She had lost her sister to addiction in 2014. By 2024, the nonprofit she had founded had placed eleven hundred Minneapolis residents in long-term recovery housing.
The phone call had come at four in the morning on the seventh of August, 2014. Maren Holstrom had been twenty-nine. She had been living in a small apartment in the Lyn-Lake neighborhood of south Minneapolis, two miles from the small Powderhorn Park duplex where her younger sister Greta had been living, off and on, for the previous three years.
The call had been from her mother in St. Paul. Greta had passed at approximately three forty-five, of an overdose, at a Minneapolis hospital where she had been admitted three hours earlier. She had been twenty-six.
Maren had driven to the hospital. She had stayed with her mother and her father and the body of her sister until almost nine that morning. She had then driven home to her apartment in Lyn-Lake. She had sat at her small kitchen table for almost the rest of the day.
She had not, by her own honest later description, cried very much that day. She had spent the slow Thursday afternoon doing a different thing. She had been writing, in a notebook she kept on the kitchen counter, the list of every place Greta had stayed during the previous three years.
The list had taken her almost four hours to compose. It had ended with thirty-one entries. Three of them had been short-term inpatient detox stays. Six had been emergency-shelter beds. Eleven had been couches of friends or distant relatives. Five had been tents in parks. Four had been her parents' guest bedroom in St. Paul. One had been Maren’s own apartment in Lyn-Lake. One had been the Powderhorn Park duplex she had been renting at the time of her passing.
None of them had been long-term recovery housing.
The slow careful Minneapolis network of long-term recovery beds had been, by the arithmetic of Greta’s three years, the thing that had not, by every honest reading, been available.
II. The decision.
Maren had been a project manager at a Minneapolis-based architecture firm at the time. She had been on track, by her own internal arithmetic, to be promoted to senior project manager within the year. She had not been, by her own honest later description, the kind of careful young Minnesotan who had been planning, in any conventional sense, to leave careful corporate architecture work to do nonprofit work.
She had decided, by the slow careful internal decision she had made over the subsequent six weeks, to leave it anyway.
She had given the firm her notice on the third Monday of September. She had finished out her current projects through the end of November. She had been, by the first Monday of December, the founder of a new Minneapolis nonprofit she had named The Greta Project.
She had had, at the time of the founding, no funding, no board, no office, no employees, and no specific careful plan beyond the piece of internal certainty that the Minneapolis network of long-term recovery beds for young careful adults in their twenties was the thing she was going to spend the rest of her working life trying to expand.
She had been twenty-nine.
III. The first three years.
I want to be careful, in writing the next part, about how I describe the first three years of The Greta Project. The popular American story of grieving sister who founds a nonprofit tends to compress the first three years into a montage of triumphs. The actual shape of Maren Holstrom’s first three years was not, by her own honest later description, a montage.
It was a slow set of failures.
She had spent the first year — from December of 2014 through November of 2015 — doing two things. The first thing had been the slow careful work of learning the Minneapolis nonprofit landscape. She had attended approximately a hundred and forty meetings of existing Minneapolis nonprofits in the recovery and housing spaces. She had introduced herself. She had listened. She had taken notes. She had asked questions.
The second thing had been the work of applying for grants. She had applied, by her honest spreadsheet at the end of the first year, for approximately forty-eight grants. She had received four. The total grant funding raised in the first year had been approximately fourteen thousand dollars.
She had also, by the end of the first year, depleted the entirety of the savings she had accumulated during her seven years at the architecture firm. She had moved, in October of 2015, out of her Lyn-Lake apartment and into the guest bedroom of her parents' house in St. Paul.
She had been thirty.
She had spent the second year — from December of 2015 through November of 2016 — doing two things. The first had been the work of building the initial program. She had partnered, by gentle slow careful negotiation, with two existing Minneapolis recovery organizations to provide the initial set of services that The Greta Project would offer. The services had been, in the initial shape, a set of case-management protocols for young adults transitioning from inpatient detox to long-term housing.
The second had been the work of raising additional funding. She had applied, by her spreadsheet, for approximately seventy-two grants in the second year. She had received eleven. The total grant funding in the second year had been approximately a hundred and forty-four thousand dollars.
She had used the funding to hire one employee — a older case manager named Janet Whitebear, who had been doing Minneapolis recovery work for nineteen years and who had agreed, by gentle joint conversation, to come on board at fifty-two thousand dollars a year. Maren herself had taken, by her honest later description, no salary for the first two years.
She had spent the third year — from December of 2016 through November of 2017 — doing the initial case-management work. The Greta Project, by the end of the third year, had placed eighteen young careful adults in long-term recovery housing.
Eighteen was not, by Maren’s honest internal arithmetic at the time, a number she was proud of.
She had, by the end of the third year, run out of patience with herself.
IV. Janet.
She had walked into Janet Whitebear’s office on the first Monday of December, 2017, intending to tell Janet that she was going to close The Greta Project.
She had sat down in the chair across from Janet’s desk. She had said, in the direct way of a woman who had spent three years failing to build a nonprofit, what she had been planning to say.
“Janet,” she had said. “I have been doing this for three years. I have placed eighteen people. In three years, in Minneapolis, in the middle of the overdose crisis we are in, eighteen people is not a number that justifies the continued existence of this organization. I am going to close it. I am sorry. I wanted to tell you in person.”
Janet Whitebear had been fifty-seven. She had been a Anishinaabe woman from the Leech Lake band. She had been doing recovery work in Minneapolis since 1998. She had spent the first three years of her own career, by her honest careful later description, placing approximately four people in long-term housing.
She had looked at Maren for a long moment.
“Sweetheart,” she had said. “Sit down. Let me tell you something.”
She had then, by Maren’s honest later description, given Maren the long talk that older Minnesota nonprofit workers sometimes give younger ones at the three-year mark.
The long talk had been, in substance, about the nature of nonprofit recovery work. The work was, by Janet’s patient instruction, the work of building trust networks one careful person at a time. The initial trust networks were, by every honest reading of every careful nonprofit that had ever done this work in Minnesota, slow to build. The third-year placement count was, by every honest reading of the trajectory of recovery nonprofits, the lowest the count would ever be.
The number, Janet had told her, would double in year four. It would double again in year five. It would double again in year six. By year ten, if Maren stayed, the number would be in the hundreds.
“Sweetheart,” Janet had said. “You did not start this thing because you thought it would be easy. You started this thing because your sister Greta died. The number is the number. The work is the work. You do not get to close it because the number is small. You get to close it only when the work has been done.”
Maren had sat in the chair for almost twenty minutes.
She had then walked back to her own office at the end of the hall.
She had not closed The Greta Project.
V. The next seven years.
The placement count had doubled in year four, to thirty-eight. It had doubled in year five, to seventy-one. It had doubled in year six, to a hundred and forty-three. It had grown, in year seven, to two hundred and ninety. In year eight, to four hundred and ten. In year nine, to seven hundred and forty. In year ten — the calendar year of 2024 — to one thousand and one hundred and four.
The staff had grown, by the end of year ten, to twenty-three employees. The annual budget had grown to approximately four point eight million dollars. The Minneapolis nonprofit landscape had begun, by approximately year six, to refer young careful adults transitioning from inpatient detox to The Greta Project as a matter of standard local recovery practice.
Maren had taken, by her honest spreadsheet, a salary beginning in year four. The salary in year four had been forty thousand dollars. By year ten, it had grown to approximately ninety-two thousand. This was, by every honest reading of Minneapolis nonprofit executive compensation, a below-market salary. She had been, by her honest internal accounting, content with it.
She had moved, in year five, out of her parents' guest bedroom in St. Paul and into a one-bedroom apartment in the Whittier neighborhood of south Minneapolis, three blocks from the new offices of The Greta Project on Nicollet Avenue.
She had not married. She had not, by her own honest later description in our conversation in May, been in any hurry to.
VI. The Greta Project at ten years.
I sat with Maren Holstrom at the offices of The Greta Project on Nicollet Avenue on a Wednesday afternoon in early May, almost exactly ten years and five months after the first Monday of December 2014 when she had founded the organization. She was thirty-nine.
The offices were the kind of Minneapolis nonprofit offices that Minneapolis nonprofits at the four-point-eight-million-dollar level tended to have — bright, careful, full of careful older mismatched furniture, with a break room that smelled, that afternoon, of coffee and cinnamon rolls that a staff member had brought in.
Janet Whitebear was still there. She was sixty-seven. She had been promoted, in year five, to the director of programs. She had been, by Maren’s gentle private description in our conversation, the internal infrastructure of the organization for the past ten years.
Maren did not, in our conversation, characterize the ten years in any conventional language. She characterized them the way a Minneapolis nonprofit director at the ten-year mark would characterize them. She had done, by her honest description, what Janet Whitebear had told her to do on the first Monday of December 2017. She had kept going. The number had doubled. It had doubled again. It had grown, by the slow patient compounding of daily case-management work, to eleven hundred and four in the calendar year 2024.
The honest difference between a nonprofit founder who quits at year three and a nonprofit founder who does not is, sometimes, the presence in the office at the end of the hall of an older woman who has done the work for nineteen years and who knows what year three is supposed to look like.
She did, however, in our conversation, characterize one piece of the work in the direct language of a younger sister who had lost her older sister to addiction ten years and nine months earlier.
She told me, in the direct way of an honest woman in her late thirties, that she did not believe — by every honest reading of her own internal accounting — that her sister Greta would have, by any counterfactual reading, been saved by The Greta Project. The network of long-term recovery beds that The Greta Project had spent ten years building in Minneapolis would not, by every honest reading of the timing, have been available to Greta in any meaningful sense in 2014.
What The Greta Project had done, by Maren’s direct accounting, was to make the network available to eleven hundred and four other careful young adults who had been, in their own 2024 lives, in the shape Greta had been in in her own 2014 life.
The work, by Maren’s honest description, had not saved her sister.
It had saved, in the subsequent ten years, eleven hundred and four other people’s sisters.
That, by Maren’s honest internal accounting, was enough.
VII. The two siblings.
I sat with two of the eleven hundred and four placements on a Thursday afternoon at a coffee shop in the Whittier neighborhood of south Minneapolis. They were a brother and sister — Marcus and Theresa Whitfield, both in their late twenties — who had been placed in long-term recovery housing through The Greta Project in the summer of 2022 and the winter of 2023, respectively.
They were the kind of recent recovery success stories that The Greta Project did not, by Maren’s gentle private decision, often publicize. The organization’s policy on alumni had been, by Maren’s instruction, to honor the privacy of the people who had moved through the program. The Whitfield siblings had agreed, by their own gentle joint request, to be interviewed for this piece on the condition that I describe them only in the general terms I am describing them in here.
They told me, in the slow careful gentle way of two careful Minneapolis siblings who had each been through their own long-term recovery, what The Greta Project had done for them.
They did not, by their own gentle joint description, characterize it in conventional terms. They characterized it the way two young adults in their late twenties who had each spent approximately eighteen months in the program would characterize it.
Marcus had been the older of the two. He had been the first to enter. He had been placed in a long-term recovery house in the Powderhorn neighborhood — by the accidental geography of Minneapolis recovery housing, the same neighborhood where Greta Holstrom had been living at the time of her death in 2014. He had been twenty-five at the time of his placement. He had stayed in the recovery house for twenty months. He had been, by his gentle later description, in continuous recovery for almost three years.
Theresa had followed him into the program approximately six months later. She had been placed in a different recovery house in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood. She had been twenty-three at the time of her placement. She had stayed for sixteen months. She had been, by her gentle later description, in continuous recovery for almost two years.
I asked them, near the end of our conversation, what they would tell Maren Holstrom if they had the chance.
They looked at each other for a moment.
Marcus answered first.
“I would tell her,” he said, “that I have a younger sister. The reason I have a younger sister in continuous recovery is that I went through the program first. The reason I went through the program first is that The Greta Project existed. The reason The Greta Project existed is that Maren Holstrom’s older sister did not, in 2014, have a program to go through. The work that Maren did, between 2014 and 2022, made the work available to me. The work that I did, with Maren’s program, made the work available to my sister. The chain is the chain. I would tell her that.”
Theresa nodded.
“I would tell her, also,” she said, “that I have, in my own continuous recovery, decided to enter the nonprofit field. I am, by my gentle private decision in February, in the early process of applying to a Master of Public Health program at the University of Minnesota. I want to do the work Maren has been doing. The work, by my honest internal accounting, is what gave me my continuous recovery. I would tell her that I am, by my gentle private decision, going to carry it forward.”
VIII. Why it stays.
I sat with Maren and Janet together at the coffee shop on Nicollet Avenue on a Saturday afternoon in mid-May. The two of them had been working together for almost ten years and five months. They had become, by every honest reading of every careful staff member who had been in the organization for any meaningful length of time, the collaborative pair that had built the entire current shape of The Greta Project.
Janet had been, by Maren’s direct admission in our conversation, the reason the organization still existed. She had been the older Minnesota nonprofit veteran who had walked into Maren’s office on the first Monday of December 2017 and had given her the long talk. She had been the presence at the end of the hall for the past ten years.
I asked them, near the end of our conversation, what they wanted the readers of this piece to understand.
They looked at each other.
Janet answered.
“Sweetheart,” she said. “I want them to understand that the work is the work. The work is not, by any honest reading, the work of a single founder. The work is the work of a slow network of people doing the work for the long time it takes to do the work. Maren did the founding. I did the patient teaching. The twenty-three staff members did the daily case management. The eleven hundred and four placements did the work of their own continuous recovery. The nonprofit landscape of Minneapolis did the work of receiving the program into the broader Minneapolis recovery infrastructure. The work is everyone.”
She paused.
“The sister Greta,” she said, “is the sister Greta. The work is the work the sister Greta inspired. The two things are not the same. The sister Greta is not coming back. The work is going forward.”
Across the United States, in nonprofit offices and long-term recovery houses and Minneapolis neighborhoods that have been quietly building recovery infrastructure for the past ten years, the slow patient work of surviving siblings is being carried forward by the slow patient compounding of daily case management. Most of these nonprofit projects will not, in any usual sense, ever reach the eleven-hundred-placement scale that The Greta Project has reached. A handful of them, by the slow patient ten-year work of surviving siblings who have been told by older Minnesota nonprofit veterans not to quit at year three, will. For broader context on the long American history of substance-use recovery infrastructure and the available work of family-founded nonprofits, readers can spend time with the materials at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration or the long-form reporting at PBS NewsHour. If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available twenty-four hours a day. The Chapbook keeps its narratives clean, human, and responsible — read more in the Editorial Policy.
The Greta Project is, this calendar year, projecting approximately fourteen hundred and twenty placements. Maren Holstrom is, by her gentle private description, in no hurry to expand beyond the current Minneapolis service area.
She has, by gentle joint conversation with Janet Whitebear in late April, begun to think about the succession plan for the directorship.
She is, by her honest gentle description, in no rush. She has, by the patience of ten years of work, learned what the next ten years are likely to require.
