Why We Knock the Block
By Jamael Lundy, J.D. | October 21, 2026
My name is Jamael Lundy. I’ve spent my career organizing for more equitable housing, education, and public safety. As a Senior Staffer in the Minnesota House of Representatives’ Public Safety Committee, Policy Director at the Minnesota Justice Research Center (MNJRC), and Lobbyist for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, I saw how elections shape decisions that affect our lives. That experience led me to co-found Knock the Block, a nonpartisan campaign at the MNJRC.
How the work began
In 2012, I moved back to Minnesota from Washington, D.C., to participate in a partisan voter outreach effort in Greater Minnesota. I was welcomed into a community of organizers using some of the most sophisticated voter outreach tools available. I learned how voter files and likely-voter models helped campaigns decide whom to contact and where to invest their resources. I’ve participated in a partisan or nonpartisan voting effort in Minnesota every election cycle since.
That first campaign also showed me the limitations of that approach. Campaigns concentrated on competitive districts and people considered likely to vote. I began to see how those priorities could leave Black communities, particularly those with lower participation, receiving less attention. I wanted to take what I was learning and use it to reach people those efforts were overlooking.
As I became more involved in Black voter outreach, I encountered a different problem. Much of the advice emphasized visibility at community events, working through churches, or visiting familiar community spaces. Those approaches drew on longstanding relationships, but they often reached people who were already civically engaged. Other efforts involved knocking in areas known to have Black residents without a list or a way to record conversations and carry that information into the next election.
I wanted to bring these approaches together: the relationships and community knowledge at the heart of Black organizing, combined with the data and research capacity I had encountered in predominantly white campaign institutions.
In 2016, I began looking more closely at research on relational organizing and youth engagement. I also explored Census data, which helped us identify smaller pockets of Black residents beyond the urban neighborhoods campaigns typically associated with Black voters. We built a youth mentorship program around that approach, bringing predominantly Black young organizers into conversations with residents in places including St. Cloud, Woodbury, Brooklyn Park, and North Minneapolis.
We saw slightly higher turnout in the areas we visited than in the previous presidential election. But we hadn’t established a comparison group, so we couldn’t determine how much, if any, of that change came from our work. I wanted to know what we could accomplish with the resources to sustain those relationships and properly evaluate the results.
Over the years that followed, I brought that proposal to foundations, nonprofit organizations, and partisan voter outreach organizations. I couldn’t secure the funding to carry it out. Even as I continued organizing each election cycle, the question stayed with me: what would happen if we consistently invested in these communities and measured what changed?
When I connected with MNJRC, the organization was already working on a democracy event and had authored three reports focused on understanding the strategies to mobilize formerly incarcerated eligible voters. That collaboration finally gave us an opportunity to bring sustained community outreach and research together.
What the data and the neighborhoods tell us
At MNJRC, I finally had the support to look closely at what I’d been seeing for years. Working with Dr. Rob Stewart, we paired voting records from the Minnesota Secretary of State with citizen population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. We wanted to see exactly where participation was falling short, and to give this approach the real test it had never gotten.
The numbers were stark. In the areas we studied around Rondo and Heritage Park, we estimate that about four in ten adult citizens voted in 2024. Statewide, it was nearly eight in ten. To be sure, these figures describe the neighborhoods we studied, not the choices of individual Black residents.
At Knock the Block, we don’t read that gap as a sign that people care less about where they live. We read it as the result of a long history. Our neighborhoods have seen decades of underinvestment, including too few chances in school to connect voting with the decisions that shape a community. Campaign targeting and familiar organizing habits often mean no one comes to these doors with a personal invitation. After decades of decisions being made about these neighborhoods without them, residents reasonably wonder whether a vote will change anything on their block.
The Rondo neighborhood shows where that doubt comes from. By the 1930s, half of St. Paul’s Black residents lived there, in a neighborhood with its own newspapers, churches, clubs and businesses. When planners chose to run I-94 straight through it, residents did what civic life asks of us: they organized, protested and demanded help for families being forced out. They won a few design changes, but the freeway came anyway, and police carried one minister out of his home when he refused to leave. Roughly 600 families and 300 businesses were displaced, even though other routes were on the table. Many families weren’t paid what their homes were worth, and housing discrimination left them few places to go. In 2015, the state’s transportation commissioner formally apologized. An apology doesn’t return a neighborhood.
Heritage Park carries a similar story on Minneapolis’ North Side. It exists because families of color and the Minneapolis NAACP sued in 1992, accusing city and federal housing agencies of purposely clustering public housing in Black neighborhoods. The 1995 settlement led to the demolition of more than 700 public housing units, including Sumner Field, which opened in 1938 as a segregated project. They built Heritage Park in its place as a mixed-income community. Three decades later, it is falling apart. City inspections stopped for six years because the City and the public housing authority weren’t sure who was responsible, and when they resumed, inspectors logged more than 900 violations. A report filed in court in August found that 160 of 209 units may need to be torn down. That same month, Minneapolis approved voluntary relocation assistance, but by late September families were still waiting on that help, support for public-housing households was unresolved, and residents were pressing city leaders to move faster.
Residents of both neighborhoods have every reason to want a say, yet campaigns miss their doors and don’t ask. The money, staff, and data-driven targeting usually go to swing districts and areas with large numbers of registered voters. Through Knock the Block, we want to test what happens when those resources go instead to the Black neighborhoods we too often leave behind. Between now and Election Day, that means paid canvassers, along with volunteers recruited by community ambassadors from the neighborhood, will reach residents repeatedly through phone calls, door knocks, and flyers. We’ll show residents how their neighborhood’s turnout compares with the rest of Minnesota and let them know their community is counting on them. We’ll listen to what matters to them and connect voting to the decisions that affect their lives, including their experiences with the criminal justice system. And when someone tells us what’s standing in the way of voting, we’ll connect them to help.
Building beyond one election
We also intend to learn from this work. Our goal is a 5-10 percent relative increase in participation, measured against our baseline. We’ll compare results with similar areas and past elections, and we’ll report the limitations alongside the findings.
We know one campaign in one election cycle won’t undo decades of neglect. Rondo wasn’t lost in a single season, and Heritage Park didn’t fall apart overnight. Trust broken over generations gets rebuilt slowly, by people who keep showing up long after Election Day. Our funding ends when the polls close. In these few weeks, we hope to show what organizations can accomplish when they prioritize these neighborhoods, and we hope that evidence gives people the confidence to support this work across different organizations outside of an election cycle.
But the next two weeks belong to all of us. Imagine neighborhoods that campaign models have written off as “low turnout” showing up in numbers no one predicted. Imagine the next campaign planner looking at Rondo and Heritage Park and seeing not a gap, but a base of voters worth fighting for. That won’t happen because of a report. It will happen because someone knocks, a neighbor opens the door, and someone asks. Whether you can knock doors, make calls, or hand out flyers, there is a place for you in this work. Come be the person who asks.
Volunteer with Knock the Block:
Count Us In Democracy Fair: Saturday, October 24, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Sabathani Community Center, 310 E. 38th St., Minneapolis. Stop by to meet the Knock the Block team, connect with neighbors and community organizations, and find out how you can help close the gap before Election Day. All are welcome.
MNJRC Election Debrief: Thursday, November 5, 6 to 8 p.m
Memorialize the Movement, 3140 Snelling Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55406, After the votes are counted, join us to hear what we saw on the ground, what we’re learning and where this work goes next. https://www.mnjrc.org/event-details/reimagining-democracy-election-debrief
Together, we can close this gap.
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