Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to volunteer with the clean-up efforts in North Minneapolis. On my drive from our office downtown over to Urban Homework’s volunteer central on Emerson and Broadway, I didn’t see any damage. After turning in my waivers and getting a safety debriefing, I boarded a bus and was sent over to Penn and Golden Valley Road, at which point I could finally see that we had our work cut out for us. I know clean-up crews had been working around the clock since Sunday, but the neighborhood was still in shambles. There was one house we passed where a giant oak was uprooted (the roots literally tore up the road) and had crashed into a duplex. All of us volunteers were amazed by the destruction and started whipping out our camera phones for photos when a mother with her four-year-old son came walking up and said, “I should really be charging people for taking pictures of my home.” I was reminded that aside from picking up the physical destruction, there is a lot of work to be done to help raise up the families affected by the disaster.
At MPM’s Metro Mentor Network gathering last week, a group of mentoring professionals discussed how we can respond to this tragedy. Several of the programs serve North Minneapolis youth who were directly affected by the tornado. For these programs, getting in contact with these youth and determining their needs was the top priority. Bolder Options provided us with a list of things needed by their youth, and FreeArts staff talked extensively about the healing power of art and how they are coordinating an art supply drive to give youth in North Minneapolis a way to express their feelings and to give them hope.
The energy from the programs in the room and the desire to help was inspiring. Several programs, including those who do not serve youth in North Minneapolis, were thinking about ways to engage their youth to help. Some ideas included coordinating supply drives and having mentor-mentee matches volunteer together in the clean-up efforts. We realize that right now there is an outpouring of support for this community, but the rebuilding efforts will need to continue for months and even years to come. We don’t want to forget about what happened, so in late June or early July we are hoping to coordinate a follow-up meeting with mentoring programs to see what needs still exist at that point.
What has your program done to serve North Minneapolis? We would love to hear what you’ve done, either in the comments here or on our Facebook page. Also, if you hear of upcoming service opportunities that are open to youth, we would be honored to repost them.
Thanks for all you have done to help so far! Here a few more resources:
- North Minneapolis Recovery Fund with Dollar-for-Dollar Match up to $300,000
- North Side Volunteer Clean-Up Day June 4
- HandsOn Twin Cities Disaster Relief Portal
- Tornado Relief Webpage from the U of M’s Urban Research Outreach/Engagement Center (UROC)
- Community Resource List from Pillsbury United Communities
- Real-Time Relief Effort Updates from the City of Minneapolis
- Hennepin County Storm Response Webpage
- Text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation to North Minneapolis tornado relief efforts via the American Red Cross Twin Cities Area Chapter.
Mai-Anh Kapanke
April Riordan
Joellen Gonder Spacek
Polly Roach
