Tag: Minnesota

Minneapolis’s Costly Jobs Program Pays Off

Posted on by robbie

Imagine being in your mid-40s and getting laid off from the job you’ve held for more than a decade. Talk about a moment of panic.
That’s the exact situation that Tracie Roberts faced in 2009 when she lost her job after 13 years of being a Target employee. With years of experience but without a college degree, Roberts — like many victims of the Great Recession — was stuck.
This story is all too familiar across the country, where unemployment continues to grip cities. But a local Minneapolis nonprofit has been proving for decades that taking the time to empower underserved members of the community (like Roberts) has its merits.
Twin Cities RISE! (TCR) is a job skills training program, founded in 1993, aimed at helping Minneapolis low-income residents. While it specifically targets men of color, applicants are both male and female and over the past few years, about a one-quarter of participants have been white, according to the Atlantic CityLab. Through a combination of training, mentoring, internship opportunities, and teaching courses focused on personal empowerment, the organization aims to help the unemployed find jobs that earn a living wage.
The program costs $5,000 annually per participant and can take more than seven months to complete. An applicant must have earned less than $20,000 in the past year and may not hold a four-year degree from a United States college. The requirements may sound rigid — but the program has proven successful.
Part of that success stems from TCR’s investment in each participant. The nonprofit teaches personal empowerment training — from improving self-esteem to developing relationship skills — and reinforces the concept throughout its entire program.

“It’s all about the thought process. It’s all about perception. How we think or feel,” said TCR instructor Quinten Osgood. “It’s about helping you look inside yourself for solutions.”

The concept has worked. Former CEO Art Berman and independent economists from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve and the state government estimate for every $1 invested in its program by the state, they reduce more than $7 to Minnesota taxpayers from increased state tax receipts, reduced state subsidies, and reduced recidivism among graduates.

Most of TCR’s funding is donated, but the organization also benefited from a state performance-based contract that earned them money every time a participant became employed and were still employed a year later.

Getting through the program is no small feat. About 400 students enroll each year, focusing on either office support, administrative-focused jobs, or operations like machine lifting. After taking courses on everything from resume writing and workplace communications to goal-setting and public speaking, students then apply for jobs. TCR tries to place participants in jobs that pay at least $20,000 a year with benefits, but that doesn’t always work out.

A student officially “graduates” after holding a job for more than a year. The nonprofit boasts that 81 percent of its graduates remain in their job in the first year and 70 percent remain in the second year. For the state of Minnesota, that’s a pretty effective jobs growth initiative.

Personal coaches also advise participants while they’re in the program and for the first two years after getting hired.  As CityLab points out, the transition from no job to one that pays $20,000 annually can be a lot of responsibility. TCR’s coaches and long-term empowerment method may take some time, but have proven to be a worthy investment.

Five years later, Roberts now works for the Hyatt Regency in downtown Minneapolis, taking summer classes at a community college for credit to eventually earn her bachelor’s degree in business management.

“I thought it would be a great free training program, I’d get my computer skills up. But it turned out to be so much more than that. It really did,” Roberts said.

MORE: Minnesota Looks to a Historic Structure to Help End Veteran Homelessness

 

From Field Hands to Farmers: This Program Helps Latino Immigrants Become Land Owners

Posted on by robbie

When asked what they want to be when they grow up, many little boys say that they want to be farmers. But when those small men become full-grown ones, a career in agriculture is often far from their minds.
That’s precisely the problem facing Minnesota. Those who own the state’s 69,000 farms are aging — averaging 56.6 years old — and many of their children aren’t interested in continuing the family business.
At the same time, more Latino immigrants than ever before are flocking to the state, and many of them would love to own their own farms, but they lack the necessary capital to purchase land.
It’s precisely these two demographic trends that inspired Ramon Leon, the CEO of the Latino Economic Development Center (LEDC) in Minneapolis, to find a way to help low-wage Latino workers become farmers.
Leon has experience in transforming the lives of low-wage immigrants. According to Tom Meersman of the Star Tribune, Leon’s organization has already helped many people previously employed as dishwashers and drivers become business owners. And three years ago, the LEDC established a training course for prospective farmers, provided them with loans, and set up Latino farming cooperatives, such as the Agua Gorda co-op (named after the Mexican town that many meatpacking workers in Long Prairie, Minnesota come from).
“There are a lot of Latino workers in agriculture that aspire to be farm owners if they had a chance,” John Flory of the LEDC told Meersman. “The question is what model can we use to bring them from being low-wage agricultural workers to having an opportunity to be a farm owner.”
The workers in the co-op keep their day jobs while farming rented fields on evenings and weekends. The first year, each member contributed $250 and all together, the group took out a $5,400 loan. They sold $7,000 worth of produce (including peppers, tomatoes, melons, and cucumbers), and eventually were able to expand their acreage and their sales to $40,000 last year. Their main focus? Developing connections in the community so that they can sell all of the produce they grow.
Many of the immigrants find that as their work roots them to the Minnesota soil, long-time residents are becoming more accepting of them. “When you go to communities the people start seeing you there working so hard, and they give you some respect,” Jaime Villalaz, business development specialist for the LEDC told Meersman. “They start thinking of us as good people.”
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Here’s How Thousands of Low-Income Americans Became Entrepreneurs

Posted on by robbie

For some struggling small business owners, success hinges on the ability to acquire a loan or capital to get off the ground.
For minorities, this can be even more a problem since they are more likely to be denied credit, according to the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy.
Fortunately for penny-pinching, aspiring entrepreneurs in Minneapolis, the nonprofit Neighborhood Development Center (NDC) offers training and tools they need to get their own businesses off the ground that ultimately, help revitalize their community.
Founded in 1993, the NDC offers entrepreneurship courses, small-business loans, and real-estate projects with a focus on turning vacant buildings into business incubators, according to the National Journal.
“There is just this huge untapped resource,” said Mihailo Temali, founder and chief executive officer of NDC.
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The NDC estimates that every new business it supports ultimately generates $100,000 annually for the local economy through rent, property taxes, and business expenses. The group also partners with community organizations, dispatching NDC-trained instructors to teach a 20-week course offered in five different languages. The course costs students between $100 and $600. The small business incubator has trained more than 4,400 people, 84 percent of which are non-white.
Alumni can apply for small business loans after completing the NDC class. The lending team examines the student’s finances and business plan and uses instructors for references. While not all students go on to continue their business plans, NDC’s default rate is a mere 5 percent — in part due to hardworking entrepreneurs but also positive support throughout the entire launch process.
For Haiyen Vang and her husband, Neeson, the NDC is the reason they can boast a chain of six discount clothing stores — The Clearance Rack — and a staff of 26 employees. Ten years ago, the couple received help at age of 22. Neeson worked at Wal-Mart while Haiyen managed a toddler with another baby on the way. With only their GEDs and bad credit, it was unlikely they could launch anything of their own.
But through NDC training, a loan, and a network for support and advice, a decade later the Vangs are planning to nationally franchise their once-small business. The Clearance Rack is one of around 500 NDC-assisted businesses in the Twin Cities area.

“NDC assisted us, but then at the same time, we helped ourselves,” Haiyen said, noting the NDC’s ripple effect of giving back to the community. “It’s just amazing how the cycle just repeats. And it gets bigger and better every time.”

Minnesota Looks to a Historic Structure to Help End Veteran Homelessness

Posted on by robbie

First, the building served as a fort. Its second life? A Civil War induction station. Next, it was the Military Intelligence Service Language School during World War II, where soldiers learned Japanese. For its fourth incarnation, the fort was decommissioned and turned over to the Minnesota Historical Society and became a military museum. Now, the historic structure is being called to service once again — this time as housing for homeless veterans.
Fort Snelling, which sits at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, was built in the 1820s. To ready the structure for its new purpose, construction workers broke ground on May 29 to begin converting five of its historic buildings into 58 affordable housing units for homeless military veterans and their families — the CommonBond Veteran’s Housing.
Studios and one-, two-, and three-bedroom units are available. The complex will include medical and psychological health offices, job training services, and academic support. Residents will work with counselors to help get their lives back on track.
Collaboration between public and private groups, including United Health Group, the Home Depot Foundation, Neighborhood Works America, and many others raised the $17.2 million required for the project, which should be completed by spring 2015.
“I’m very proud of the progress that we have made. After years of hard work, Minnesota now has the lowest homeless rate for veterans in the country,” Senator Al Franken told Reg Chapman of CBS Minnesota. Minnesota has 320 homeless veterans, and state leaders have set a goal to end homelessness among veterans in the state by 2015.
Formerly homeless Marine Corps Vietnam veteran Jerry Readmond, who now serves as an advocate for homeless veterans, told Chapman, “We’re all trained in the military how to survive but when we come home we have to start surviving all over again.”
This new use of the old fort should make that quest for survival easier.
MORE: The City of Miami Steps Up for Its Homeless Service Members
 
 

No Soil? Or Sun? This Urban Farm is Raising Fresh Food in a Whole New Way

Posted on by robbie

With no natural dirt or sunlight, an abandoned brewery may be the most unlikely spot for a farm producing kale and tilapia. But with a little help from technology, St Paul, Minnesota has turned a shuttered industrial space into a source for fresh produce and seafood.
The food-based urban renewal project is spearheaded by local company Urban Organics, which focuses on using an aquaponics system — where fish and plants help each other grow. The ideas is that aquaculture — like fish or shrimp — uses water from hydroponics, or cultivating plants in water, for mutually beneficial agriculture.
In East St. Paul, the local Hamm’s Brewery has long been a local landmark, once symbolizing the neighborhood’s livelihood before it closed in 1997. The shuttering left many without jobs in an area that was in much need of urban renewal.
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“Hamm’s and 3M provided most of the jobs in East St. Paul, and they shut down within a few years of each other,” said Dave Haider, an Urban Organics cofounder who runs day-to-day operations.

With the help of $300,000 in grants and loans from the city of St. Paul, as well as private backers, Hamm’s is once again giving the community something to boast about.

The aquaponics technology was purchased from Pentair (PAES), a Swiss-based multibillion dollar company that makes industrial fluid-control systems. In three tiers, plants float atop polystrene rafts in plastic troughs while roots drip down into the fishwater — all of this stacked atop 18-foot-high racks illuminated by bright lights.

The leafy greens are electric in color, benefiting from the aquaponics system that uses nutrient-filled wastewater (from four 3,500-gallon tanks stocked with tilapia) to irrigate and fertilize the plants before redirecting it back to the fish as clean water. The closed-loop system may be the largest indoor facility such as this in the country, according to Fast Company.

Without using any soil, the sophisticated system uses about 25 percent of the water needed to grow greens conventionally while using 40 percent less energy than most office buildings. The system can produce about 75 fish a week but the plan is to add more tanks to increase production to 150,000 pounds of fish and 720,000 pounds of greens annually. Produce is available to local consumers within 24 hours of harvest.

The ambitious project took two years to build before its launch this past April. Urban Organics’s first harvest of tilapia was delivered in early April to 20 Lunds & Byerly’s locations, a local grocery store chain.

The high-tech farm is a test case for this new type of urban farming, with hopes that it will serve as a model for other places around the country. Pentair already serves customers in North and South America, Scandinavia, Asia and Saudi Arabia. Randy Hogan, Pentair’s chairman and CEO, said they are now working with entrepreneurs in Kansas City and Chicago.

Though Urban Organics employs only a handful of people, the group is collaborating with a local restaurant, craft brewer, and a distiller to grown some of their botanicals. Urban Organics co-founder Fred Haberman said expectations are high, but the local reaction to seeing a “symbol of decay turned into an asset” is an empowering reason to continue serving the community.

This State Banned a Very Common Ingredient Hiding in Your Soap

Posted on by robbie

Everyone in Minnesota who insists on scrubbing their hands with certain anti-bacterial products might want to run to their nearest drug store to stock up.
As the Associated Press reports, Governor Mark Dayton recently signed a bill making Minnesota the first state to prohibit the use of a very common chemical ingredient that’s found 75 percent of antibacterial soaps and body washes: Triclosan.
So what’s the fuss with this funny-sounding chemical? Well, for starters, it’s been linked to a whole slew of health and environmental impacts.
Laboratory studies found that this common household ingredient (which is also found in some hand sanitizers, dish soaps, laundry detergents, toothpastes and even pacifiers) could disrupt the function of certain hormones that are necessary for proper reproductive and brain development.
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Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that antibiotic resistance is one of the most pressing health issues facing the country. According to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), “infections caused by bacteria with resistance to at least one antibiotic have been estimated to kill more than 60,000 hospitalized patients each year.”
If that’s not enough for you to become anti- anti-bacterial, the NDRC says that approximately three-quarters of Americans ages six to 65 have triclosan in their urine. So besides being washed off our bodies and down the drain, the stuff is also being flushed into our waterways — polluting oceans, rivers, and lakes, and harming aquatic life.
Minnesota’s ban will go into effect on January 1, 2017, which means state residents have a few years to stockpile hand sanitizer.
ALSO: Now Banned in Hawaii: Plastic Bags
That is, unless other states and soap-makers follow Minnesota’s lead. One of the bill’s lead sponsors, state Senator John Marty, told the AP, “While this is an effort to ban triclosan from one of the 50 states, I think it will have a greater impact than that.” He added that other states and the Federal government are likely to act, plus some manufacturers are already phasing out triclosan.
There are, of course, several anti-regulators who are opposed to the ban. Not to mention that, because of sanitation reasons, trilosan is a necessary ingredient for surgeons and other hospital workers.
Despite this, conventional wisdom (and the FDA) says that there’s really nothing better than properly washing up with good ol’ soap and water. Which, to us, sounds like a small price to pay for our health and the health of the planet.

A New Program Transitions Soldiers into Successful Tradesmen

Posted on by robbie

You always want the very best for your friends. That’s especially true if your pal has sacrificed by serving as a member of the United States military.
When seeing two of his Marine friends (“both extraordinary people with a lot of talent”) struggle after returning from war, Keith Mercurio of Little Canada, Minnesota had an idea. “When they came back from service, I was able to watch how they reintegrated into society—one of my friends didn’t have much to do, he was just home. These guys are having to come home where there are no jobs for them. He was having a tough time…While I am seeing this happen to my friends, I am also listening to how our businesses are having trouble finding good people. And both of these situations just didn’t make any sense to me,” Mercurio told Candace Roulo of Contractor Magazine.
Mercurio realized what his veteran friends were missing: Professional training that would qualify them for in-demand fix-it jobs.
So he met with Jack Tester, the CEO of Nexstar (a national company that organizes a network of contractors), who just happens to be his employer. (Mercurio is a sales trainer for Nexstar.) From there, the program Troops to Trades was born.
Nexstar usually only trains people who work for its own companies, but Mercurio asked his boss to open up their training to all veterans — regardless of their business affiliation. Tester agreed.
One of the beneficiaries of the program is Army veteran Bryan Daleiden, who was working in the office of Uptown Heating and Cooling in Minneapolis. Daleiden wanted to be fixing heating and cooling systems instead of completing paperwork, but he lacked the training. He applied for a scholarship from the Troops to Trades program, and they paid his expenses for a two-week training course.
“Anytime there is an opportunity to achieve higher learning in something I’m passionate about, I seize it,” Daleiden said.
Troops to Trades is run by The Nexstar Legacy Foundation, which is partnering with the American Legion to get the word out about the scholarships, training, and job placement that they offer in plumbing, heating, cooling, and electrical services. The company has set up a business network whose members agree to talk to veterans about their work and offer them jobs.
Mercurio said he knew his idea would work, because people like his Marine Corps veteran friends “…did get all the skills from training in the military that anyone would ever hope for in a human being — they are reliable, respectful, disciplined, hardworking, noble and honest.”
Only now, they can fix your clogged kitchen sink, too.
MORE: This Program is Transforming Unemployed Veterans Into In-Demand Chefs

This Man Is on a Cross-Country Mission to Meet Every One of His Facebook Friends

Posted on by robbie

While Facebook began as an exclusive site for young college kids, its reach has expanded far beyond that. With the worldwide social network now boasting more than 1.28 billion users, the concept of what it means to friend someone seems to be lost on most people.
Which is exactly why 35-year-old Army vet Mikel McLaughlin is asking: What does it mean to be Facebook friends? He’s hoping to find an answer during his cross-country quest to meet every single one of his friends on the online platform. The law school graduate set out on his journey April 2, documenting his story on his website, “We’re Friends, Right?“
McLaughlin, a Minnesota native, came up with the idea after hearing about people applying some “spring cleaning” to their social network. Rather than deleting people he hadn’t spoken to in awhile, he wanted to do the opposite.
MORE: You Can Do More Than Just ‘Like’ Your Favorite Charity on Facebook
“Originally, the thought was I wanted to test the friendships I had on Facebook to see how close they were to traditional friendships,” McLaughlin told the Good News Blog. “If I could travel great distances to see these people, would they give me an hour or two of their time?”
But he’s found something more than that while traveling across the country in a rented red Volkswagen Beetle. Along the way, he’s managed to make new friends, including people he wasn’t exactly sure why they were connected on Facebook.
“I had absolutely no idea who he was or why we became Facebook friends in the first place”, he wrote on his blog. “Today, we figured it out together.”
Now on day 36, McLaughlin is about a third of the way through his network of 422 friends. While he admits he was previously friends with one out of every four Facebook friends, he’s hoping to turn some of his virtual acquaintances into real friends.
“I think if I can meet up with these people, I know spending time with them makes you more likely to be compassionate…I thought if I could be a little better perhaps everybody could be the same.”

How ‘The Golden Girls’ Can Help Solve a Problem Facing Senior Women

Posted on by robbie

“The Golden Girls” went off the air in 1992, but many of us still remember the show about four senior women sharing a home in Miami, in part because there hasn’t been anything else like it on T.V.
It turns out “The Golden Girls” was ahead of its time in more ways than one, and that its model of communal living—with some good-natured bickering thrown in—might provide a solution to a problem facing millions of Baby Boomer women as they reach retirement age. One third of Baby Boomer women live alone, and 50.8 percent of the 78.2 million Boomers in America are women. Many of these single women are divorced, a situation that often leaves their finances in disarray as they head into retirement.
According to the PBS NewsHour, the median income of senior women in Minneapolis was $11,000 less than that for men, which gave Connie Skillingstad an idea. She runs Golden Girl Homes, Inc., which helps match older women in the Twin Cities with others who’d like to reduce loneliness and split expenses by sharing a home. She told Spencer Michels of the NewsHour that each of the women who band together as roommates offers some asset that can help the others. “For example, there are women who have no money, but they have a house. They have space and they can share it with somebody, and it will help them to survive,” she said.
Karen Bush, Louise Machinist, and Jean McQuillan are longtime friends in their 60s, each of them divorced, who now share houses in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Sarasota, Florida. The women reach agreements about cooking, cleaning, finances, and what to do should any of them fall ill. They have legal documents in place stipulating what would happen if any of them are no longer able to take care of themselves. Together, they’re renovating their Florida condo to allow them to age in place. Bush told Michels, “The whole setup that we have here is going to help me be independent for a long time. And at the point at which I can no longer be independent, I will have additional resources to pay for what I need.”
Half a million women over the age of 50 in America live with roommates who are not romantic partners. Now this sounds like a case of smart women banding together to solve their own problems. Could a sitcom be next?
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A New Study Yields Surprising Results About Low-Income People and Food Deserts

Posted on by robbie

Whether it’s a traveling bus full of vegetables or convenience stores stocked with farmer’s market produce, people across this country are coming up with innovative ways to solve the problems caused by food deserts. And these creative programs are having a big impact in some neighborhoods.
More low-income people tend to live in food deserts and have a hard time accessing transportation to grocery stores and farmers markets — exacerbating the problems of obesity-related illness among the poor. Or so the theory goes.
Jerry Shannon wondered if this was true, so during his doctoral program in geography at the University of Minnesota, he studied where 275,366 recipients of SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, once known as food stamps) in the Twin Cities purchased their groceries from 2009 to 2010.
Shannon discovered that SNAP recipients often travel to supermarkets outside their communities. “You can’t just assume people shop where they live,” Shannon told Cynthia Boyd of the MinnPost. These people shop outside their neighborhoods in part “because of perceived better quality and lower prices of suburban stores,” Shannon said.
Shannon’s findings are detailed in “Rethinking Food Deserts: An Initial Report of Findings,” published in Social Science & Medicine. On his website, he offers an interactive map showing where those who receive SNAP benefits live, where they redeem their benefits, and the types of stores they shop at. Shannon isn’t suggesting that communities stop working on the problem of food deserts, but he told Boyd, “We need more sophisticated ways about seeing how people access the food system.” He just might be the researcher to advance these studies.
MORE: This Innovative Idea Brings Produce Directly to Low-Income Communities