Minneapolis is partnering with journalism organization StoryCorps Studios for a project to collect resident stories and cultivate racial healing. 

Five years after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, the director of Minneapolis’ Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging department Prince Corbett said a project with StoryCorps was an opportunity for Minneapolis to work toward social racial healing. 

“We wanted to create a window of opportunity for people to reflect back and be able to interview their family members, friends, loved ones, even people they may not agree with, about their experiences and what has happened five years later,” Corbett said.

The heart of the Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging department’s work centers on reducing disparities in racial equity through oral history projects and grants for organizations dealing with community trauma. 

A year after the city initially connected with StoryCorps, Minneapolis residents can record and save their stories to the “Minneapolis Your Story” project through an online recording booth until May 31. StoryCorps’ traveling recording studio will be in Minneapolis from May 13-22 where residents can record their story in person.

Corbett said racial healing has three components: individual, community and institutional system healing. Minneapolis’s StoryCorps project will focus on community healing. 

“The murder of George Floyd shows up differently within different communities,” Corbett said. “As we’re able to sit down and be able to listen to those conversations, the more we have a deeper understanding of a perspective or a different experience that someone is coming from.”

Caitlin Moses Bowser, StoryCorps’ managing director who oversees project partnerships, said starting a storytelling project with a city begins with a conversation between community leaders to identify the city’s goals for the project.

“The city’s goals are to really think about how they can give and hold space to hear from those who are really oftentimes not heard from, who are not in the newspaper every day, who oftentimes whose perspectives they might not think matter so much,” Moses Bowser said.

StoryCorps’ unique journalism model centers around conversation, where participants ask each other questions and share their perspectives in a safe space, Moses Bowser said.

“The microphone, oftentimes, really gives you license to ask questions that you might not feel comfortable to ask in normal day-to-day life,” Moses Bowser said.

StoryCorps has the largest collection of human voices ever recorded, stored in an archive in the Library of Congress where people can access them long after being recorded.

Corbett, who had a personal experience finding the story of an unknown family member through the StoryCorps archive, said the ability for future generations to hear the voices of today’s residents was important for him.

Moses Bowser said any Minneapolis resident can submit their story to the project with the city, especially hoping to hear from young people.

Corbett said he hopes the project will create a space for conversation and open up the possibility for understanding between Minneapolis residents.

“In an ideal world, an outcome would be bringing together two people, who may not necessarily agree about all of the outcomes or the circumstances of a situation, to be able to sit down and have a conversation with each other,” Corbett said.

An interview can be recorded and submitted to the “Minneapolis Your Story” project on StoryCorps’ website.

Minneapolis’ Southeast Como neighborhood houses long-time residents, University of Minnesota students, small businesses, parks and six gardens. One of those six gardens is the Talmage Crossing Community Garden, a roadside home to wildflowers and bees during the spring and summer.

Across Talmage Avenue — the garden’s adjacent road and its namesake — sits about a 1,000-square-foot, triangular plot of abandoned asphalt.

Left empty for almost 50 years, Como neighbors have wanted to turn the empty plot into an extension of the community garden on the other side of Talmage Avenue and started the Talmage Triangle Rain Garden project to do so.

Luke Nichols, a 10-year Como resident and landscape architect, said he first got involved with the Talmage Triangle project because he saw the garden as a way to cultivate a neighborhood bond.

“I’ve seen this garden as this means to create community and also to transform a vacant piece of land that was used for railroad rubbish into this thriving native pollinator garden,” Nichols said.

Privately owned since the 1970s, transforming the empty lot proved more difficult than imagined. 

Talmage Triangle project volunteers worked for the last 15 years to earn the support of the previous Southeast Como Neighborhood Association, the Minneapolis Public Works Department and a grant from the neighborhood’s watershed district. 

They were ready to purchase the plot of land, Nichols said, until the plot’s current owner lost interest in selling.

“I’m aggravated about this because the neighborhood has spent a long time organizing and trying to work with this property owner. The property owner expressed interest,” Nichols said. “So we tried to consider their concerns, but they’re just not interested or motivated to do anything.”

Chris Vos, the son of the Talmage Triangle plot’s current owner and future landlord of the property, said he and his family supported turning the plot into part of the community garden, but they have concerns about potential city ownership and what erosion damage from removing the street curb would do to their neighboring property.

“The idea of the garden is phenomenal,” Vos said. “They keep saying that there is no modifying the space without city ownership, and that’s a significant part of what makes us nervous.”

Next to the empty lot, the Vos family owns a duplex which they rent out. 

The asphalt will remain unless the Vos family decides to sell the triangular plot to the city,  Nichols said.

“It’s a volunteer-based organization and the fact that all these things have come together, it’s no short of a miracle,” Nichols said. “And now we have a homeowner or a landlord that just doesn’t care.”

Lila Smith, a spearhead of the Talmage Triangle project who’s lived in Como for almost 50 years, said the project’s grant money expires in March of 2026, so drawn-out property negotiations are not in the potential garden’s favor.

The Talmage Triangle project started a petition advocating for the potential garden to garner the support of Minneapolis City Council members.

Avery Davis, a former Como resident and one of the more than 200 petition signatures, said they signed the petition because walking through the existing Talmage community garden helped their mental health while they lived in Como.

Davis, who works at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, said that they led a watercolor class at the existing garden in 2024 and would like to lead another in the new garden.

“Not only was the current existing space so wonderful for people in that immediate area, but also brought people to the Talmage space to learn about art and to be able to sit and really focus on specific native plants,” Davis said. “Having that space be bigger would just expand that impact.”

Rachel Forrest, a three-year Como resident, said she signed the petition because more nature spaces are immeasurably better for the neighborhood community than an empty plot. 

Vos said he has not ruled out allowing a garden to be planted on the asphalt plot, but for now his concerns about the project are seemingly without a solution.

“Obviously, that improvement of that space is great, and we’d love it,” Vos said. “But at the same time, we’re not willing to give up the bit of control that we have over that little bit of space.”

Smith said the possibility of transforming the empty plot into a blooming garden motivates her through the frustration of the project’s missing final piece.

“Sometimes you can get down,” Smith said. “But then on the other hand, it’s a chance to take something that’s been an eyesore for many years and the neighborhood has been working on for many years and make something beautiful.”

Minnesota environmental advocacy organizations filed a lawsuit against state government agencies to limit nitrate pollution in drinking water.

The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA), alongside Minnesota Trout Unlimited and the Minnesota Well Owners Organization filed a joint lawsuit on Jan. 28 against the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. 

Aaron Klemz, chief strategy officer for MCEA, said the lawsuit’s goal is to change farming practices to decrease nitrate contamination in Minnesota’s groundwater.

“It’s not like we sued somebody because they did something, broke the law or it’s a punitive lawsuit,” Klemz said. “It’s more of we really think there’s a problem here that’s not being addressed by current rules.”

John Lenczewski, the executive director of Minnesota Trout Unlimited, the conservation organization working to protect cold water fisheries, said the organization joined the lawsuit to fight for the interests of trout fishermen and fish populations.

“Something’s got to change,” Lenczewski said. “Things are getting better as far as nitrate pollution, so we joined to highlight the impact on natural resources as well as humans.”

In a 2022 report, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency identified nitrates as a harmful nutrient to human and animal life at high levels and proposed limiting the amount of nitrates in Minnesota’s cold waters.

Nitrates are a nutrient that typically occurs naturally in water, soil and plants, but can be harmful or deadly if a person or animal is exposed to high levels of it. Exposure to high levels of nitrates is linked to bladder and bowel cancers, according to Klemz.

People can be exposed to nitrates when too much fertilizer is used on crops, which can cause rain to wash away the excess nitrate in the fertilizer, Klemz said. Those nitrates can seep through the ground and into groundwater resources, he added.

Aquatic life can be harmed if nitrate levels reach more than five milligrams per liter, according to a press release from Minnesota Trout Unlimited.

Nitrate pollution in the state’s groundwater, especially in southeastern Minnesota, can disproportionately affect well owners whose water quality is not routinely checked by their local government, according to Klemz.

MCEA petitioned the federal government about Minnesota’s lacking nitrate regulations in 2023 and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency directed the state to immediately address nitrate contamination, according to the MCEA website.

State agencies began that process, Klemz said, but the changes have not yet reduced unsafe nitrate levels. Stopping overuse of fertilizer and changing farming manure disposal practices is key to reducing excess nitrates in Minnesota’s groundwater, he added.

“We’re really conscious of the fact that farmers are not evil people that are trying to destroy the planet,” Klemz said. “It’s more that oftentimes they’re kind of caught in, ‘I’ve got this waste, how do I get rid of it?’”

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency said in an email statement to the Minnesota Daily that reducing nitrate pollution is a priority on which they have made progress. 

Klemz said he is confident the lawsuit will succeed and expects arguments at the district court will be made in the summer.

“While everyone agrees there’s a problem, there’s definitely disagreement about the extent of that problem or what the right solution to it is,” Klemz said.

Lenczewski said all the lawsuit is asking is for concrete work toward changing the rules on nitrate regulation in a way that gives every stakeholder a place at the table.

“We’re not like trying to slip one by anybody,” Lenczewski said. “We’re just asking for a very public rulemaking process where all the public can have a voice here and make sure that things are changed.”

Four months after becoming an official organization, the East Bank Neighborhoods Partnership (EBNP) and its members are determined to make their neighborhood association merger a success.

Chris Lautenschlager, EBNP executive director, said he and the organization’s board members are acutely aware of the stakes in creating a new neighborhood organization.

“A lot of people recognize we made a big argument in the last year and a half, and we don’t want to see it not work,” Lautenschlager said. “There were criticisms, there were people that opposed a merger like this and we want to be right.”

Community members from Marcy-Holmes, Southeast Como and Nicollet Island voted to merge their individual neighborhood associations into a new conglomerate in October. Association leaders decided to merge to combine financial and staff resources in light of lost funding from the Minneapolis city government.

The new organization became operational on Nov. 4 when the Minnesota Secretary of State office approved it as a legal non-profit.

Lautenschlager said the organization spent the last four months ironing out the details on how to transition the three neighborhood associations’ financial and bureaucratic functions into the new merged association.

“Every day we uncover a new wrinkle in something that needs to be addressed fairly quickly,” Lautenschlager said. “But I think we’re much better established than we were a month ago, especially three months ago, when we thought, ‘Okay, we did this, now what happens?’”

An interim board of 15 people selected to represent each neighborhood is tasked with deciding how the new organization will function by the time it holds its first elections in the fall.

Katie Fournier, an EBNP board member and a Southeast Como resident of more than 50 years, said the biggest challenge to the planning process is figuring out how voting for future board member elections will work.

Lautenschlager said despite the past months’ slog of administrative work, he is excited by the EBNP’s interim board’s motivation to prove the merged organization a success.

“Certainly the biggest change is having 15 active, informed voices that are really wanting this to work,” Lautenschlager said. “That’s exciting that it’s not just a couple of people, but there’s a lot of energy involved.”

Siya Shelar, a second-year University of Minnesota student and one of two University student representatives on the EBNP board, said she wants her student perspective to offer realism for what other student residents want from the EBNP.  

“Being on the younger side, it definitely is the perspective of what does our outreach genuinely look like?” Shelar, who is also the director of local affairs for Undergraduate Student Government at the University, said. “What is attainable and realistic for timelines and events people can actually go to?”

Shelar said that as the only person of color on the EBNP board, she values her ability to offer the EBNP a unique perspective on issues like food insecurity and public safety.

Lautenschlager said another guiding principle to the new organization is honoring the projects that individual neighborhoods worked on before merging.

The EBNP will have a membership meeting at the University Lutheran Church of Hope on March 18, open to all neighborhood residents and renters. They are also planning several Earth Day cleanup events throughout the East Bank neighborhoods on April 19. 

Fournier said after more than a year of working on the merger, she is thrilled to see it coming to life.

“I’ve been a longtime advocate of trying to combine the neighborhoods of Southeast Minneapolis in some way, or at least get them to cooperate better with each other,” Fournier said. “So I was really very pleased to see all of us come together.”

Shelar said despite the challenges of building a new neighborhood organization, she is excited by the opportunity for community and strength the EBNP offers.

“It sounds so corny but genuinely public unity, and being like, ‘We can’t exist separately, but we can exist together,’” Shelar said. “And what does that look like?”

Minneapolis’ annual tree lottery prioritizes the city’s local climate, underserved community and residential health as warmer weather forces change.

Sydney Schaaf, program manager for City Trees which runs the tree lottery, said the program has helped plant more than 20,000 trees at a low cost to Minneapolis residents since the program started in 2006.

“Planting a tree in your yard can lower the cost of your energy bills,” Schaaf said. “It can increase your property values, and you are saving a lot of money through our tree lottery because the trees are only $30.”

Trees could typically cost around $250 if bought from a tree nursery, according to Schaaf. City Trees has 1,600 trees available for this year’s sale.

Minneapolis’ City Trees program works to get more trees planted on private residential and commercial property to help build up the city’s tree canopy with large-leaf shade trees, according to City Trees community forester Shahin Khalili. 

A tree canopy is the surface area covered by leaves from trees and the shade those trees cast, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. 

From now until March 14, Minneapolis residents can enter the City Trees’ tree lottery to purchase up to three trees for $30 each for their property. Residents who purchase trees are responsible for planting and caring for them.

Artur Stefanski, a forestry resources professor at the University of Minnesota, said an abundant tree canopy helps a city’s environment and resident health by storing carbon dioxide, creating oxygen, filtering out pollution particles, acting as sound barriers, decreasing stress levels and increasing residential property value.

“Essentially, they are kind of filters for us, in a really true sense,” Stefanski said.

Having an abundant city tree canopy can alleviate heat island effects, Stefanski said. Minneapolis is built out of a lot of concrete which traps heat in and raises the average temperature of the city. A tree canopy that casts more shade can cool the city down.

With heat island effects leading to warmer temperatures, people use more air conditioning, said Peggy Booth, a founding member of the Minneapolis Tree Advisory Commission who consulted with City Trees. 

“A tree leaf is a tree leaf, but if you put it where it also reduces heat on parking lots and reduces unwanted sun coming in windows and whatnot, you get more bang for the buck,” Booth said.

Khalili said City Trees works to equitably distribute and plant trees to improve Minneapolis’ tree canopy. 

“We have this lottery in place beforehand that kind of gives people more of an equal chance to get access to the trees where they may not have originally had that opportunity,” Khalili said.

City Trees offers residents in Minneapolis Green Zones, areas historically impacted by pollution and environmental racism, free trees for their property.

When the City Trees program started, they did not have a lottery system for their low-cost tree sale, Booth said. Without a randomized lottery system, tree sales were disproportionately going to wealthier Minneapolis neighborhoods, so the Tree Advisory Commission started reserving trees for lower-income neighborhoods.

Stefanski said another factor to consider for urban tree canopy planning is doing thorough homework on what trees will grow and prosper in a city’s current and future climate, which will likely be warmer.

“They are good for the climate because of the job they do, but at the same time, climate is not necessarily good for them if it’s outside of their optimal conditions,” Stefanski said.

Khalili said City Trees prioritizes selling tree species native to southern Minnesota in its annual tree lottery, but must also consider trees that will prosper in residential areas for years to come.

“We can all see that the climate is changing around us, shorter yet harsher winters and longer, warmer summers and springs,” Khalili said. “We can plant for the forest today, but we also want to be planning for the urban forest five to ten years out as well.”

Community organizers in Prospect Park continue their decade-long fight to get Glendale Townhomes, one of Minneapolis’ first public housing developments, historically designated.

Ladan Yusuf, a co-founder of Defend Glendale & Public Housing Coalition, said their application to get the Townhomes historically designated is supported by Minnesota’s State Historic Preservation Office but has long faced pushback from city government.

“We’ve been fighting for this historic designation for 10 years,” Yusuf said. “The city just didn’t really care.”

The coalition formed in 2014 to protect public housing from businesses looking to privatize the historic Glendale area in Minneapolis and Hennepin County. 

Samira Ali, a University of Minnesota graduate student and coalition team member, said preserving the Townhomes is as much about preserving the physical space as it is about preserving the community.

“It’s kind of like an urgent need,” Ali said. “We’re doing this not in the aftermath as an afterthought, but rather in the moment while things are happening.”

The Townhomes were one of Minneapolis’ first public housing developments. Built in 1952 on more than 14 acres of public land, the 184 homes provided affordable housing for World War II veterans, according to the Glendale Townhomes 70th anniversary project. Today, the residents are primarily African-American, East African and Hmong.

The Minneapolis Community Planning & Economic Development Department (CPED) refused to update their 2019 report evaluating the Townhomes’ historic architectural integrity, Yusuf said, despite the State Historic Preservation Office confirming the Townhomes’ social and ethnic heritage significance.

Rob Skalecki, a city planner with CPED who worked on the Townhomes’ most recent evaluation, said the criteria they use to define historic integrity are based on architectural qualities. However, since the Townhomes’ architecture has changed multiple times, the city denied a recommendation.

“The toolbox we have for preserving buildings and sites is limited in some ways,” Skalecki said.

Skalecki said the CPED team acknowledges the Townhomes’ social historical significance, but that does not fulfill the national regulations for historic designation the city follows.

Cam Gordon, the former Ward 2 city council member who originally nominated the Glendale Townhomes for historic designation in 2019, said community interest and the evident historical value of the Townhomes encouraged him to nominate the site.

“I wasn’t really willing, necessarily, to do anything that I didn’t feel like the residents there were interested in doing,” Gordon said.

Bisharo Jama, a resident of the Townhomes, said she loves where she lives and wants the Townhomes and its community protected with a historical designation.

“These homes have history,” Jama said. “It’s public housing for low-income people that cannot pay a market rate rent. The government should be protecting us and protecting poor people and low-income people that cannot find housing anywhere else.”

Gordon said it is important that people in public housing have access to green space and single-family style homes rather than only high-rise apartments. 

“My sense was, isn’t it just fair that we also give some opportunities for people to have some choice of housing, whether on public housing or when and if they’re dependent on public housing?” Gordon said.

Many of the Townhomes’ first residents were World War II veterans pursuing a degree at the University of Minnesota while living with their families in the public housing complex, Gordon said.

Gordon said he could not get his fellow city council members to approve a historical designation recommendation before his time on the council ended in 2022, so the site’s nomination expired. He added that the lack of support from the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority (MPHA) likely stopped fellow council members from approving a designation.

In June 2024, Gordon’s Ward 2 successor, Council Member Robin Wonsley, re-nominated the Townhomes for historic designation. Minneapolis’ Heritage Preservation Commission voted unanimously to recommend a historical designation for the Townhomes in July 2024.

Mohamed Ahmed, another Glendale resident, said he could not take care of his child or maintain his job without the townhome’s convenient location and low rent cost.

Ahmed said residents like him need the coalition to protect their living space from city government and business disruption.

“People cannot defend themselves,” Ahmed said. “People are weak here, they are disabled, so we need people like Defend Glendale to protect us, to fight for us.”

Yusuf said the Glendale Townhomes need and deserve a historic designation to protect the site’s immense historical value and the livelihoods of the people living there from corporate housing exploitation.

“Why would you want to destroy that?” Yusuf said. “Why should our history be erased?”

Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB) prepares for future unpredictable, warm winters after temporarily closing their outdoor ice rinks.

MPRB temporarily closed more than 40 ice rinks for about three days starting on Jan. 30 because of a warm weather snap. Temperatures during the last week of January hit more than 40 degrees twice.

Jordan Nelson, the interim adult athletics program manager for MPRB, said the organization’s recreational pond hockey leagues and city ice rinks rely on cold weather and manpower to maintain the rinks.

“If it doesn’t get cold enough, there just isn’t really much that we can control with that respect,” Nelson said.

Almost an entire season of outdoor ice rink use was lost to warmer-than-average winter temperatures in 2024, Nelson said. 

From December 2023 to February 2024, Minnesota lost its winter to warm temperatures and almost no snow, according to a report from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

MPRB’s pond hockey league is unique, Nelson said. The longstanding park program has a history of introducing people to skating and hockey — Minnesota’s state sport — while bringing neighborhood communities together. However, with warm winters that force outdoor hockey rinks to close becoming more common, Minnesota is losing out on time spent with its winter pastime.

Keegan Johnson, a third-year student at the University of Minnesota and a member of the University’s men’s club hockey team, said he started skating at two years old on an outdoor ice rink his dad put together in their Lino Lakes backyard.

“I know it’s not that way for everybody, but the hockey culture in Minnesota has a lot of kids skating early and just falling in love with the game from an early age,” Johnson said. “That’s pretty special in itself.”

Nelson said MPRB has no concrete plans yet, but conversations about allocating money and resources to building new indoor rink spaces are happening in preparation for future warmer, unpredictable winters.

“It was kind of a situation that everyone faced together, and we’re all in the same boat in terms of the urban park systems as well,” Nelson said. “That really kind of opened up the discussion for us internally of what are things going to look like. What are we going to do in these situations?”

Johnson said a lot of kids fall in love with hockey by playing on pond rinks.

“Whenever you’re inside, it’s more serious and more like you’re there to play a game or you’re there to get better, whatever that may be,” Johnson said. “But whenever you’re outside, it’s just more enjoyable and you have a good time and you’re with your friends.”

Henry Lawrence, a fourth-year student at the University and a captain of the men’s club hockey team, said he and his friends use the outdoor ice rink at the Van Cleve Recreation Center and pond rinks at home in Stillwater for hockey pick-up games.

“It’s just a different type of sport, and you’re having fun, and you see guys that were from Minnesota that played high school hockey and are probably done now, but still have that joy of the game,” Lawrence said. “It was tough, missing out on that, basically missing a year of that pond.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted a wetter-than-average winter with colder-than-average temperatures for most of Minnesota in 2025.

Johnson said he has noticed lost playing time on outdoor ice rinks. He and his family were not able to play pond hockey, a Christmas family tradition, in December 2023 because of the unseasonably warm weather.

Nelson said MPRB needs to plan for more warm, unpredictable winters that climate change in the future will bring to ensure that the Minneapolis community can still play the winter sports they love. 

“We have to be forward-thinking as an organization about how we’re going to adapt so that we can either maintain or modify our operation and our programs to still meet the needs of the community,” Nelson said.

Uncertainty and worry remain in Minnesota higher education after President Donald Trump’s administration tried to freeze federal funds on Jan. 28.

Sen. Doron Clark (DFL-Minneapolis), a member of the Senate’s education finance and higher education committees, said uncertainty about the effect of the funding freeze limits the University of Minnesota community from planning ahead. 

“We just don’t have certainty, and we need certainty so the University can hire professors, so students can plan for what they need to do this summer, so they can plan for how they’re gonna pay for this,” Clark said. 

The vague freeze announcement from the Trump administration caused widespread confusion among healthcare and education organizations. A federal judge temporarily blocked the freeze the same day though Medicaid portals, the U.S. public health insurance programs, were down in all 50 states on Jan. 28.

In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz’s office said in a press release the funding freeze directly impacted around $1.9 billion in the state’s monthly spending on Medicaid and assistance programs like SNAP.

“President Trump is leaving states out in the cold without any guidance or explanation,” Walz said in the Jan. 28 press release. “Minnesota needs answers.”

Sen. Clare Oumou Verbeten (DFL-St. Paul), another member of the Senate Education Finance and Higher Education committees, said the committee sat down with the Minnesota Department of Education, the University and the private colleges council to understand how education institutions were affected.

Oumou Verbeten said that while the federal fund’s issue is uncertain, students continue depending on federal Pell Grants, loans, SNAP benefits, and the Women, Infants and Children program to attend school.

“There’s a lot of federal funding that we depend on and cutting that would be devastating to our students and then devastating to our institutions,” Oumou Verbeten said. “That’s absolutely certain that those things are needed.”

More than 33,000 students at the University received federal loans or grant money to attend school in 2023.

Clark said losing federal funding would also impact the community the University serves through its health centers.

“Trump’s freeze isn’t just how you pay for your tuition, it’s also how you afford food, it’s also how you get into your housing. It’s, if you are a veteran, will you even be able to get your promised benefit GI bill benefits?” Clark said.

Without clarity on how much federal money the University will get, Clark said determining how many students to accept, or how many professors and counselors to hire, is difficult. 

The 2024-25 state budget relies on nearly $4 billion in federal grants. Around 10% of Minnesota’s public schools budget relies on federal funding, which directly impacts school districts, according to Oumou Verbeten.

“To put that into perspective, we do a lot of work in (the education finance) committee trying to get like one, two, three, four percent more on the formula for our school districts,” Oumou Verbeten said. “Imagine they’ve got a 10% cut just right off the bat.”

Clark said despite partisanship in the state legislature, he is confident that his Republican counterparts in the Senate understand the gravity of potentially losing federal funding. 

“I trust that my friends on the Republican side are beginning to recognize that this is causing real harm and will shout and provide some help,” Clark said.

Oumou Verbeten said the focus for Minnesota lawmakers is to resolve this issue and protect students’ financial well-being.

“It’s valid to worry about something that is so important to your future and to your ability to be in school,” Oumou Verbeten said. “I also would say know that you have strong advocates, know that you have people who are fighting for you.”

Human trafficking awareness is essential to prevention, and college students can be at greater risk of victimization, Minneapolis and Hennepin county advocates said.

Minneapolis passed a resolution recognizing January as Human Trafficking Awareness Month while highlighting the laws and organizations working to prevent future trafficking and provide healing to trafficking victims. 

Lauren Martin, the former director of research at the University of Minnesota’s Urban Research and Outreach Engagement Center (UROC), said a desire to belong is a root cause of being recruited into human trafficking.

“But the trade-off for that belonging is, it’s a high price to pay for feeling like you belong,” Martin, who led UROC’s sex trading, trafficking and community well-being research initiative, said. “That just tells me as a society, we are really missing the mark on making sure that everybody feels like they have a place and that they’re worthy.”

Minnesota’s Safe Harbor Law, passed in two parts in 2011 and 2014, increased the age someone can be labeled a victim of sexual exploitation from age 18 to 24. 

The law also led to the creation of organizations like Hennepin County’s No Wrong Door and Minneapolis’ The Link. Both organizations work to prevent, respond and care for sexually exploited youth and young adults.

Kelly Reeves, the supportive services manager at Safe Harbor’s The Link, said the city’s resolution and growing the law’s victim age range helps increase intervention in sexual exploitation cases.

“As many people as we can get in that age range the more we can help them find stable housing, get a job, build that safety plan, finding a healthy community and hopefully making sure they don’t get back into the life as a victim of trafficking,” Reeves said.

The Link offers shelters, housing, therapy and healthcare resources to sexual exploitation survivors up to age 24, Reeves said. The organization also has survivor advisory committees where survivors can counsel one another. 

College students can be uniquely at risk for being sexually exploited, Martin said.

“There’s this almost stereotype that college kids are somehow that this issue doesn’t impact them or that poverty isn’t a problem for kids who are attending school,” Martin said.

Martin added that understanding the scope of sexual exploitation’s impact on college students is difficult because there is little research on it.

Tia Joy Peterson, the program coordinator for No Wrong Door, said first-year students, living on their own and making their own choices for the first time, dealing with financial stressors, and failing to meet basic needs are some characteristics unique to college students that make them especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

Recent migration or relocation was the most common risk factor in likely victims of sex trafficking, applying to around 54% of victims in 2021, according to data from the National Human Trafficking Hotline.

No Wrong Door partners with community organizations, law enforcement and hospitals to ensure that young people being sexually exploited can reach out to anyone in their community for help.

Some red flags of sexual exploitation students can look for are sudden changes in appearance like getting new clothes or jewelry, their hair or nails done, having an unexplained amount of money, being unusually anxious and being scared of their dominating relationship, according to Reeves.

“Their facts don’t line up and they sometimes could be lying about maybe where they were, how they got there, an unexplained black eye or something and their stories seem to be kind of not making sense,” Reeves said.

Peterson, who used to work at the University of Minnesota’s Aurora Center, said there are not sufficient resources on college campuses about sexual exploitation and schools need to implement more programming about what healthy sexual relationships look like.

“It’s on universities to really start exploring different ways that they can have those conversations with college students,” Peterson said. “It’s on them to get more education on that high need.”

Reeves said she would like to see Safe Harbor laws apply to people of all ages, and spreading awareness about sexual exploitation and trafficking helps The Link and Safe Harbor achieve that.

“To be honest we’re trying to work ourselves out of our jobs as much as we can to fight to end sex trafficking and human trafficking here in Minnesota,” Reeves said.

If you are a victim of sexual exploitation and need help call 612-232-5428 for The Link’s crisis line. Call 1-866-223-1111 or text 612-399-9995 for the Day One Crisis Hotline.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated Tia Joy Peterson’s last name as Joy-Peterson. It is only Peterson. 

U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) reintroduced a bill on Jan. 21 to ban sulfide-ore copper mining in the Boundary Waters while advocacy groups and University of Minnesota students worry for the land’s future.

McCollum’s bill, the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection and Pollution Prevention Act, on its fourth introduction to Congress, would permanently ban pollutive sulfide-ore copper mining from nearly 235,000 acres of land surrounding the Rainy River Watershed in the Superior National Forest, according to the bill’s language.

McCollum said she wants to protect the Boundary Waters because of its uniquely clean freshwater and untouched natural beauty.

“We put value on land, we put value on minerals, we put value on so many things, but when it comes to water we pretty much take it for granted,” McCollum said.

Sulfide-ore copper mining is proven to be an extremely pollutive type of mining, according to Ingrid Lyons, executive director of Save the Boundary Waters. To mine copper, a mining company creates a tailings pile, a pile of toxic sulfuric waste rock left on the surface. 

These toxic tailings piles seep sulfuric acid into the surrounding wilderness and pollute the Boundary Waters’ air and water, Lyons said.

“Even though there are mitigation techniques, this industry has never been done without some form of pollution in all of those categories, but most notably water pollution,” Lyons said.

The mining company in this case is Twin Metals Minnesota, owned by Chilean mining company Antofagasta. Since 2022, Antofagasta has spent over $2 million lobbying for the mining industry.

Boundary Waters advocacy organizations’ worries for the area’s future grew after President Donald Trump’s reelection in November. Trump promised he would lift a 20-year mining ban, put in place by former President Joe Biden, to a rally crowd in St. Cloud.

Friends of the Boundary Waters spokesperson Pete Marshall said the organization is preparing for the worst after Trump did not include lifting the mining ban in his slew of first-day executive orders.

“(McCollum’s bill) would end, not an end-end, but it would really seal up this constant back and forth,” Marshall said. “It would give people a lot more assurance and just some time to breathe and just enjoy the boundary waters.”

U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.), whose district includes the Boundary Waters, wants to introduce an opposing bill that would open up the Boundary Waters area for sulfide-ore copper mining contracts on the “false” grounds that having a domestic store of copper is important for U.S. national security, McCollum said.

“Antofagasta, when it mines minerals, it takes the minerals out and it ships them to China to be refined and then once refined in China, they’re sold on the global market,” McCollum, a ranking member of the Defense Appropriations Committee which oversees the Department of Defense budget, said. “This does nothing to protect our defense supply chain and there’s other copper mines that we can rely on.”

Cooper Marton, a first-year University student and an officer for the University’s Outdoors Club, said he wants the club to continue going on their annual trip to the Boundary Waters’ pristine wilderness.

“Drilling or mining is completely against everything that it stands for,” Marton, who has been going to summer camp in the Boundary Waters since he was a kid, said. “The whole point is that it’s supposed to be untouched, or as untouched as you can get it to be, and to mine there just completely dismantles that.”

Abi Addink, a fourth-year student and an Outdoors Club officer, said she now feels a sense of urgency to visit the Boundary Waters for the first time.

“What if there was something that was going to happen to the Boundary Waters?” Addink said. “It’s like we got to get there now, you know, sadly as we don’t really know what the future of these natural spaces is going to be.”

McCollum said she does not expect her bill to pass the U.S. House of Representatives in the next two years but believes wholeheartedly in the need to cherish the Boundary Waters nationwide.

“People tend to think of it quite unfortunately as like this is just Minnesota,” McCollum said. “This national treasure and we need to respect it as such.”