In 2017, Be That Neighbor started a theater group called the Mill City Players.  It began with 26 young people from the Cedar Riverside community and young people who were experiencing homelessness.  We rehearsed at the Guthrie and over the next 3 years performed all over Minneapolis. 
After 3 years, all of our players had ‘successed out’. They were in college, working full time, housed, and fully engaged with life.  Just as we had begun to recruit a new group, the pandemic happened.

          Hope 612 began in February, 2024, and started with a ‘Dream Team” of alumni from the original group of the Mill City Players.  Mahad Ahmed, Anthony Anderson, Sam Karpeh, Mahamed Salad, and Miske Salad have met twice a week since February to write a play about their experiences growing up in Minneapolis.  The plot of the play is focused on 3 areas the playwrights identified as the most critical in their lives; racism, fentanyl abuse, and police brutality. Each character is based on their own experiences and the power of their words is clear. As they have written this play, they have insisted that it must end in hope. The discussions about hope, despite their experiences, have been wonderful and so heartening.

          The plan is to perform this powerful work at Waterworks Park, the Commons, Elliot Park, the Capri Theater, and Mixed Blood.  We need your help. Be That Neighbor offers this program free to every participant and all the work in running this program is done by Be That Neighbor. Artists give away their work far too often, and these young people deserve to be paid for their artistry.  We know how important art is to the life and well-being of a community.  As one of our writers said, “It’s really special to do this work, but getting paid for it would be entirely different.”

          Please join us in this project titled, “Hope 612”. These artists need your support so that we can share their work with you. Go to https://www.bethatneighbor.org to become a partner in this project.  Please watch this video, created by Mike Binkely.  https://vimeo.com/950782267