NAMI's Healing Minnesota: $1M Invested in Mental Health

A girl places a flower at the site of Renee Nicole Good’s death on Jan. 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minn. Good was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent while observing their actions. Photo: Shutterstock

In recent years, Minnesotans have felt their collective traumas stack up. First came the COVID pandemic, then George Floyd’s murder and the unrest it triggered, followed by the Annunciation School shooting. Then Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration crackdown led to the killings of two Minneapolis residents and drove many families into hiding earlier this year.

“It has rattled all of our communities,” said Marcus Schmit, the new executive director of NAMI Minnesota. In an interview with MinnPost he said his state chapter of NAMI – the National Alliance on Mental Illness – has been besieged this year by a record number of requests for mental health support.

Schmit and his NAMI colleagues wanted to do more to help so they took a look at what existing organizations were doing right as they worked to serve residents. “We saw a lot of community-based organizations set up response systems to meet emerging mental health needs,” Schmit said. “We wanted to help support and sustain that work.”

One organization NAMI looked at was Por el Amor a los Nuestros, a group offering mental health support for Spanish-speaking immigrant families in the Twin Cities metro area. Co-founder Mahry Torres-Castillo remembers the onslaught of calls from families begging for food during the ICE surge. The immigration sweeps sparked a panic so great that people feared leaving their homes to take their children to school, the doctor or even the grocery store.

“Our collective strength and our resiliency was really put to the test,” said Torres-Castillo. Months after the ICE drawdown, some families still hesitate to leave home even to go to work.

So, rather than start from scratch, NAMI Minnesota embarked on an ambitious goal: to raise $1 million to back efforts like Por el Amor through a new initiative called Healing Minnesota. With support from The Medica Foundation, The Andersen Foundation, HealthPartners and NAMI National, they succeeded, and are distributing the funds without a formal application process.

“We’re relying on partners and communities to help us get connected to efforts that are underway,” Schmit said. “Now we want to be helping to lead the effort to show the world how we are going to recover.” So far, five nonprofits have received $65,000 in grants ranging from $5,500 to $20,000.

Por el Amor received $20,000, which has helped cover transportation, childcare, food, program facilitators and legal help to secure official nonprofit status. For Torres-Castillo, though, the check means more than money. “Beyond the funding, what means the most to us is knowing that someone believes in our community,” she said.