Voices & Choices Minnesota

Category: Coalition Engagement & Strategy

  • Partnership is Structural: Building Authentic Relationships, Not Just Transactions

    As Voices & Choices continues to secure legislative victories and embed equity within state governance, we rely heavily on our partnerships. However, we define partnership rigorously: we are interested in building authentic relationships that last over time.

    Our process is not about transactional support. We are explicit that if a relationship forms and is fostered in an authentic way, we stick with one another and appreciate it may take a long time before something “happens”. A request to partner must be strategically aligned with our core goals:

    1. To be at the table when legislative or state administrative decisions are being made.

    2. Helping us advance our legislative agenda.

    3. Helping us educate policymakers about racial equity.

    We seek organizations that have aligned values in racial equity and are committed to structural change. Initial contact should be made to CDF staff, who bring formal requests to the Steering Committee for decision. We carefully decide when to join in with others leading an event and when we ourselves will be the lead convener. We look for visible evidence of aligned values, ensuring that strategic activities are in harmony with V&C’s timeline.

  • The Ideological Pivot: Why Voices & Choices Rejects the “Deficit” Model of Advocacy

    Voices & Choices for Children MN emerged to address a systemic failure: the systematic exclusion of communities of color and American Indian nations from the policy-making tables. To effectively address this, we needed a new ideological grounding.

    Our coalition fundamentally rejects the common policy approach that frames disparities through a “deficit” lens—an approach that often focuses on what marginalized communities supposedly lack. This narrative relies on the dangerous assumption that the families of children who are not succeeding in standard systems have somehow “not prepared their children properly”.

    We adopted a powerful counter-narrative: the failure lies not in the families, but in the systems that perpetuate exclusion. The harm is caused by the “systemic devaluing, undermining, disadvantaging or marginalizing of their individual identities”.

    This ideological pivot—from focusing on “closing the gap” to affirming identity—is the intellectual engine driving our legislative agenda. It means we focus on creating new programs, like the Community Solutions Fund, that are designed to support and strengthen the assets already present within our communities.