyday Minnesotans have organized a vast underground support network. Neighbors taking shifts observing ICE vehicles and documenting their movements. Local businesses coordinating food and financial donation drives. Families and faith communities delivering food to those who cannot safely leave their homes, and people quietly providing rides to work and standing guard at school and daycare pickups. The feeling in the Twin Cities is that the whole metro has mobilized to protect one another. I’ve never been more proud to be a Minnesotan, witnessing the best of humanity from one state over.
We’ve seen small businesses step up, and individuals in turn showing up for the most vulnerable small businesses in outsized ways. We’ve seen an intentional, hyper‑local flow of dollars so that money can work most effectively toward safety, nourishment, and dignity for neighbors who are being targeted.
Our purpose at Abacus is to help expand what’s possible with money. And money is often a stand‑in for power in our society. Our relationship with money has everything to do with our relationship with power.
What’s happening in Minnesota shows us that we can reimagine that power dynamic. With love and care, money can become a force for solidarity and collective wellbeing in the same way it has been used as a force for division and harm. When communities redirect resources toward those most at risk, they are meeting community needs. But at an even deeper level, they are challenging the old assumption that power must flow from the top down and instead demonstrating how power can move through networks of trust, mutual aid, and shared responsibility.
We are in the bands of a powerful and pervasive storm that has defined how our culture relates to power. It is chaotic. It’s loud. It unravels our nerves and tests our resolve, with the winds whipping hardest just before they move on. And as that storm slowly passes, a new atmosphere of power can settle in. A new system rooted in care, commitment to our neighbors, and an understanding that all flourishing is mutual.
As a part of the Abacus community, we get to be part of the dawning of this new way. We can direct our immense power through a thoughtful examination of how we spend, save, give, and invest our dollars, creating the kinds of communities we want to live in. We will continue to voice the uncomfortable truth that money is not neutral. With that honest reflection, we can re‑route the flow of our precious resources to local businesses that show up for their neighbors, to funds and organizations led by directly impacted communities, to investments that minimize harm and seek to cultivate positive impact, and to strategies that prioritize long‑term community resilience over short‑term gain.
We may not all be in the Twin Cities right now, standing strong as legal observers, delivering food to neighbors, or playing in a brass solidarity band. But wherever we are, we can choose to align our money with the kind of community care Minnesotans are modeling so powerfully. The work in front of us is to treat money not just as a tool for individual security, but as a shared resource we can use to care for one another and help reshape the world we belong to.
