(gentle music) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] Coming up on the next "Off 90," we visit the Cooperative Response Center in Austin, travel to Rochester to check out a shoe repair shop turned bar and return to Austin for a visit to the library.

It's all ahead on the next "Off 90."

(upbeat music) (gentle music) - CRC is a cooperative organization, and our purpose is to serve the electric cooperatives nationwide.

We're a contact center providing customer service, a dispatch center, and a alarm monitoring center all focused on the utility industries.

The beginning of our history, we... It was in 1991, it was the Halloween storm.

Southern Minnesota had a major ice storm and it was differing based on where you were geographically in the US.

A lot of people couldn't get out of their house, and they were stuck in their home, and the cooperatives couldn't get to them because of the ice and because of the weather, but it was... it pointed out the need for an organization to provide customer care and take care of the members of cooperatives while they were out trying to restore power.

So out of that, the cooperatives do what cooperatives do and they said we have a need and we're going to create an organization to provide that service because shared service for the whole industry will provide a better service and cheaper service than just one everybody doing it themselves.

Out of out of that storm, the president and CEO of Freeborn Mower Electric Cooperative, Ron Steckman, kind of rallied the troops of the upper Midwest.

We had 19 members from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa that came together and had a need and had a shared need and decided that they were gonna launch forward and put something together.

Just over a year that they they came together, they found the need, they organized, put an organization together, put the structure together, and we took our first call in December of 1992.

So it's about the relationships.

It's about the conversations.

It's about really helping people really being here for our members.

Our members take care of eight to five, and when they go home and they have families and they have other things, they can feel assured that they can hand that off to CRC, and we'll take care of it until they open up the next morning.

CRC started its roots out on Highway 56 just east of town in a rental space owned by Krueger Trucking.

And we spent the first almost 10 years before we moved into this facility.

First service was just customer service, answering the phone, taking care of them.

About a year later, we added the dispatch side of things and the alarm monitoring.

Alarm monitoring is mainly focused on medical monitoring, the lifeline-like solutions.

We had a need for more space.

We had a need to have ownership from our employees that this is where I work and I'm proud of where I work, and actually for this building, our employees worked directly with the architect and designed the building.

From colors to chairs to layout to the contact center.

They got they got their fingerprint on this building.

CRC, over the years, has expanded from a Midwest focus.

And we have built a facility in Dunlap, Tennessee in the early 2000s.

And then we expanded into Texas which brought bilingual service into CRC in 2012.

And most recently, we added a center in Missouri to focus on growing that region.

All of our areas are very focused and all the calls are very focused on our regional presence first.

So we want calls from Minnesota to be handled with Minnesota agents and calls in Tennessee to be handled.

However, at some point, we need to use everybody to handle the calls.

COVID really upset the apple cart and made us innovate to how we do what we do without buildings and without proximity.

The challenge is to be able to work from a phone that sits on your desk to a phone that works through a computer.

In 30 days, we took 80% of our employees and gave them the technology to be able to work from home.

Fortunately, going into that, we had a pandemic plan that we had developed for the bird flu actually before about three or four years ago.

They had the scare of the bird flu, and we had a pandemic plan that was in place so we were able to modify that when COVID hit and we were able to do things and adjust our systems and continue supporting our membership because our membership had the same issues where they had to shut the doors, and they didn't have the public-facing which pushed more of the customer service to the phone versus being able to walk into your cooperative and ask a question.

Now, our members relied on us a little bit more.

We're really proud of the awards that we've gotten.

Our central station, our alarm monitoring center has been the focal point in the recent past of providing leadership and excellence in the alarm monitoring space.

We have the manager of the year recognized by the association, the CSAA association.

And then our support person of the year was recognized shortly thereafter.

So great leadership back in our central station.

We follow the weather very closely.

We have systems in place and processes in place to be able to adjust our service to react to the weather.

Our volume in the contact center can vary widely.

We can go from a thousand calls an hour to our highest has been 37,000 calls in an hour in our past.

So we have to have the tools in place to take care of those members.

When CRC started, we started with 19 founding members and today we're really proud that we're serving just under 600 organizations at CRC.

And we're serving those with just over 350 employees.

We provide customer service one member at a time.

We still believe there's value, a lot of value in a conversation and in a relationship.

That conversation can't be replaced with the technology.

At the core of our business, people matter.

(gentle music) (gentle music) - I grew up in Wisconsin.

It was always kind of my idea to bring a small Wisconsin dive bar kind of mixed with a European style beer bar.

In Europe, everybody's going out to to find a spot to hang out and read the paper, play chess with their buddy, drink a glass of tea.

It's more of a third space, and I just thought, man, it'd be really nice to bring something like that to this community where people can feel comfortable going out as well as having lots of like non-alcoholic options, having coffee and tea and kombucha and soda and kind of lower cost options where you don't have to be like, "Man, I can't go out 'cause I don't want to go spend $50 on non-alcoholic stuff."

You could come in here.

I mean our average ticket is under 20 bucks.

It's a pretty approachable spot to come hang out with somebody and just chill.

(gentle music) I first saw The Only Shoe Repair I mean probably years and years ago.

And then coming by this building a whole bunch of times, I just always though it was cool.

It's a really old, almost kind of a landmark space in Rochester.

Everybody knows The Only Shoe Repair.

Those guys stopped doing shoe repair in around 2022, and this building came up for sale.

I think this is kind of a special part of town.

I like this building.

It's old.

It's got kind of a grungy vibe on the outside.

So I was worried that it would get torn down.

So in 2022 I was like, "I'm gonna open a little bar over there."

And I told my wife and she's like, "That's not a good plan.

Don't do that."

(laughs) And somebody else ended up buying the building.

I was like, "Shoot."

But that was actually probably perfect because about 18 months later, the person who had bought it decided they weren't going to be able to do what they wanted with it, and they put it back up for sale.

And I was like, "You know what, I'm actually gonna make an actual little run at this thing."

(gentle music) So anyhow, I got a hold of a realtor, and I was like, "I'm very interested in this space," but I've never owned a bar and I've never even worked in a bar, to be honest.

So I got a hold of Jack, Jack Lester from Jack's Bottle Shop.

Him and I are buddies.

- Yeah, I would see him on the regular, started playing golf, developing a good friendship.

And found out about The Shoe Beverage Bar idea on the golf course.

- I was like, "Hey, this is the concept.

What does it look like to open a bar in this town?"

And he was like, "Well, are you looking for some advice or you want to have a partner on that?"

- Instant trust.

As I knew somebody who had already had some success in business, wanted to see it, wanted to feel it out.

We came here.

We came down, we checked it out, and I remember being super excited.

Jack's Bottle Shop's kind of is doing its thing.

And I'm a believer that a lot of things happen in life.

I think that there's always a something deeper, something deeper there.

- Jack's just got a plethora of knowledge on spirits and beer.

So it's just crazy resource.

Super thankful that that happened.

- I moved to Rochester in 2021.

Over three, four, five years, I got to know Matt really well, and I drank a ton of his kombucha.

He was just a guy who I like the way that he operates with people in the community.

And I had asked him, "If you ever do a project, consider me.

I'd really like to do something with you."

And Matt reached out.

Jack was on the phone too.

We had a conversation, and I think it was kind of a natural fit.

We had an opportunity to put our talents together.

My background is technology, consulting, and music production.

So we had a chat and kind of took it from there.

- [Matt] We came and looked at the space.

I can kind of visualize things, but this was... It does not look like it does now.

It was a little bit dingy, looked like a lot of work to turn it into a bar.

So the three of us kind of jumped in on that, my wife included as well, Frankie.

Bought the building.

- [Eric] Frankie is Matt's wife, and she's really the heartbeat behind this thing.

She does all of our scheduling.

She's somebody who I think brings a balance to the craziness of Matt, Jack, and I. So Frankie's been just an incredible fourth partner.

- [Matt] Spent a little over a year renovating it, tearing out all the walls down to the studs.

So it was quite a bit of work.

Almost everything that we have is repurposed, our bar is from Lake City, the old bank bar.

We have a kegerator from Forager.

We have 25 seats in here.

The bar is not super big.

It was a little bit of a puzzle just getting things to fit in here.

- I'm responsible for kind of the curation of the beverage menu expectation was here at The Shoe.

And the team make it super affordable that anyone and everyone here can play, right?

(gentle music) First and foremost, gotta have craft beer here.

Matt and I have always bonded over through his shopping experiences at Jack's Bottle Shop.

And unique beverages; our heartbeat for sure, is beer first.

The Shoe customer says different.

Cocktails are definitely the top seller here, and that totally makes sense just knowing that beer, wine, spirit industry, cocktails are what's hot, a lot of different wine, a lot of different natural wines.

We have a really cool spritz program.

We've got a beverage for everybody.

We've got some pretty cool like mocktails, and also a really fun program is we have these highball, and it's kind of called our Highball and Chill Menu.

It's not just about the beverages with alcohol in them.

To us, we're a beverage bar so we have something that's comfortable for anybody and everybody.

- Eric's had a music studio in Northeast Minneapolis and it's like, man, we could really dive in with a little bit of music potentially too.

- This place is this old historic building and it's a very analog feel, but we've got some high tech things behind the scene, giving ourselves and artists who come in the ability to create some cool content.

(gentle music) We do something called Soul Sessions, and it's like our version of Tiny Desk.

So an artist can come in and basically do a three to five-song set.

♪ I was thinking if you took me in your car ♪ ♪ We could be alone ♪ ♪ You were thinking ♪ - [Eric] We've got so many good artists here in Southeast Minnesota.

It's an opportunity to expose them to people real time here at the bar and create those connections.

Because it's such a small venue, those constraints create opportunity, intention, and creativity.

So we do about one show a month and it's a listening room show.

- This song is called "20 Elephants."

(gentle music) - People love to congregate at a coffee shop.

Cafe Steam I think does a really nice job down there where people wanna hang out.

Art Heads even is a great spot where people like to go and congregate.

We wanted this place to kinda center around community.

It was more of a thing where it's like I wanna hang out at a place like this.

So it was worth the risk to give it a shot, see what happens.

(patrons applauding) (gentle music) (lively music) - So Andrew Carnegie was an immigrant from Scotland.

He came over with his family when he was young, and he worked in, or he went to school until he was 12, and then he worked in factories.

He left school at 12 to work in factories.

And one of the things that he was able to do was there was a local colonel in his neighborhood who opened his house open up on Saturdays for workers to come in and borrow books from his personal library.

And that really stuck with Andrew.

He appreciated the ability to further himself and his education on his own through this access to books.

So one of the things that he always found, wanted to do was if he ever had the opportunity to have money that he could share with others, one of the things he wanted to make sure that he did was make sure people had access.

So fast forward to years later, he became this huge steel magnate and had all of this money.

And so one of the things that he did was to promote libraries in all of the ways.

And that foundation that he built has carried through for 150 years.

And he not only gave, I think it was 56 million dollars, the foundation gave to build over 2,500 libraries worldwide, 1,600 of which were in the US.

And I think the very first library he actually built was back in Scotland in the town that his grandfather and his father had grown up in.

And they had also been proponents for education and community and community building.

And then he, I think the second one was in, I believe it was in Pittsburgh where he grew up here in the States.

And so, yeah, he... Definitely, it was one of those people talk about their legacy.

And he definitely created this legacy of access to books and learning and literacy that has really grown to, I think, add to what the founders of the country really meant and to do was that, that intellectual freedom that the United States was really kind of built on.

- This was also during the time when women's groups were coming into existence all over the United States.

And one of their rallying cries was, "We need public libraries."

So, in the late 1890s, the Floral Club urged City Fathers to, "Let's see if we can't get Andrew Carnegie to build a library for us."

And City Fathers went to New York City to meet with Andrew Carnegie's lawyer, his representative.

I believe his name was James Baldwin.

And he said, "Well, given the population of Austin, you probably could get up to $25,000."

So they came home very excited about the possibility of getting $25,000 to build a library.

The application process for Carnegie Library was rather involved.

And so they made application and said that, at that time, the population of Austin was 6,000 people.

And the Carnegie Foundation said, "Well, you really... What your population deserves probably as a library is $12,000."

So that was the initial gift.

So the Carnegie Foundation said, "We'll give you the money.

The city has to provide a free location for you.

You have to do some sort of governmental funding up to 10% of the gift that will provide maintenance, a salary, and buy books."

And so $12,000 was the initial gift.

City Fathers went back to them and said, "You know, we really have more people here than you think we do."

And so they raised their gift to $15,000.

So by a vote of the people, this was put to a public vote, the citizens of Austin agreed to give $1,500 a year for the maintenance of the library.

And they also elected a library board.

And the first library board president was F.E.

Crane who owned, owned Crane Lumber.

And so that's how the library started.

I always thought they were beautiful buildings.

I still think they're beautiful buildings, but they're not necessarily accessible.

They were very utilitarian in their structure inside.

He didn't want a lot of money spent on storage spaces, on bathrooms or on grand staircases.

He wanted the interior to be used strictly for the use of books and a central checkout station.

And he wanted them to be very accessible.

One of the problems with Carnegie Libraries is that they were very hard to modify, and he wanted steps to all of them.

Well, that doesn't make them accessible, which is one of the problems that they had is that you couldn't make them accessible to everyone.

So, also, all of the additions didn't necessarily make it a gorgeous building, but, I mean, it served its purpose at the time, but we just needed more space.

It's now a parking lot behind Clasen-Jordan across the street from the Methodist Church.

- The Carnegie is actually... I think it's the Carnegie Corporation is what it's called.

So, yes, they're still very active and have done a lot of things in New York City for I think the New York Public Library in particular where they are founded right there right now.

But continuing on to in 2026 when they are giving out these grants to all of the Carnegie libraries with no strings attached.

These grants are coming to all of these little... some of them really little tiny libraries where it's like, "Here's $10,000 and you can use it for whatever you need to use it for."

So, yes, they have continued their work supporting the American Library Association, supporting schools.

They really do great work.

Yeah, so our grant money is going to be put into our children's area.

We have done a couple updates to the building in the last few years.

And one of the things that we wanted to do was change how we have our children's books shelved.

One of the things, one of the, I think, not problems, but one of the issues that librarians deal with is we wanna be able to find the books through the catalog, but we really want the kids to be able to walk in and browse through a pile of books and find things that they want.

And so we are looking at changing our shelving to something that's more browsable, and that's going to cost some money.

So that's what that money is going to go towards that, and the idea of play, so making that area a little bit more playful, but really making it user-friendly for some of our youngest patrons who come in and want to find the firetruck books or the dinosaur books.

We're gonna have those easier for them to locate.

I think the big takeaway is that, 150 years later, access is still really important, and it's access for everyone, whether it's physical access or digital access or digital literacy access.

It's all of those things because this country was really built on the idea that its populace can participate in its governing.

And to do that, you need an informed populace.

And to have an informed populace, you need access to that information.

And I think especially in this day and age where so much is done online, libraries have really had to switch.

You had asked Sally why we don't have the old Carnegie building, and part of that is because technology was changing, and that building was not... The 1890s is a little bit different than the 2020s technology wise.

We've had a lot of changes, and we needed something that was more flexible with the changing times.

And it really is, it's the same foundational idea that Andrew Carnegie had, just with a different, a more modern tweak to it.

Part of why I think he's remembered as kind of the father of libraries is because that his idea of what was needed has endured throughout 150 years.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.