Star Tribune
Minneapolis food shelf, a lifeline for refugees, shuts down to straighten out IRS issues
A north Minneapolis food shelf that has served thousands of families, including many newly arrived Ecuadorian refugees, has closed so it can sort through its problems with the IRS.
Camden Collective shut down most of its programming on June 29, including its weekly food distribution. It has supported more than 25,000 people so far this year and had been on track to surpass last year’s number by nearly 20%.
But founder and director Anna Gerdeen said she decided to shut down after the food shelf became stuck in a bureaucratic limbo of nonprofit filing issues, eventually leading to the loss of its tax-exempt status in December.
“It’s going to be hard,” Gerdeen said. “It’s going to be a loss for the community, and not just [because of the] food. It was a gathering place.”
In the meantime, she said, she will be reapplying for tax-exempt status for the food shelf, which served 43,000 people in 2023.
Gerdeen announced the decision to close the food shelf in an emotional speech during business hours. “Everyone was so kind and so sweet and supportive and sad,” she told Sahan Journal.
After her speech, Gerdeen talked to a group of elderly women who gave her hugs. “One lady was talking about how hard it is to get resources to north Minneapolis, then we finally get things and they’re taken away from us,” she said. “That was hard to hear.”
Lenora Caston, 73, has been going to Camden for the past three years and had just recently started volunteering there. “I was crying because I got to know everybody at the food shelf,” Caston said. “It impacted me, because I’m a senior and I don’t get food stamps.”
Fourteen part-time employees are losing their jobs, including 12 youth employees and an adult volunteer who worked 24 hours per week. Lizbeth Flores, 17, a youth employee for three years, got a new job at a fast-food restaurant. Other workers were still struggling to find employment.
“I feel devastated,” Flores said. “It’s sad to know the connections I made with people. I’m not going to be able to see them.”
She remembered once helping an elderly couple carry their groceries to their car and hearing them say they couldn’t believe such a service existed. The woman started crying. “Bless you,” she said to Flores.
“I want to emphasize how community-led it was,” Flores said. “We listened to the opinions of the people in the community, and we tried our best to always accommodate those who came to our food shelf.”
Camden Collective stocked culturally specific foods, such as rice for Latino families and halal meat for Muslim families, as well as plasticware, cleaning supplies and hygiene products.
Most of the staff and clientele have been Spanish speakers, and many speak only Spanish. A majority of the volunteers had recently immigrated to the United States, according to Gerdeen.
Camden Collective started in 2020 as a neighborhood support group that tutored kids. After the group received a sponsorship in 2021 from the Sanneh Foundation to deliver food, volunteers and staffers handed out 50 or so food boxes every week in the parking lot of Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church in north Minneapolis, which has become the food shelf’s home.
The organization became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the fall of 2022, newly eligible for federal support from the Emergency Food Assistance Program. That’s when the problems began, Gerdeen said.
After a long approval process, the IRS failed to list the group in a master file system until June 2023, causing Camden to miss out on several nonprofit perks. Gerdeen said she hasn’t been told why, but she theorizes it may have been because the food shelf had changed its name.
The mistake led the IRS to reject the food shelf’s tax filings, Gerdeen said. In addition, some filings were sent too early or too late; by the end of 2023, Camden Collective’s tax-exempt status was revoked after three missed tax filings.
Gerdeen didn’t find out about the revoked status until March, a peak time for nonprofits to apply for grant funding. She said she attempted to contact the IRS multiple times. Once she was on hold for 80 minutes, talked to someone for five minutes, and then was put on hold again for 20 minutes before the call dropped.
IRS officials declined to comment due to federal disclosure regulations.
“Whenever you’re going to call the IRS, you need to have your whole entire afternoon clear, because you don’t know how long it’s going to take,” Gerdeen said.
Eventually, Gerdeen was told to forward all of Camden’s documents to the IRS. In the meantime, she contacted U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s office, which made inquiries with the IRS on her behalf.
“It made me start to think that they weren’t even reading our case or haven’t even looked into what was going on,” Gerdeen said of the IRS. “It went round and round in circles.”
Camden Collective will still host its fall and winter festival this year, when it distributes free coats. Gerdeen said the nonprofit is also planning to launch a resource center with donations it has stockpiled to provide newly-arrived migrants with clothing, personal hygiene supplies and more.
About the partnership
This story comes to you from Sahan Journal, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color. Sign up for a free newsletter to receive Sahan’s stories in your inbox.
NEWBURG, MINN. — Driving down a winding road dotted with farms, churches and roadside produce stands, it can be easy to miss the only business in town here, an old red shop tucked behind rows of flowers and hanging ferns.
But make no mistake, behind those century-and-a-half-old walls is one of the top food destinations in Minnesota’s Driftless Area.
For the past seven years, Irene Fishburn has been delighting locals and road-trippers alike with made-from-scratch delicacies at Newburg Vintage Home and Garden and Small Batch Bakery.
Fishburn opened the business after she and her husband, Glenn, moved to southeastern Minnesota to be closer to family in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. After leaving the grind of their corporate careers in California, the couple settled on a former general store where Irene, a former merchandise buyer for more than 35 stores, could sell garden gifts and baked goods, and Glenn could fish in a nearby trout stream.
Their retirement was set — at least that was the plan.
“When we first bought it, we imagined sitting on the front porch and having coffee with neighbors who stopped by,” Irene said. “We had no idea that it would become a destination-type business.”
Open only on select Saturdays — and then for only three hours — the Newburg bakery regularly draws scores of people willing to stand in line for up to an hour during the busiest summer months to get a taste of authentic French baking. Others come from just down the road.
Mike and Cheryl Erickson, both retired military members, spend their summers in nearby Mabel, Minn., where Mike grew up. He remembers getting ice cream as a kid outside of the same building and said he initially came to the bakery with low expectations.
Any kind of art — from the Mona Lisa to your family snapshots — can look better in a nice frame.
To elevate, protect and display paintings, photos and other prizes, you’ll either need to find a good shop to do the work or buy supplies and DIY. Many local framing shops provide expert advice, take care of your precious items and don’t charge high prices. If you want to frame yourself, online businesses offer products and instructions, or you can buy supplies from an arts and crafts store and watch online instructional videos for an assist on putting everything together.
If someone else will do the work, you’ll want a skilled pro who offers sage advice. Staff at the best shops will spend time with you exploring framing options (single or double mat? Metal or wood? Plexiglass or real glass?) and eventually give you a fine-looking final product.
Until Nov. 5, Checkbook is offering free access to its ratings of area framing shops to the Minnesota Star Tribune readers via Checkbook.org/StarTribune/framing. Checkbook surveyed its own subscribers plus other randomly selected individuals. You’ll notice big shop-to-shop differences for customer satisfaction and prices.
You can hire a local shop to do your framing, ship your stuff to an internet-based outfit or do some or all the work yourself. DIY options are usually the cheapest. You can buy inexpensive frames at stores like Target, Pottery Barn and IKEA, and they often look pretty good.
“I do kid artwork walls for some of my clients, and cheaper frames like this are a great option,” says Allison Marvin, an art consultant whose firm, Sightline, helps people buy and mount art.
Make sure you use acid- and lignin-free mats that won’t damage artwork through time. Check on this sign of quality when buying from online outfits or when picking up an inexpensive premade frame. Most pro framers use nothing but acid-free materials.
If you have odd-sized art or want customized frames and mats, several websites allow you to enter measurements and shop from hundreds of frames. Plus, you can buy custom-cut mats, glass or plexiglass fronts and more. The store ships your products, and you assemble everything. In our experience, this is a relatively simple but not totally goof-proof transaction.
Richfield resident Alex Asmus doesn’t agree with Hayford Oleary. As someone who has a degree in construction management, Asmus said he believes reducing parking minimums will give developers an incentive to build less parking than needed because it doesn’t generate much revenue for them.
Asmus said the council’s emphasis on adding large apartment buildings has made parts of Richfield, including his once-quiet neighborhood, busier than they were designed to be, something he’s concerned lower parking requirements could exacerbate. Because many neighborhoods in Richfield don’t have sidewalks, pedestrians and kids on bikes use the streets, and more cars parked on streets present more obstacles. And in the winter, he said, snow plows struggled to get through.
“Cars have just flooded into our neighborhood,” he said. “We have a lot of young children, when they try to exit their driveways on their bikes into the street, cars fly by and they can’t see a child coming out of their driveway. Because there’s so many cars parked, it’s hard to have that kind of visibility.”
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How a small Newburg, Minnesota bakery became a Midwest destination
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