A north Minneapolis food shelf that has served thousands of families — including many newly arrived Ecuadorian refugees — is closing this week while it sorts out its tax-exempt status.
Camden Collective will shut down most of its programming, including a weekly food distribution, on Saturday, June 29. The food shelf has already supported more than 25,000 people this year and was on track to surpass last year’s number by nearly 20%.
The organization’s founder and director, Anna Gerdeen, said she made the difficult decision to close after the organization became stuck in a bureaucratic limbo of nonprofit filing issues that eventually led it to lose its tax-exempt status in December. She said only learned of the revoked status in mid-March.
“I feel like it’s a family. You build relationships when you see people week after week. 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.”
Gerdeen announced the decision in an emotional speech in English and Spanish on June 23 during the weekly food shelf hours. An estimated 190 families received food that day.
“Everyone was so kind and so sweet and supportive and sad,” Gerdeen told Sahan Journal in tears. “No one really blamed me, they felt like I had done my best.”
After her speech, Gerdeen was talking to a group of elderly women who all gave her hugs and expressed their frustrations.
“They were kind of mad, like, ‘The government always does this to us,’” Gerdeen said. “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. That was hard to hear.”
The Camden Collective served more than 43,000 people last year, including about 10,000 families, according to Gerdeen.
A place to build connections, relationships
Lenora Caston, 73, has been going to the food shelf for the past three years. She had just recently started volunteering, too.
“I had tears in my eyes. 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. So it really helped me out a lot.”
Fourteen part-time employees who will lose their jobs, including 12 youth employees, Gerdeen, and an adult volunteer who worked 24 hours per week. Gerdeen said she’s especially proud of Camden Collective’s youth employment program.
Lizbeth Flores, 17, had been working as a youth employee for three years. She found out Camden Collective was closing earlier this month.
While Flores said she recently got a new job at Chipotle, her former coworkers are struggling to find new jobs.
“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. And I relied on the income I got from the job. It’s the end of a chapter in my life, but it was a good one.”
She remembered once helping an elderly couple carry their grocery boxes to their car. She remembered them saying they couldn’t believe that a service like this existed. The woman started crying and said “Bless you,” to Flores. Flores almost started crying too and said the moment really stuck with her.
“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.”
Flores said they would help people who were elderly or disabled carry their food. The food shelf also stocked culturally specific foods, such as rice for Latino families, and halal meat for Muslim families. The Camden Collective also stocked plasticware, cleaning supplies, and hygiene products, too.
Most of the staff and clientele at Camden Collective were Spanish speakers, and many spoke only Spanish. A majority of the volunteers also had recently immigrated to the U.S., according to Gerdeen.
When Caston started volunteering a few months ago, she worked with an Ecuadorian woman to hand out bags of food in Camden Collective’s express line. Lenora doesn’t speak Spanish, and the woman doesn’t speak English, but the two have been teaching each other their languages while working.
“A lot of times, you don’t have to say anything. We’d just look at each other and know what they’re thinking,” Caston said. “She got really close to me, we always would give each other hugs.”
Challenges with the IRS
Camden Collective began in 2020 under a different name. The group started as a neighborhood support group that provided tutoring for kids. By 2021, the group received a sponsorship from the Sanneh Foundation to deliver food. Volunteers and staff started off handing out 50 or so food boxes every week in the parking lot of the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church in north Minneapolis, which later housed the Camden Collective.
The organization became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in fall 2022. It then became eligible to receive federal support from the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) and worked with Second Harvest, a national food bank. The Camden Collective received support from grants and donations.
Gerdeen said Camden Collective began facing issues when it became a tax-exempt organization in 2022. After a long approval process, Gerdeen said Camden Collective continued to face issues because the IRS had not listed the group in a master file system. She found out the organization wasn’t listed in January 2023, and it wasn’t added until June of that year.
Gerdeen hasn’t received answers as to why the organization was never included in the master file system. She theorized that it could be because the organization changed its name to Camden Collective.
Because Camden Collective wasn’t listed as an official tax-exempt organization, Gerdeen said she missed out on a lot of nonprofit perks, such as free Microsoft access.
However, getting added to the master file wasn’t an easy fix. What Gerdeen called a mistake on the IRS’ part led to their tax filings getting rejected. In addition, some of their filings were sent either too early or too late. By December 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.
“I sought every avenue I could for three months,” Gerdeen said. “It’s been so stressful.”
She attempted to contact the IRS multiple times and also appealed to a tax advocate who works with Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Of the last four calls she made to the IRS, three calls didn’t go through because the call line had reached its capacity for the day. The one time she got through, she was on hold for 80 minutes, talked to someone for five, and then was put on hold for another 20 minutes. Then, the call dropped.
The IRS declined to comment on Gerdeen’s case due to federal disclosure regulations.
“The problem is, 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 mail and fax all of Camden Collective’s documents. In the meantime, she contacted U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar’s office, which made inquiries with the IRS on her behalf. But Gerdeen said it wasn’t helpful.
Klobuchar’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
“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.”
Despite feeling like she had lost all fight in her, Gerdeen said she ultimately decided that she will be reapplying for tax-exempt status.
Camden Collective will still host its fall and winter festival where the group distributes free coats. Gerdeen said the organization is also planning on starting a migrant resource center with donations they’ve stockpiled to provide newly arrived migrants with clothing, personal hygiene supplies, and more.
Camden Collective will have its last food distribution and a community celebration on Saturday, June 29, from 12 to 3 p.m. There will be Mexican tacos, halal food, live music, and a bouncy house.
