The Rural Urban Gathering begins this evening, Wednesday, June 9, from 6:30 – 8:30 and is followed by a reception hosted by the U of MN Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships and entertainment is by The Strollers, Southwest Minnesota’s premier acoustic blues trio.

The focus of the gathering will be on the formation of the Rural-Urban Partnering Council with its emphasis on education, workforce and entrepreneurship to increase innovation and wealth creation across Minnesota. All are welcome to attend and to consider becoming a member of the inaugural Council.  If you are unable to join us, but are interested in learning more about or participating in the Rural-Urban Partnering Council, send us an email at feedback@rurb.mn.

The Symposium on Small Towns will be held all day on Thursday, June 10. The theme for this year’s Symposium is Finding Solutions and Redefining Communities.  In tough economic times, the importance of connecting with people and ideas outside of our local situations becomes vital.  The agenda includes panel discussions, keynote speakers, showcase fair, policy panel and breakout sessions that focus on leadership, capacity building and practical improvements for small communities and strengthening rural-urban connections to build back a thriving Minnesota for all.

The Symposium on Small Towns is co-hosted by the University of Minnesota, Morris Center for Small Towns and Minnesota Rural Partners, Inc.

We are in the business of promoting the public purposes of higher education. As a result, we may have downplayed the connections civic engagement has to career and workforce development, perhaps out of a sense that they represented a focus on personal gain — or on preparing students to fit into the world as it is, rather than encouraging critical thinking and creative action. Yet these goals are not mutually exclusive; they actually complement and enhance each other in countless ways.

(Read the entire post here)

What are your thoughts?  Is civic engagement good for workforce development?  How do you involve students in civic engagement and service learning opportunities in your community? Leave a comment below or come and join in on the discussion at the Symposium on Small Towns and Rural Urban Gathering on June 9th and 10th.

Below is one of the connections we learned about during the video conference this past Wednesday.

Pine Center for the Arts, located in Pine City, MN, grew out of a need not from a lot of artists who wanted a space to showcase their art, but rather from local residents who wanted a place in their town where they could partake in classes, lessons and special events where the community could gather for and learn from artistic endeavors.  What started as an idea in July 2008, and is primarily an all volunteer-run organization, has blossomed into a budding economic engine for the community — and surrounding area of Pine City– that has served 7,000 people since it opened in an empty storefront on a main corridor in town. Participants in the Center’s classes not only come from the local community, but also as far as Hastings and White Bear Lake, MN. The ages of these participants also varies, from ages 15 – Adult. People of all ages have the opportunity to “exercise their courage muscle”, explained Kristin Seuntjens, a founding board member, giving people the chance to learn a new skill in the arts and to explore their own creativity.

The Pine Center for the Arts is now a hub of activity for artists to show case their work and to teach the next generation of artists their craft.  PCftA, as it’s known to local residents, recently received a Legacy Arts and Cultural Heritage grant from the East Central Arts Council that will allow them to hire a part-time Executive Director and a part-time administrative coordinator.  The Pine Center for the Arts is definately a model that can be looked at by other small, rural communities that are looking to the arts as a way to expand and improve their own economic outlook and future.

We will inform you of the other connections that were featured during this video conference in another blog post.  In the meantime, we want to remind you that our eighth and final rural urban connections video conference before the Symposium on Small Towns and Rural Urban Gathering, will feature Local Foods Connections in West Central Minnesota on Thursday, June 3rd. Click on the Video Conferences page on our blog to learn more information.

1) Northland Community & Technical College’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Maintenance Training Center, was established with funds from a $5 million U.S. Department of Labor American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (A.R.R.A.) Grant.  Scott Fletcher, Aviation Program Director, filled us in on all the great  things happening at the Aviation Maintenance Technology Training Center in Thief River Falls.  The vision of this center is to provide a nationally recognized curriculum in unmanned aircraft system mechanics training. Northland Community and Technical College was quick to recognize that no one else in the U.S. was providing mechanics training for Unmanned Aircraft Systems.  So, they have created a world class, state-of-the-art facility that provides hands-on, real world experience to their students.  Did you know that it takes 65 people to work on one Global Hawk Unmanned Aircraft System?  One-third of these folks are maintenance mechanics. Students who go through this program curently have a 100% job placement rate and can earn anywhere from $45,000 – $125,000 / year, right out of school. The future is wide open for the workforce potential and connections between private industry, the military and Northland Community College.

2) We learned about MnKnows, a wonderful, statewide resource and portal to Minnesota’s online library services that is available right at your finger tips via your computer keyboard. For those who prefer a human connection, you can access this resource via your local library.   MnKnows is an Information and Resource Sharing Program of the Minnesota Office of Higher Education and the University of Minnesota Libraries.  The goal of this program is to move information from the Twin Cities area out to rural communities and be accessible to everyone — K-12 schools, higher education, businesses, local governments and people in the community.  The best part is there is no fee to access the information via the MnKnows portal.  It is paid for by tax dollars allocated by the Minnesota State legislature.

There are five electronic resources that make up MnKnows:

1. MnLINK Gateway — search multiple Minnesota libraries and subject databases with a single search.
2. ELM – Electronic Library of Minnesota — provides Minnesota residents access to online databases of magazines, journals, newspaper articles, eBooks (electronic books), and other reference sources.
3. Minnesota Reflections — find photos, documents, and maps related to Minnesota history.
4. AskMN– An online service for information and research help available to all Minnesota residents and students 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
5. Research Project Calculator — Plan and create a sensible timeline for research projects.

Many K-12 schools, small businesses, citizens and local governments rely on MnKnows and it’s online databases for information and research. It’s the best place to find information about Minnesota!

3) The EDA Center at the University of Minnesota, Crookston, conducts applied research, provides direct technical assistance and delivers educational programs to economic development agencies that support the economy of economically-distressed rural communities throughout Minnesota. The EDA Center’s mission is to engage university faculty, staff and students with local, county and regional economic development agencies in support of our rural economy.  Their focus is to utilize the capacity of the University of Minnesota, Crookston in partnership with economic development agencies to support job creation, capital investment, business recruitment and job retention.  Communities interested in receiving technical assitance from the EDA Center need to fill out a Request for Assistance (RFA) form. This RFA will be the mechanism by which the EDA Center will identify its annual technical assistance projects.

4) Minnesota Main Street is a program of the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota and is recognized by the National Trust Main Street Center® as the official statewide coordinating program in Minnesota. The Minnesota Main Street Program has been financed in part with funds provided by the State of Minnesota from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the Minnesota Historical Society. The Main Street program is a comprehensive commercial revitalization strategy that helps communities preserve some of their most significant assets-their historic buildings.

Not only did we learn about many great resources and connections — but connections were made between organizations that attended the video conference.  There is still time to participate in one of our two remaining video conferences before the  Symposium on Small Towns and Rural Urban Gathering on June 9th and 10th.   We will hear about Arts connections in East Central Minnesota on Wednesday, May 26th and Local Foods Connections in West Central Minnesota on Thursday, June 3rd.

Do you have some rural urban connections that you’d like to share with us?  Please share them with us at www.rurb.mn/connections. We’d love to hear from you!

Here are some of the great examples that were discussed during the video conference.

Paula Frings, from Maven Perspectives and Bud Stone from the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce discussed an innovative workforce development program called CEO’s in the Classroom.

The Grand Rapids Chamber, working with Maven Perspectives, started CEO’s in the Classroom in 2005. Working with students in the 8^th grade level and up, CEO’s of local companies work with the students to develop entrepreneurial skills.  The CEO’s share their story of how they got to where they are in life, the mission and responsibilities of being a CEO and they challenge the students to think 5 – 8 years into the future about how they would start up and run their own businesses.   The CEO’s also talk with students about the importance of hard work, applying themselves in school and how learning math skills creates a strong future.  The CEO’s in the Classrooms Program, built on intentional strategic partnering principles, started out in 2 schools in the Grand Rapids area and has now expanded to 17 areas across northeastern MN. The plans are for the program to continue to expand in northeastern MN and into northwestern WI.

For more information, contact Bud Stone at the Grand Rapids Chamber at bud@grandmn.com

Suzanne Semborski and Mary Mathews from the Northeast Entrepreneur Fund, talked about Northland Flavor, a new program and cooperative marketing effort spearheaded by the Northeast Entrepreneur Fund that helps local artists find new markets.  The Northland Flavor Marketplace, a two-day wholesaler event held in Duluth in March, allowed over 40 artists to make contact with buyers from nearly 100 gift shops in the Arrowhead region and to market their local products to these local businesses.

For more information go to http://www.entrepreneurfund.org/NorthlandFlavor.html

Bernadine Joselyn, from the Blandin Foundation, shared information about the  Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities (MIRC) coalition and a federal Broadband Technology Opportunity Program grant that the Blandin Foundation and the MIRC coalition of 19 other partners received this past March.   Through this grant, the Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities (MIRC) coalition will bring a network of resources and support to rural Minnesota individuals and communities – especially those unemployed and seeking employment, small businesses, coalitions of government entities, and local leaders.

Berndine also talked about the need to create a ‘culture of use’ by creating working and living environments where people see broadband as critical to daily life.   When broadband access is not readily available to everyone, it creates an information underclass of those folks cut off from high speed internet access.

For more information go to: http://broadband.blandinfoundation.org/

Our next rural urban connections video conference will be on Tuesday, May 18th, from 3:30 – 5:00 PM. and will feature workforce development and education connections in northwestern Minnesota.

We also hope to see you at the Symposium on Small Towns and Rural Urban Gathering in June!

In a recent Star tribune article titled The New Pioneers, Kristin Tillotson wrote about how young people are moving from the city to rural areas to start out as first-time farmers and create a life on the land for their futures and blog about it!

Our South Dakota friend and colleague, Mike Knutson, who blogs about the future of rural life on his Reimagine Rural blog shared with us that “I find it interesting that when I first started blogging 1 ½ years ago, there was not much conversation happening online about rural.  That’s changed in the last six months, and my rss reader is definitely filling up.  That’s a good thing.”

So, we know there are a lot of great rural and urban connections out there.  Some are detailed in blogs and reports, others are discussed over coffee and pie at the local diner.  What rural urban connections are happening in your area?  Share them with us on this blog!  Either reply to this post or click on the Rural Urban Connections button and tab on this blog.  Keep up the great work!

We are still gathering examples of rural urban connections, partnerships and frameworks that are occurring across the state. We will be presenting our findings at the Symposium on Small Towns and Rural Urban Gathering on June 9th and 10th.

So, it’s not too late to join in on the discussion during one of the video conferences listed below. Click on the Video Conference button to the left for more detailed information about the following video conferences and registration information.

We look forward to your participation!

Northeast Minnesota Video Conference
WHEN: Monday, May 10, from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Featured Connections: Broadband Telecommunications, Entrepreneurship, and Workforce Development

Northwest Minnesota Video Conference
WHEN: Tuesday, May 18th, from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Featured Connections: Workforce Development and Education

East Central Minnesota Video Conference
WHEN: Wednesday, May 26th, from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Featured Connections: Arts

West Central Minnesota Video Conference
WHEN: Thursday, June 3rd, from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Featured Connections: Local Foods

For cities, friending Facebook is trickier than a click or two

By Mary Jane Smetanka, Star Tribune, March 28, 2010

Ask Edina or Blaine, “What’s on your mind?” when it comes to using social media, and they answer with concerns about censorship and other legal issues.

The city of Edina has a state-of-the-art website and routinely uses Twitter and e-mail lists to communicate with residents. But it doesn’t have a Facebook page. Neither does its larger neighbor, Bloomington.

…Tom Grundhoefer, general counsel for the League of Minnesota Cities, said dealing with social media is “a tough one” for cities. So far, he said, court rulings that would help clarify the law are scanty.

“I don’t think the issues are insurmountable in any way, but it’s a new thing,” he said. “Everybody’s figuring it out.”

Click here to read the full story on the Star Tribune’s website.

What forms of Social Media does your community use?  How has your community addressed some of these social media concerns?

Here are some of the great examples that were discussed during the video conference:

Kay Sauck, from Sauck Media Group, has created two successful magazines, Caregiving in America and Women Inc. that are based in Fairmont, MN. She has a staff of 12 people, (half are under the age of 30) and some of whom travel from Mankato and the Twin Cities to work with her on the magazines.

Pam Benike, from Prairie Hollow Farm talked about the Southeast Minnesota Food Network, which is a collaborative of over 90 farms in southeast Minnesota that supply restaurants, caterers, retail stores, food co-ops and institutions in the Twin Cities metro area with meats, cheeses, fruits and vegetables, honey and other specialty items. They are able to offer a one call – one delivery – one invoice system, making it easy for both the farmer and the buyer to source locally grown products. This also allows more time for farmers to do what they love, grow and produce food!

Annalisa Hultberg, from Minnesota Project, explained how the Heartland Food Network works with Minnesota chefs, caterers, colleges, and other food service professionals to help them purchase and use more locally grown ingredients in their establishments. In 2010, the Heartland Food Network received funding from the USDA Specialty Crop Block Grant Program and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture Minnesota Grown Program. They will be hosting several local food learning days to facilitate information exchange among chefs. The first workshop will be held on Monday, March 22. Check out their website for more details.

We also learned how Riverway Learning Community, a charter school in Minnesota City, recognizes the relationship between nutrition, food, and education.  Students maintain a close relationship with their food at Riverway, participating in all aspects from caring for chickens and planting seeds to composting. Over the next five years, Riverway Learning Community hopes to farm, grow and prepare 50% of all cafeteria food on site.

We heard a workforce development example that involved several high tech companies in Martin County and along the I-90 Corridor that use the “Grandma network” when recruiting for new and young employees.  The companies put advertisements in local newspapers during the holidays and when young people from the Twin Cites, Mankato, Sioux Falls, or other metropolitan areas are visiting relatives in southern Minnesota, they get a “pitch” from their relatives about the great paying high tech jobs in the area.  So far, this has worked as a successful recruitment tool for these businesses!

Additional resources that were discussed during the video conference are:

Finding Food in Farm Country: The Economics of Food & Farming in Southeast Minnesota, a study conducted by Ken Meter at the Crossroads Resource Center, that examines how food networks thrive and strengthen local economies.

The documentary, Food, Inc., which examines the way food is produced in our country.

These featured rural urban connections are only a starting point, and we encourage and welcome other examples from you such as health care, education, arts, renewable energy, and workforce development connections, just to name a few!

Share your rural and urban connections with us!  Click on the Submit Examples of Rural Urban Connections button on this page or fill out the Rural Urban Connections Form.

******************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Southern Minnesota Video Conference

Featured Connections: Local Food Networks and Entrepreneurship

This video conference was held on Thursday, March 4th, from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m. Fifteen people attended at the following four locations:

Fairmont: Fairmont High School – Board Room
900 Johnson Street, Fairmont, MN 56031

Byron: Byron High School  – Room 2205
1887 2nd Ave NW, Byron, MN

Winona: Winona State University – Somsen Hall – Room 110
175 West Mark Street, Winona, MN

St. Paul: TIES – Video Conference Room
1667 Snelling Avenue N. St. Paul, MN

Stoke the conversation about rural and urban connections by using the hashtag, #rurbmn on Twitter when discussing any subject relating to rural urban connections in Minnesota.

What is a hash tag you ask?  Here are a couple of links that give a great description of hashtags:

http://twitter.pbworks.com/Hashtags and http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/49309

We welcome your voice to the conversation!

You know best what rural and urban connections are happening in your area. Perhaps you are even involved in a number of these connections.  Share them with us so that we may add them to the digital map that we are creating to highlight these connections.

Fill out the Rural Urban Connections form — it only takes a few minutes!

Don’t be left out! Subscribe to our blog and stay updated on Rurb.MN. Enter your email address in the Email Subscription box in the left-hand column of the blog, and receive notifications of new blog posts by email.