Who We Are
Our Mission
Seeds Worth Sowing (SWS) is a culturally specific, African American–led nonprofit organization based in South Minneapolis, dedicated to strengthening families intergenerationally through trauma-informed, culturally grounded services.
Every program we run is an expression of the Community Welfare System™ (CWS), the framework we built from six years of direct field work. CWS guides how we design, deliver, and measure every service under our roof, from housing assistance to maternal health to community navigation.
Everyone deserves access to a system where they feel seen, safe, represented, and nurtured.
How We Work: The Community Welfare System
The Community Welfare System (CWS) is not a separate initiative. It is the operating framework underneath everything Seeds Worth Sowing does. Every program, from the Nurturing Homes Project to Housing For The Homies, is built using the same CWS principles: meet people where they are, remove bureaucratic barriers, and build infrastructure that outlasts any single crisis or funding cycle.
We developed CWS because we kept seeing the same gap across our work: families navigating fragmented systems that were never designed to communicate with each other. CWS is our answer to that fragmentation, a shared structure that lets housing support, maternal health, benefit navigation, and community care work together instead of in silos.
We believe every family deserves soil to grow in: a community that holds them, resources they can count on, and room to thrive on their own terms.
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The Root: Our Story
Seeds Worth Sowing started in South Minneapolis in 2020, built on a simple premise: African American families already know how to care for each other, and what's often missing is the infrastructure to hold that care in place.
We offer housing support, benefit navigation, direct financial assistance, maternal health education, parent coaching, mental health support, and reentry assistance for parents coming home from incarceration. We coordinate these programs into one path, so a family moves through a single door instead of five separate referrals. Every program runs the same way: built on relationship, trust, and dignity, shaped by both our cultural history and what families are facing right now.
Since 2020, we've supported more than 1,500 families across Minnesota. Thirty-five parents have reunited with their children after incarceration and are supported through the transition back into stability.
Our Focal Values
1. Access Without Barriers
Care shouldn't come with a fight attached. We take down the bureaucratic, financial, and social walls standing between families and the housing support, benefits, and maternal health care they're owed.
2. Reciprocity as Practice
Every family we support today is part of the network that supports the next one. Care moves in circles here, not in one direction from an institution down to a recipient.
3. Sustainable Infrastructure
Responding to crisis matters, but permanence is the goal. We're building a skeleton of care, systems and networks strong enough to hold through political and economic shifts.
4. Centering the Margin
We focus where the system has already fell short: families navigating housing instability, and workers whose paychecks don't stretch far enough to cover the basics. What we build for them becomes the blueprint for a more just Minnesota, for everyone.
We are interested in being a trusted fixture in the community. We are building the soil so that every seed planted in our neighborhood has the chance to thrive. Find images of our space and learn how to get involved here.
“The concept of mutual aid does not only need to be in response to emergencies.”
Zedé Harut, Founder