One Black scholar-practitioner. One Residency. A think-and-do laboratory for building inheritance across Black communities in Minnesota — capital, ownership, culture, place, and power — across generations.
Term
Aug 2026 – Jan 2027
Time
20 Hours / Week
Stipend
$45,000 – $60,000
Deadline
June 26, 2026
Each cycle, we call in one Black scholar or field-shaping practitioner for a focused Residency inside one of our six impact areas: Economic Prosperity, Generational Wealth Building, Education, Public Safety, Environmental Justice, or Health.
The Forum is a think-and-do tank. The Residency is where rigorous imagination, Black-centered research, policy strategy, community wisdom, and prototype-building meet in real time.
This cycle's Residency lives at the intersection of Economic Prosperity and Generational Wealth Building.
The field is intentionally expansive. The Resident will help shape the focus of the work in conversation with The Forum, our communities, and the questions Black Minnesota is already asking about capital, ownership, inheritance, place, and power.
The Afrofuturist sets the anchor. The Forum is already moving on adjacent workstreams — including Baby Bonds — that the Resident may choose to help shape and drive forward. The invitation is larger than any single workstream: bring us a question big enough to matter, focused enough to move, and alive enough to build from.
Below are some of the territories we are inviting an Afrofuturist to sharpen, stretch, or reimagine. The work may land in one of these — or open a doorway we have not named yet.
Publicly funded trust accounts that grow from birth, so a young person enters adulthood with capital in their own name. This is not charity. It is infrastructure.
What would it take for Minnesota to lead on Baby Bonds, and how could child wealth accounts be designed with Black futures at the center?
The partner system in Jamaica. Sou-sou across West Africa and the diaspora. Esusu. Rotating savings and credit networks have moved capital through Black communities for centuries with discipline, trust, and collective intelligence.
What becomes possible when we study these systems with the seriousness too often reserved for venture capital, and design twenty-first-century versions our communities deserve?
Shared ownership is not new. Investors have used it for generations to build portfolios, hold assets, and shape neighborhoods.
What could shared ownership unlock for Black Minnesotans at scale: buy-back-the-block strategies, commercial corridor stability, cooperative real estate, community land stewardship, and generational asset transfer?
Time banks. Mutual credit. Community currencies. Barter systems. Digital wallets. Local procurement networks. Dollars are one way value moves. They are not the only way.
How can Black economic activity circulate, compound, and build power inside community?
Black culture is a global engine of value. Food, music, fashion, language, beauty, design, technology, ritual, story, and style all carry intellectual property.
Who holds the rights? Who builds the companies? Who licenses the work? Who captures the upside? What infrastructure helps Black creators protect, multiply, and pass forward the value they create?
Inheritance is infrastructure. Wills, trusts, titles, succession plans, probate navigation, and family governance all shape whether homes, land, businesses, and creative assets remain connected to the people who built them.
What legal, financial, and cultural infrastructure helps Black families hold, transfer, and grow assets with clarity across generations?
Black businesses are not side projects in the future of Minnesota. They are engines of employment, culture, innovation, neighborhood vitality, and wealth creation.
What investment pathways, capital-readiness tools, procurement ecosystems, and patient capital structures would help Black businesses grow at scale?
Wealth inheritance and place inheritance belong in the same room. The Forum's Northside Forward work advances place-keeping, neighborhood power, Black homeownership, and Black business corridors.
How can an economic prosperity lens connect ownership, capital, culture, and place into a stronger Black ecosystem?
We do not expect one Resident to carry all of this. We expect one Resident to sharpen one powerful piece, and to help us see the shape of the whole.
The Afrofuturist will help us sharpen which question is most alive — and which questions we have not yet asked.
What does it mean to build inheritance across Black communities in Minnesota — not only for children, but for elders, neighborhoods, businesses, artists, and the institutions our people are already building?
What economic systems, wealth strategies, and community-owned futures should Black Minnesota be designing now?
What ancestral practices are we ready to carry forward as twenty-first-century infrastructure?
What does liberated economic life — not survival, not catch-up — actually look like, and what would it take to build it here?
The Resident will not be handed a thesis. They will be invited to set the anchor — a focused concentration inside a living field — and help us see the whole more clearly.
“Inheritance is not only what is passed to children. It is what a people builds, holds, and grows together.”
Language matters. Before we ask anyone to build with us, we say plainly what we are building toward.
Not catch-up. Not survival. The conditions under which Black people in Minnesota can build, own, circulate, protect, and pass forward economic life on their own terms — with capital, agency, and infrastructure that meet the scale of our communities' contribution.
More than dollars transferred at death. The full architecture of inheritance: capital, ownership, land, businesses, intellectual property, cultural assets, legal protections, financial knowledge, and the institutions that hold them. Wealth that compounds across people, place, and time — and across an entire community, not only inside individual households.
Inheritance is built across a community, not only inside a household — and across generations, not only for children.
The Resident will set the direction of their Residency. They will not be boxed into a single workstream.
And — there is work already in motion they may choose to help shape and drive forward. One example: Baby Bonds & child wealth accounts. The Forum is actively exploring what it would take for Minnesota to lead on publicly funded trust accounts that grow from birth, designed with Black futures at the center.
The Resident may push that work farther. They may sharpen it, redesign it, connect it to ancestral finance, or contextualize it inside a larger strategy for Black economic inheritance. They may also choose a different concentration entirely.
The anchor is theirs to set. The infrastructure to move with them is already here.
“The concentration is focused. The imagination is not.”
The Residency begins with focus-setting.
The Resident will bring their own question, body of work, lived practice, and intellectual commitments. The Forum will bring our research infrastructure, design methodology, community relationships, policy experience, and strategy pillars.
Together, we will identify the concentration that is most alive, most useful, and most ready to move.
The final shape may include
Specific enough to act on. Expansive enough to open a future.
All of this moves through The Forum's design practice — the methodology we have spent years building for moving from Black lived experience, to research, to policy, to product, without losing what makes the work true.
Define a focused concentration within Economic Prosperity and Generational Wealth Building in partnership with The Forum.
Bring rigor, imagination, and public voice to a question that matters for Black Minnesota's future.
Partner with our policy, research, design, and community teams to move ideas from inquiry to implementation.
Co-design convenings, community-forward focus groups, and learning spaces in their area of expertise.
Lead the work the moment calls for: launching a pilot, co-authoring reports, crafting toolkits, mapping resources, designing investment pathways, or prototyping new wealth-building infrastructure.
Help build an ecosystem that holds both ends: Black businesses capitalized to grow, and Black neighborhoods rooted through place-keeping work.
Build a public-facing body of work that outlasts the Residency.
Teach us. We learn alongside you.
An Afrofuturist in Residence is a trusted voice we pull close.
Scholars. Academics. Independent researchers. Practitioners. Cultural strategists. Field builders whose life's work is already shaping what comes next.
We hold the Residency like a village holds a birth. The Resident gets room to dream, think, question, teach, and build. The Forum gives them the wind at their back.
Here is what distinguishes this Residency from a grant, fellowship, or postdoc: The Forum is a learning organization. The Resident does not just receive support. They shape our thinking. They sharpen our practice. They help us build the future with more precision.
That practice has a name and a shape. We have spent years building a Black-centered design methodology: a structured way of moving from witness, to deep listening, to interpretation, to building. It is the modality the work moves through, and part of the intellectual property The Forum is contributing to the field.
The Resident gets a working laboratory for it — invited to use it, push it, stretch it, and add to it. They help us think and dream differently alongside community. The whole ecosystem gets stronger for it.
We call it an umbilical cord between past, present, and future.
That is the work: carrying ancestral intelligence forward, nourishing what is becoming, and building conditions worthy of the generations arriving next.
Analytics, predictive tools, research infrastructure, and the capacity to make patterns visible.
Platforms, convenings, storytelling, and the muscle to shift public imagination.
Institutional support, cross-sector partners, research collaborators, and resource pathways.
The practice we work through and the IP we have built. A structured methodology for getting from Black lived experience to research, policy, and product — without losing what makes the work true. It refuses universal frameworks. It treats community as co-architect, not consultation.
The reach to make sure the work lands with communities, decision-makers, institutions, and builders ready to move.
Plus a room of Black scholars, builders, strategists, and visionaries ready to think alongside you.
This residency has been balm to a raging soul. It has been so fulfilling. It has allowed me the space to think about and explore avenues without restraining. I love being creative and hadn’t been able to be at this level for years.
Dr. Nneka Sederstrom
2026 Afrofuturist in Residence, Health
Black scholars, academics, independent researchers, policy thinkers, cultural strategists, artists, designers, technologists, and field-shaping practitioners working on questions of:
You do not need a tenure-track title. You do need a question that matters, a serious practice, and readiness to go deep.
We are looking for applicants whose work can meet people's real lives with imagination and rigor: rent, childcare, payroll, business growth, debt, inheritance, ownership, creative production, neighborhood belonging, and children who deserve to inherit more than possibility. They deserve infrastructure.
The future is made, not waited for.
Our job is to build the conditions our children will inherit with the clarity of people who have been building futures under pressure for generations.
Afrofuturism gives us permission to move with memory and invention at once. It asks us to take Black life seriously as a site of intelligence, design, beauty, technology, and liberation.
That is the standard.
What we ask in the application
If a name rose in your spirit while reading this, send them this page. Sometimes the call arrives through a friend.
Sometimes the call arrives through a friend. Pass it forward.