As a Minneapolis cop, he closed encampments. Now he serves meals and delivers food to the streets.

A police officer for 30 years, Grant Snyder got to know a lot of people surviving on the margins of Minneapolis. He’d bring them meals and blankets and just talk. Word got around the chronically homeless community that beyond Snyder’s badge was a different kind of cop.

In his last role as an MPD commander, Snyder also begrudgingly oversaw more than a dozen encampment closures. After retiring in summer 2023, he turned his attention entirely to his wife Melanie Snyder’s nonprofit, Involve, which feeds and mentors people experiencing hunger. His new chef’s hat has allowed him to be more candid about the city’s encampment response, the accusations of “enabling” lobbed at volunteers who deliver food to encampments, as well as what he’s learned from his own family’s dealings with addiction, homelessness and what people really need in order to feel human again.

Since October, Involve has worked out of the Agate Housing and Services Food Centre at 714 Park Av., a popular food shelf and kitchen that had been on the brink of closure earlier this year. Whereas Agate served one free meal a day to people facing food insecurity downtown, Involve has been serving breakfast, lunch and dinner since it took over. Involve also packs meals for local shelters and encampments, with its outreach staff using food to start conversations about moving forward.

Lasagna was on the menu for Friday night dinner. There were real tablecloths on the tables, and the mood was relaxed and respectful. While a sign instructed that everyone who came through the door got one token for one meal, in reality there was plenty for seconds. Melanie personally packed a cheese-free meal for one man with a cheese allergy.

“This is like a family service. There’s a difference. You’re not being made to feel like the cattle coming to the trough,” said Katy Creighton, who has been eating at Involve’s kitchen for the past month.

Quietly eating alone in the back of the dining room was Loren Brown, who’d known the Snyders for a long time. Brown had lived at the Wall of Forgotten Natives — Minneapolis’ first major encampment — in 2018. In the early days of that encampment, female residents complained about sexual harassment, so Snyder set up a tent among them and lived out of it for a while before his bosses told him he had to stop.

“He was one of the [cops] that actually was there, in person, and actually putting in hands-on work,” recalled Brown.

Brown said he would eat at Involve as often as he could, but sometimes he’d fall asleep on the bus and miss the stop. Before he got a phone last week, he didn’t have much concept of time. He wished the kitchen were open longer, and that he could stay there longer.

Snyder spent about 20 years of his law enforcement career in human trafficking. Frustratingly, he found that while there was a lot of trafficking within the unsheltered population, victims almost never reported it, and even more rarely would it get fully investigated and prosecuted. One reason: It’s hard to find people always on the move. So Snyder started circling the city in his Polaris Ranger, meeting people in encampments and under bridges. Initially, he tried to figure out how to make the systems of justice work for people who were homeless, but eventually his eyes were opened to their trauma, barriers and immediate needs, such as water when it’s hot and shoes when it’s cold.

He also concluded that the “big narrative” pushed by local governments — that there are always plenty of beds available in emergency shelters but people just weren’t choosing to use them — was untrue. He was frustrated that when an order came down to close an encampment, it would just spread people around without reducing homelessness or the problems that upset neighbors.

“Let’s call it what it is,” he said. “If we’re serving these folks, really committed to their well-being, let’s start with the truth, OK? And the part of the truth that we have to start with is there’s nowhere for them to go at night.”

In 2018, the Snyders incorporated Involve, which focused on providing whatever it was that people needed to survive on the streets. In 2020 when COVID hit and all the soup kitchens shuttered, they delivered thousands of bag lunches to encampments throughout the Twin Cities. Eventually they got state grants and hot food service contracts with shelters including Avivo Village. They hired staff with culinary backgrounds and firsthand experience with homelessness.

The outreach director is their son, Ethan Snyder, who was addicted to meth and living on the streets in his early 20s. Ethan went to jail, woke up one morning realizing he had hit rock bottom and did years of intensive therapy. Now he delivers meals multiple times a week to the same people he used to live with on the streets.

More than the food, he believes the most important thing about his work is providing the basic requirement for social interaction. He said that just like being “institutionalized” by jail, you can get “institutionalized” by the streets to get stuck in a prison of your own mental limitations.

Human connection needs to come before they can begin to consider moving inside, he said.

Now and then, bystanders tell Involve staff that feeding homeless people “enables” them, but Ethan thinks that defies logic. “I had one person tell me these people are staying here because you’re feeding them. Keep in mind this was in the middle of January, it was about negative 14 outside, people had frostbite and their fingertips were gone. Do you think somebody is going to stay outside and occupy an area just because they know that a cheeseburger is coming on a Monday? I don’t think so.”

On the night of Dec. 10, exploding propane tanks engulfed an encampment in the 2400 block of 15th Av. S. before spreading to neighboring residences. No one died, but people displaced from their homes spent the night on buses. Minneapolis police called Snyder at 5 a.m. the next day, wondering if he could bring them food. Snyder suggested they bring everyone down to the Food Centre and fired up the kitchen. It became an ad hoc resettlement hub where outreach workers with various housing agencies came and went all day.

Council Member Jason Chavez, who helped translate for Spanish-speaking families whose nearby apartment caught fire, recalled that the concentration of resources at the Food Centre the day after the fire evoked the navigation center that was set up six years prior to help people from the Wall of Forgotten Natives find housing before that encampment was closed.

“They had food. Some of them were able to get some monetary support,” Chavez said. “This showed that there could be different models to address this issue, especially in emergencies.”

Housing consultant Chelsea McFarren said she often worked out of the Food Centre, meeting clients who didn’t have phones but could be counted on to show up for a meal.

“He and Melanie have a really great rapport with people,” she said. “He knows people, he knows their faces, he knows their names, he knows their issues. Every time I drop by the Food Centre, I’m just reminded of how grateful I am that there are people like him in this work.”

Involve now serves about 15,000 meals a week, Snyder said.

They’re in discussions to purchase the building from Agate. Once they raise enough money, he envisions upgrading the old freezers, commissioning a mural for the dining room, retooling the food shelf into a pay-what-you-can cafe for anyone downtown to come in and eat with people from different walks of life.

“We feel like we’re good at giving people an experience that elevates their dignity, that makes them feel special,” he said. “If you do it carefully and you pay attention to the details, there’s an opportunity to blend people together. And when we all start hanging out together, we just start to understand each other better. That’s really what I am hoping for.”