Ground Level Category Archive: Young people

Minneapolis art students share ideas with a small city

Posted at 2:45 PM on March 1, 2012 by Dave Peters (2 Comments)
Filed under: Community Development, Economic Development, Local Food, Rural, Young people

MONTEVIDEO -- Last Saturday at the community center here, a handful of students from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) presented ideas aimed at revitalizing the local economy and culture through arts, broadly defined.

An arts-based economy is emerging in western Minnesota, in the Upper Minnesota River Valley. I wrote a story about it that will run next Tuesday as part of Ground Level's One Job at a Time project.

Meeting with some four dozen residents, including potters and organic farmers, the MCAD students tossed out ideas that included enlisting young documentarians to make a short film establishing a narrative for the region, opening a restaurant with local foods and furnishings and formalizing an internship program where MCAD students would earn credits for working with local artisans.

The students were part of the school's new Rural Arts Initiative, funded by the Bush Foundation, which seeks to lay fresh, problem-solving eyes on the Montevideo area and also the Iron Range. The students spend a little time in each location and return to present creative suggestions, along the way gaining a feel for real-world problems. (Full disclosure: Ground Level receives support from the Bush Foundation.)

"We are not coming in to save people through art or design," said class professor Bernard Canniffe, who chairs MCAD's design department. "I think artists and designers do more damage than good in these things. 'Oh look, we're going to create a mural.' It's like God almighty, really? That's all we can do? Or create a papier-mache donkey standing on its head that symbolizes hope in Montevideo? Many times that's what these things become, padded resume builders for designers or artists. It doesn't accomplish anything. This is something different."

Canniffe, who is from South Wales, said the goal is to "create innovation" and hopefully establish a long-term relationship with the community. "Art can assess and create," he said. "That's what art and design can do, look at things quickly and assess them really quickly."

"The next ground-breaking initiatives or ideas are going to come out of the Midwest and not the coasts," he said. "Pick any subject that's affecting the world now. It could be globalization, population densities, entrepreneurism, agriculture, cultural ethnicity, Christian versus Muslim identification. All these things are happening in one shape or form in Minnesota or Iowa."

Aside from one audience member who thought it paternalistic to have student documentarians from elsewhere tell the region's story, the response to the presentation was largely positive. Attendees seemed to appreciate the opportunity to exploit young talent and energy and perhaps draw a student or two to stay. "Out of the creativity phase, hopefully something comes and clicks and becomes a new model," said Patrick Moore, of Clean Up the River Environment, based in Montevideo.

Moore is one of those people who make things happen in a community and he facilitated the student presentation. "I'm hoping that the economic development of western Minnesota can grow. I love the towns and the people and the river. I want people to live in this landscape. I don't want it to be inhabited by robots and machines. I want people in these communities to thrive and raise kids and create art and music and plays."

"It's about building a new society in the shell of the old," he said.

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Jobs are coming, but there is bad news

Posted at 2:28 PM on March 22, 2011 by Jennifer Vogel (1 Comments)
Filed under: Aging, Health care, Local government finance, Young people

"We have entered the age of entitlements in Minnesota and the United States and in some respects the entire world," said state demographer Tom Gillaspy during a lunch talk on Tuesday at Minnesota Public Radio. "It's an unprecedented time."

Gillaspy was referring to an ominous trend reflected in the latest census data: The state is experiencing a dramatic increase in the number of people who are over 65 and drawing Social Security and other benefits and a decrease in the number of young people entering the workforce to pay for those benefits.

"By the end of the decade, for the first time, we'll have more people over 65 than in K-12 education," Gillaspy said.

The implications are far-reaching. The age imbalance will make it harder to rectify the state budget in the future.

"This decade, it's not going to be nursing homes that are driving the whole thing," Gillaspy said. "That's a couple of decades out. This decade the big issue will be the labor force. It's an odd thing to talk about when unemployment is high."

He predicted, quite ominously, that, "things are about to start popping" as more older people retire and fewer younger people are available to take their jobs.

"By the end of the decade, workforce growth will be essentially nil," said Gillaspy, who noted that the change won't be gradual. "We'll see a big jump in retirement next year and strong increases for a decade after that."

He said that although employment forecasts talk in terms of job growth, for the foreseeable future, employment will center on filling vacancies not creating new jobs.

"That forecast isn't that great," Gillaspy said. "People look at that and say 'There aren't many opportunities.' But when the flood of people retires, we're going to have lots of replacement openings, across every occupation. As far as I know, those will, for the first time ever, exceed the number of new job openings."

That may sound like hopeful news to those who are out of work. But without huge, coinciding increases in productivity from automation and other innovations -- which is possible -- the state and the nation will continually be handed social services bills it can't afford to pay, he said.

That could affect the retirement age, pensions, and whether retirees receive health care benefits.

"Chronic government deficits aren't going to end anytime soon," Gillaspy said. "Unless we can deal with the underlying cause, we'll be back two years later with another $5 billion deficit. And two years later, until there is virtually nothing left except things like medical assistance. We have to see some changes. This is a non-sustainable situation."

On a hopeful note, Gillaspy said that with public investment in education, infrastructure and research, we may be able to invent our way out of the problem.

"These are exciting times," he said. "This will be a more exciting decade I think than any in history. This is a time for heroes. This is a time for leaders and exceptional things. It's not a time for business as usual."

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Wilder unveils youth and children data

Posted at 2:19 PM on January 26, 2011 by Dave Peters (0 Comments)
Filed under: Young people

Consider these items:

One out of every three black children in Minnesota has at least one foreign-born parent.

About 85 percent of Minnesota's 6th grade girls will tell you they know an adult in their community, other than their parents, who cares about them. But for 12th graders, that percentage drops to 68 percent. The numbers are lower for boys.

For both boys and girls, the likelihood they are engaged in outside-school activities like sports, the arts and community service peaks in the 9th grade and then declines.

You can find these facts and many more in a new presentation of data that Wilder Research unveiled today. Check it out at Wilder's Minnesota Compass site.

It's the latest addition to Wilder's trove of data from a huge variety of sources -- demographic, health, public safety, education, environmental, transportation data and more. The new youth and children section started with a request from the McKnight Foundation several years ago when it became clear that there were a limited number of studies of kids and their out-of-school lives.

A lot of the data comes from the tri-ennial Minnesota Student Survey the Department of Education takes. You can find the reports at the Department of Education, but Wilder has developed the knack for making the data easy to grasp, to break down to the county level and to combine with information from other sources.

By themselves these factoids might be curious and interesting, but the hope is that agencies and non-profits working with young people can use the data to fine tune their activities, find the right targets and make the connections between data and real people.

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