A career less ordinary: Randi Roth steps down from Interfaith Action of Greater St. Paul

Randi Roth has had an eventful career — at least four of them, in fact. Roth, the first person in her family to attend college, Yale University no less, went on to Northwestern University School of Law and worked in legal aid on the south side of Chicago in the high-crime 1980s, then later transitioned to legal advocacy in Minnesota for farmers facing foreclosure, even though she’d never before seen a farm.

"I had never owned a car. I was really from Chicago," quipped Roth, in a recent interview.

Her efforts led her to write the inaugural version of the Farmers’ Guide to the Farmers Home Administration, a guidebook to farm and home financing, which in turn drew her to serve as the federally appointed monitor in the landmark Pigford settlements, a $1 billion legal payout involving some 22,000 Black farmers who had sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture for discrimination.

After 12 years overseeing dozens of Pigford settlement attorneys from offices in downtown St. Paul, her career took a turn, and not necessarily one for the better. Beginning in 2008, Roth served as director of the Otto Bremer Trust, one of the state's oldest philanthropies, stepping down in June 2014 under circumstances she won't describe.

The St. Paul-based organization has continued for the past decade without an executive director, as has legal turmoil culminating in the recent ousting of one of its three trustees.

"I can't talk to the press about leaving Bremer," said Roth, whose sudden departure drew public attention to the charity's inner-workings.

For the past eight years, Roth has led Interfaith Action of Greater St. Paul, helping the organization nearly triple its budget while housing the homeless through the pandemic. It's a mission that will have to go on without her. Roth's last day at Interfaith Action was Friday. Roger Meyer of Mighty Consulting will serve as interim director until her replacement is chosen by the Interfaith board, which is working with search firm Ballinger Leafblad.

That's not to say Roth is heading into retirement. She’ll soon serve as one of two claims administrators assisting the legal trustee in a historic legal settlement involving the Boy Scouts of America, which declared bankruptcy in the face of 83,000 sexual abuse allegations. The $2.46 billion payout will be the largest sex abuse settlement fund in U.S. history.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Interfaith Action's budget nearly tripled under your tenure?

A: It was the whole team, not just me. We kind of got humming during that time. It was a great leadership team. Interfaith Action had been the St. Paul Area Council of Churches for like 110 years. Shortly before I got there, the board had done a strategic planning process. They found St. Paul was in a level of crisis. You can't be a person of good faith and not be alarmed. We can't just have a few good programs. We had to figure out how to pull the levers and mobilize the entire interfaith community in this group. They had decided it no longer mattered if they had a director who was clergy. They really wanted someone who was versed in anti-poverty work, and had some faith affiliation.

Q: So there was a bit of a pivot in philosophy and approach?

A: If you’re going to give, whether it's your time or money, you can divide your giving into four areas — charity, improvement, engagement and reform. There's a lot of thinking about adding a fifth category called reconciliation. In a 2014 book called "State of the South," the nonprofit MDC Inc. had said you can analyze any city by the extent to which it provides an infrastructure of opportunity for the people who live there. I started sharing this book, and Interfaith Action decided this is it, this organization has to equip itself to provide an infrastructure of opportunity.

Q: What concrete actions did that lead to?

A: I point to four really important campaigns we’ve run. We’re the largest shelter for families with children in Ramsey County. It's called Project Home. The shelter when I came in was 40 beds of mobile shelter, 20 each in two houses of worship — it was churches and synagogues. Often it was on a church basement floor with cardboard dividers between families, which means if one baby is crying nobody is going to get any sleep that night. During the day, people would take the van to the day center, which was in the First Baptist Church in St. Paul.

When COVID hit, all of a sudden the governor closed all the houses of worship, and we had 40 people sleeping over that night. We worked with the county manager and Max Holdhusen, the county's housing development manager. We went through a series of temporary solutions. We were at Hotel 340 in downtown St. Paul for a little while. Finally, and I actually want to credit Max with this, we had this vision that shelter should be in a neighborhood where you want to raise your family. He, through Ramsey County, hired a real estate broker to find a place for us.

Q: Where did you land?

A: It was 1880 Randolph Ave., the Provincial House. It's contracted through the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. This was built as the sisters’ residence. We had to go through a lot of things, the St. Paul Planning Commission, the zoning committee, and I actually had COVID then, too. Finally, we were able to move in. All the family statistics are skyrocketing — the percentage of families who say, "Yeah, this is working." We’ve added this rapid exit case management team that helps the families with everything they need to be successful in life. We have a nurse on staff. We’re bringing in mental health services. A generous private donor has funded a contract with us for a mental health provider.

It's much more expensive to be at the Provincial House than to be on church basement floors. We were able to pay for that increment of expense using various categories of federal COVID money. It's all running out. Then we went to the Legislature to ask for funding so it can continue. We have 108 beds — 100 are for families with children and eight are for elderly single women. It's beautiful. We have this beautiful playground, we have a basketball court. We have a dining room. We serve 22,000 meals a year there. It feels like a warm, sunny place. It's 24/7, 365 days a year.

Q: What was your other major campaign?

A: The next major project is we are the Department of Indian Work for the east metro, not to be confused with the Division of Indian Work in Minneapolis. Historically, that has included a food shelf, a clothing closet, diabetes education. We do all the out-of-school-time education at the American Indian Magnet School in St. Paul. We are building there in partnership with two other nonprofits — the American Indian Family Center and the Montessori American Indian Childcare Center. The three of us together are building an economic mobility hub to supplement the stability work with economic mobility.

Other places call it an "integrated services delivery network." We call it the hub. The first families are already entering the hub. We have a grant through the Kresge Foundation to provide guaranteed basic income to the first 24 or 25 families in the hub for two years. It's non-residential.

The data on building these hubs is they do better if it's a place where people already have a history of trust. So we do it in our food shelf. We’ve gone from distributing 65 pounds of Native-specific, Native-appropriate foods to 200,000 pounds of food. It is quite an extraordinary food shelf, all decorated with paintings by the kids. It's an all-Native staff. The families know everybody.

Q: And the third project?

A: There's about 50 houses of worship that were really involved in Project Home. They hosted. They provided labor. And the people in those congregations really understood how to get a foothold. They weren't afraid of poverty. Their kids grew up playing basketball with kids in shelter.

We thought, how do we get that experience to more of the houses of worship in St. Paul? We took nominations from all kinds of community leaders for nonprofits that work with economic mobility that really need volunteers. We chose like seven partners — three of them are in literacy. One is in job coaching. Neighborhood House is one. St. Paul Public Libraries Homework Help is one. We recruit teams in houses of worship and deploy them to work in these nonprofits. When the city proposed zoning ordinances that would have made it hard for synagogues and mosques to do food shelves, we got like 75 clergy together at a moment's notice and the ordinance got changed.

Q: And the fourth project?

A: When I first got the job, I went around to inner-city clergy and said, "What percentage of your time do you spend door-closed with your congregation, one-on-one?" They said it's all about poverty, not spirituality. The Rev. Carl Walker, the Walker of Walker West Music Academy, said, "95% of my time. They’re sleeping on the steps. They don't know what to do."

He said, "Let's start Community Power-Up to focus on legal rights and financial literacy. I need live jazz so people feel comfortable." It was the year Philando Castile got killed. We all got closer and closer. Then they said, "Now we need lawyers. We need to do a legal clinic in this church." We started a clinic. I think we had 42 lawyers rotating through on Thursdays at Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church on Selby Avenue. But then we moved to Walker West because the church was under construction.

Then we got hit by COVID and we went to phone clinic. Now we’re really rebooting the clinic. My board member, former St. Paul police chief and Minnesota Commissioner of Public Safety John Harrington, is taking the lead on this. They’re operating on the premise that poverty is a very destructive force in people's lives, and many of the problems could be solved through legal clinic. Legal aid still turns away more than 60% of eligible clients just because of lack of funding. We have to be able to meet the need through volunteer lawyers.

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