Not everyone stayed to help.
"When a crisis happens in America, we run to the rescue. Everybody runs to the rescue," said Will Wallace. "But then I had to say to myself, what's the aftermath? Who's going to keep it going?"
Wallace, director of youth programs at Emerge Community Development in north Minneapolis, stood in a room crowded with everything his neighbors might need to make it through the week. Cans of soup, bags of onions, stacks of cleaning products and diapers, warm clothes, school supplies.
These were the sort of donations that came flooding in over the summer, piling high at drop-off sites between the shattered grocery stores and burned-out gas stations along Broadway. Volunteers showed up with brooms to sweep broken glass off the sidewalks; people brought gift cards at struggling shops and donated to North Side nonprofits. But public attention shifted to the next crisis of 2020 and the one after that and the one after that.