A 24-year partnership. A Minnesota grown nonprofit.
Open Path Resources - Minnesota.
Rooted in Community.
Built on Trust.
We help families, community institutions, and public systems build the capacity to care for themselves and prepare the next generation to lead. It started as a 24-year partnership. Here’s how it became a movement.
Rooted in Relationships
Relationships are how OPR does its work, and they’re how it started. A 24-year partnership between Imam Sharif A. Mohamed and Dr. Michael Van Keulen, formalized as Open Path Resources in 2012.
Rooted in Trust
Thousands of community conversations, listening to families, faith leaders, educators, and community members before we build anything.
Rooted in Research
Our co-founders are published researchers and fellows at the University of Minnesota.
Award Winning Work
Statewide recognition for innovation in community health care.
Support OPR
Invest in trusted community led work.
Where It Began: Listening
What Families Told Us They Wanted
OPR’s mission began by listening. We asked families the same question, over and over, in thousands of one-on-one conversations across Minnesota: by the time your children are grown, what do you want for them? We didn’t ask what programs they wanted. We asked what they hoped their children would become. The same four answers came back, every single time.
We heard it from families who’d arrived last year and families who’d been in Minnesota for a generation, from people who prayed five times a day and people who didn’t, across households that traced their roots to Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and beyond. Whatever else set these families apart, on this one question, they agreed.
These are outcomes families asked us to help build toward, not commitments OPR makes on their behalf. We didn’t write this mission. We listened until the community handed it to us.
Built on What We Heard
Still Listening, Still Building
That first round of conversations didn’t end when OPR became an organization. It set the tone for everything since. For 24 years, our founders have carried that same posture into every new relationship, sitting with healthcare systems, public institutions, and faith leaders, and turning what families told us into partnerships that could actually deliver on it.
That’s why our work looks the way it does today: stronger families, stronger community institutions, and stronger relationships with the systems that shape life in Minnesota. Not because OPR decided those were the priorities. Because families did.
OPR is not here to speak for the community. We are here to build with it.
Faith. Family. Identity. Leadership.
Become a supporter of community led work rooted in faith, trust, leadership, and long-term impact.
Your support helps OPR strengthen families, faith centers, youth, and community based institutions across Minnesota. Every gift helps sustain trusted relationships, community leadership, spiritual care, health initiatives, and pathways for the next generation.
Building community strength from within.
Here's How We Answered. Three Ways.
Open Path Resources strengthens East African, immigrant, and refugee families, faith centers, and community organizations across Minnesota. We don’t run programs that do the work for families. We help build the capacity for families and their own institutions to do it themselves, and to shape the public systems around them while they’re at it.
Strengthening Community Institutions
Faith centers, mosques, churches and community organizations are where families already turn first. OPR makes sure those places are strong enough to carry that weight, so the guidance, leadership, and practical care people need is there when they need it, not somewhere else.
Building Bridges Across Systems
Families shouldn’t have to fight their way through healthcare, education, and government systems alone, or get passed from office to office until they give up. OPR builds direct lines between community voices and the systems that shape their lives, so people are heard the first time, not the fifth.
Developing Trusted Leadership
Real leadership isn’t handed down from outside. OPR backs the leaders communities already trust, giving them the tools and standing to organize with wisdom and shape their own future, on their own terms.
Every gift strengthens community.
Invest in trusted, community led work across Minnesota.
Your support helps Open Path Resources build stronger, healthier, and more connected communities across Minnesota. Every gift strengthens families, empowers youth, supports community and faith-based organizations, advances health and wellness, and helps prepare the next generation of leaders.
OPR is led by trusted community partners with decades of experience in education, healthcare, civic engagement, community development, and applied research.
Our leadership reflects the kind of bridge-building OPR was created for: rooted in community, connected to public systems, and committed to helping families and institutions shape a stronger future for Minnesota.
