A desire for change is reaching further than before. New faces are joining our city’s colorful palette of folks who have been working for generations to change a broken status quo. This may well be a turning point, but what comes next isn’t just about policy. It’s about imagination, vision, and courage.

Can we imagine a Minneapolis where we all feel safe? A city where everyone is housed, and everyone has enough to not just survive, but thrive? Can we imagine a Minneapolis that offers help to those who need it, and where justice is the foundation, not just an aspiration?

Minneapolis is us. We have the tools to make that imagination a reality in our city. Elections are one of them.

We’ve got big choices ahead of us in Minneapolis. Our city is at the center of a national conversation on public safety after the murder of George Floyd, putting that issue — alongside housing, the economy, racial disparity, and climate change — at the forefront of our minds. To help voters make informed choices this election season, Pollen worked with Sahan Journal and Pillsbury United Communities to ask Minneapolitans what they wanted to learn about the people on their ballots. We used their responses to create the questions we sent to each candidate.

The result is a voter guide created by the community, for the community. It goes deep on the issues from a perspective that centers voices too often ignored in political spaces: Black, immigrant, working class, Indigenous, members of the broader African and Asian diasporas, and others.

You have the right to take time off from work to vote. To vote if you’re in line by 8 PM. To register on election day. To ask for help. To bring your children to the polls. And to vote after serving a felony conviction.

Election math seems simple — one person, one vote — but there’s so much community feeding into that equation before a single vote is cast: block-by-block organizing, church gatherings, conversations with neighbors, dinner table debates. We come together and help each other make informed decisions with our ballots. So dig in, get to know your candidates, and get ready to make your informed decision about who can help create the future you want to see for Minneapolis.

MAYOR meet the candidates WARD ONE Neighborhoods: Audubon Park, Columbia Park, Como, Holland, Logan Park, Marshall Terrace, Mid-City Industrial, Northeast Park, Waite Park and Windom Park WARD TWO Neighborhoods: Southeast Como, University District, Prospect Park, Seward, West Bank/Cedar-Riverside, Cooper, and Longfellow WARD THREE Neighborhoods: Beltrami, Bottineau, Downtown East, Downtown West (part), Marcy Holmes, Nicollet Island – East Bank, North Loop (part), Sheridan, St. Anthony East, and St. Anthony West WARD FOUR Neighbordhoods: Shingle Creek, Lind-Bohanon, Victory, Webber-Camden, Cleveland, Folwell, Jordan, McKinley, and Willard Hay WARD FIVE Neighborhoods: Harrison, Hawthorne, Jordan (part), Near North, North Loop (part), Sumner-Glenwood, and Willard-Hay (part) WARD SIX Neighborhoods: parts of Steven Square, Ventura Village, Philips West, Elliot Park, Seward, and Cedar Riverside WARD SEVEN Neighborhoods: Bryn Mawr, Cedar-Isles-Dean, Downtown Minneapolis, East Isles, Elliot Park, Kenwood-Isles, Loring Park, Lowry Hill, and Stevens Square WARD EIGHT Neighborhoods: Central, Bryant, Bancroft, Field, Regina, Northrop, Lyndale, and Kingfield WARD NINE Neighborhoods: Central, Corcoran, East Phillips, Midtown Phillips, and Powderhorn Park WARD TEN Neighborhoods: East Harriet, East Calhoun, Lowry Hill East, CARAG, and Whittier WARD ELEVEN Neighborhoods: Tangletown, Field, Page, Hale, Northrop, Diamond Lake, Wenonah, Windom, and Keewaydin WARD TWELVE Neighborhoods: Ericsson, Hiawatha, Howe, Keewaydin (northeast part), Minnehaha, Morris Park, and Standish WARD THIRTEEN Neighborhoods: Armatage, East Harriet Farmstead, Fulton, Kenny, Linden Hills, Lynnhurst, and West Calhoun

Confused by all the legal squabbles around the Minneapolis public safety amendment? We’ve got you covered! Your vote will count—and here’s a breakdown of what you’re voting on.

Rent control is on the ballot this fall in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Sahan Journal asked supporters and opponents whether the measures will help produce affordable housing.

Should the mayor of Minneapolis have more power? Here is everything you need to know about the government structure amendment on the ballot this fall.

Vote on Tuesday, November 2, 2021. Polls are open from 7:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. Find your polling place at pollfinder.sos.state.mn.us. You can also vote by mail, or vote early in-person starting September 17. More information at vote.minneapolismn.gov. The City of Minneapolis also offers voter assistance. More information at vote.minneapolismn.gov/voters/assistance.

All polling locations have translation resources available via phone. Election workers will connect the voter with a translator who assists via phone/speaker mode. The City also strives to assign election workers to polls with fluency in the most prevalent languages spoken in larger numbers within each precinct; primarily Hmong, Somali, and Spanish.

This project was made possible, in part, by the McKnight Foundation’s Vibrant & Equitable Communities grant program.

This non-partisan voter guide was compiled by, designed, and published by Pollen Midwest. It is part of a larger Minneapolis voter engagement initiative with Pollen, Pillsbury United Communities, and Sahan Journal designed to center the voices and lives of BIPOC Minneapolis residents, and to provide comprehensive, fact-based, and engaging information about the issues and the candidates. The questions we asked of the candidates came straight from Minneapolis residents through an extensive community engagement process that included over 400 survey respondents and multiple listening sessions. We would like to thank the following community organizations for their participation and insights: African Immigrants Community Services, Center for Hmong Arts and Talent (CHAT), Hispanic Advocacy and Community Empowerment through Research (HACER), Karen Organization of Minnesota, Coalition of Asian American Leaders, CAPI USA, and Comunidades Organizando el Poder y la Acción Latina (COPAL MN) We did our best to include the voices of as many candidates for mayor and city council as we could reach, and will continue to update the guide up until election day with submissions from candidates who did not respond to our original request.

Pollen Midwest

Pollen is a media arts organization that fosters empathy, encourages connection across difference, and inspires meaningful action by sharing stories of individuals who want to change our collective story for the better. Through storytelling, art, and connection, Pollen works to advance social change movements by challenging and changing harmful and dominant narratives—demonstrating the power of narrative change through all of the media we create, events we host, and connections we grow.

Pillsbury United Communities

Pillsbury United Communities (PUC) has laid foundations for full, healthy lives for children and families in Minneapolis for 140 years. PUC builds places of creativity and connection, where strong voices are nurtured and stories are amplified and creates pathways to a prosperous future, from education to jobs to economic mobility.

Sahan Journal

Sahan Journal is the only independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit digital newsroom fully dedicated to providing authentic news reporting for and about immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota. We aim to chronicle the struggles, successes and transformations of Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color, whose stories are often overlooked by traditional news organizations.

Jaida Grey Eagle

Jaida Grey Eagle is an Oglala Lakota artist, currently located in St. Paul, MN. Jaida is a photojournalist, producer, beadwork artist, and writer. She is a Report for America Fellow with the Sahan Journal covering communities of color in the Twin Cities. She is also researching Indigenous photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts as an ongoing former Curatorial Fellow. She is passionate about bringing awareness to indigenous issues, especially those which impact indigenous women. Her work is inspired by her family's usage of color, passed down from a great grandmother’s star-quilt color-philosophy of using six colors or more in every piece. She holds her Bachelors of Fine Arts emphasizing in Fine Art Photography from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Ben Hovland

Ben is a Korean-American photographer & videographer reporting from Dakota land in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He became interested in photography while attending Minneapolis South High, and during his career has had work featured in the Washington Post, Agence France-Presse & Minnesota Public Radio. Currently, he serves as multimedia producer at Sahan Journal, a nonprofit digital newsroom that reports on immigrants and communities of color.

Allegra Lockstadt

Allegra Lockstadt was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada and raised in Lexington, Ky. In 2006, she moved to Minneapolis to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Since graduating in 2010, she has worked as a freelance illustrator, designer, and brand consultant while still devoting time to her personal arts practice. A few of her past clients include: Rookie Magazine, GOOD, Kentucky for Kentucky, MCAD, Springboard for the Arts, Paper Darts, and Utah Valley University. Aside from her creative design practice, Allegra also produces cultural events alongside local events team Cult Collective.

Emma Eubanks

Emma Eubanks is an illustrator and designer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Clients include Target, the Fulton Brewing Company, the Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden, Germany, the Children’s Theatre Company, 5ive Advertising Agency, MN Women for Political Change, the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market, Flip Phone Events, and All-City Cycles.

Ryan Stopera

Ryan Stopera is a photographer, videographer, social worker, community organizer,and entrepreneur. He has worked in direct social services and grassroots community organizing for over ten years. This privilege has allowed Ryan to build a vast amount of relationships and experiences constructing a deep analysis of the social issues our communities face today. During the Occupy Wall Street movement, Ryan produced a video sharing the story of five homeowners in foreclosure with Bank of America. The video, which included the cell phone number of Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, asked the nation to call and demand he negotiate with the homeowners who were victims of the mortgage crisis. By the second day of the video going viral executives from the office of the CEO contacted each of the homeowners to help them negotiate their foreclosure and avoid homelessness. He recognized the power of media as a tool to create powerful narratives that can be used to create social change.

Ricardo Levins Morales

Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist and organizer based in Minneapolis. He has been active in movements for racial, environmental and economic justice since his family moved from Puerto Rico to Chicago in the late 1960s. His first political home was the Chicago Black Panther Defense Committee and his most recent, MPD150. Ricardo was a founding member of Northland Poster Collective (1979-2009) and continues to use art, writing and teaching as political medicines to promote healing and resistance in the face of oppression. He works out of a storefront studio with a team of radical troublemakers (all members of the Newspaper and Communications Guild/CWA).

Scott Garrison

Director of Development by day, and freelancer by night, Scott Garrison is a Minneapolis-based Full Stack Web Developer. Scott partners with clients to achieve each of their unique business goals, while putting the highest quality work into each project. He was part of the original development team behind PollenMidwest.org and the developer for the #MplsIsUs voter guide.

Leslie Barlow

Leslie Barlow is an artist living and working on occupied Očeti Šakówin and Wahpekute land now known as Minneapolis, MN. Barlow is interested in reimagining our relationship to our racial identities through healing our collective understanding of belonging and what it means to be family. Her life-size oil paintings serve as both monuments to community members and explorations into how race entangles the intimate sphere of love, family, and friendship. Her work is colorful, tender and nuanced, and inspired by community dialogue and personal experience. Barlow received her BFA in 2011 from the University of Wisconsin- Stout and her MFA in 2016 from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Luis Fitch

Luis Fitch is an internationally artist, designer, mentor and creative entrepreneur who is currently the founder of UNO Branding a multicultural, strategic visual communication agency. Raised in Tijuana, Mexico, Luis moved to the U.S.A. in 1985. There he attended the prestigious Art Center College of Design at Pasadena, California. He graduated in 1990 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. While he has enjoyed great success with commercial art through his agency UNO, his artwork has been presented nationally and internationally and is in more than 100 collections in Latin America and the U.S.A. With the accelerated growth of the Latinx population in the U.S.A., Luis is anxious to insure this community is served. “More than ever in the new face of America there is a great opportunity to make art centered primarily in Latinx themes with a cross-over appeal,” says Luis Fitch.

Terresa Moses

Terresa Moses is the Creative Director of Blackbird Revolt. Influenced by artists and activists, Blackbird Revolt was founded because we felt compelled to engage our community through art and design. The idea to form a company came about in Fall of 2016. We noticed the continued lack of representation and the intentional exclusion of diverse voices from the dominant narrative. We are an alternative to that exclusion. At Blackbird Revolt, we act as a platform for conscious creatives looking to transform our communities. We want to find ways to support the causes we care about, while providing opportunities for others to do the same. Through design we aim to inspire people to engage in activism and movement work. Blackbird Revolt aspires to break the social & political barriers that keep us caged. Our designs go beyond media and apparel, we find creative solutions to help challenge the way people move through the world.

Aala Abdullahi

Aala Abdullahi is the innovation editor at Sahan Journal, where she leads the newsroom’s community engagement efforts. An Al Jazeera and CBC alum, her passion lies most in using concrete data and audience insights to make strong editorial decisions, and producing ambitious, visual-first, interactive stories that put readers at the center of the story.

Julie Cohen

As the engagement & advancement director, Julie grows and nurtures the Pollen network and ensures the sustainability of Pollen’s mission work. She gets all her energy from connecting with Pollenites, cultivating donor and funder relationships, and being deeply embedded in community.

Jessica Taylor

Jess Taylor is the Project Manager for the 2021 Minneapolis Municipal Elections Voter Guide. As a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota, Jess was excited to put her Political Science and Strategic Communication degrees to good use by getting involved with the creation of the guide through coordinating with community partners and candidates. In her free time, Jess enjoys bike rides around Lake Bde Maka Ska and checking out local coffee shops.

Jerome Rankine

Jerome Rankine, Pollen’s Editorial Director, finds ways to incorporate storytelling into every aspect of Pollen’s work. He helps to nurture all of Pollen’s stories from seed to flower, partnering with Pollen’s talented group of writers to help strengthen their voices and nudge narratives into place.

Melanie Walby

Melanie Walby is the Design Director of Pollen Midwest who joined our team after working at various ad agencies in Minneapolis. Her illustration, typography and design bring stories to life in collaboration with our freelance network of illustrators and photographers. Melanie’s work is driven by a deep understanding of how art and design moves people towards social change.