(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - Welcome to "Almanac North."

I'm Maarja Hewitt.

Tonight we have guests that are experts in their areas of public welfare programs.

We take a deep look at the types of situations that individuals may find themselves in that require public assistance, and we look at some of the stats and figures of this aid from 2023.

But first, the Housing and Redevelopment Authority of Duluth, Minnesota, Duluth HRA, hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for the phase six development in Duluth's Harbor Highlands Neighborhood.

Phase six will be made up of 10 one-bedroom, 14 two-bedroom, 12 three-bedroom, and 4 four-bedroom units.

The units are priced to be affordable to households at 50% area median income.

Seven units are reserved for households exiting homelessness with supportive services, and six units set aside for households with disabilities.

All units have project-based vouchers, so residents will only pay 30% of their income for rent and utilities.

Phase six is estimated to be completed and ready for occupancy by the summer of 2025.

A groundbreaking ceremony took place on Thursday, July 11th, at 1:00 PM at the location of the development on the corner of Bay Breeze Bend and Harbor Highlands Drive.

July brings big sales from major retailers, but shoppers should stay alert to avoid scams.

Here are some tips to keep your online shopping safe.

Research sellers before buying, check customer reviews and verify contact information.

Use bbb.org to see if a retailer is accredited and read customer feedback.

Beware of phishing attempts via email and text.

These often claim you have a gift or delivery issue.

Track your purchases and avoid suspicious links.

Watch out for social media ads and lookalike websites.

Slight URL changes can indicate a fake site.

Ensure the spelling is correct and check for legitimate contact info.

If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Don't trust professional photos online.

They can be stolen.

Look for blurry logos or images as red flags.

Ensure websites are secure with HTTPS in the URL and a lock icon.

Never enter payment info on sites without these.

And finally, pay with a credit card for added protection against fraud.

Avoid non-traditional payment methods like digital wallet apps or prepaid cards.

Following these tips will ensure you have a safe and rewarding sale season.

And now with a deep dive into some of the statistics surrounding welfare in our region, Dennis Anderson joins us with another edition of "Denny's Desk."

Denny?

- And thank you, Maarja.

Tonight we're gonna take a look at some of the significant numbers surrounding social welfare here in the state of Minnesota.

Now, when people consider welfare, often top of mind are participants receiving cash benefits or food assistance, and generally as long-term or lifelong benefits.

Now, in reality, there are a wide variety of circumstances and relief and aid programs available for people who do need assistance.

Aside from food, cash, and medical assistance, many programs exist to aid with housing, heating, child daycare, employment, behavioral health, crisis services, substance abuse, and many, many more.

These exist because the primary goal of public assistance programs is to help ensure all residents are safe, healthy, and supported.

In St. Louis County, this is achieved through a diverse array of programs, services, and initiatives that work at all levels and throughout our community.

The economic impact of their work on our local economy is significant.

In 2020, their financial assistance programs alone provided over $432 million directly supporting local clinics, hospitals, grocery stores, and other businesses.

Their social services and public health efforts added another $229 million, funding critical services for children, families, and individuals with disabilities.

St. Louis County Public Health has also been at the forefront of providing financial and medical assistance to residents.

Now, beyond immediate health concerns, the department conducts comprehensive community health assessments to identify and address priority health areas.

This ongoing work helps them to plan public health initiatives that truly meet the needs of our community.

Last year, over 1,500 residents, age 65 and older, received care coordination, and over 2,700 home visits were provided by public health nurses.

Another support area is Child and Family Services.

Now this division works to keep children in safe nurturing environments, partnering with families to provide preventive services and supportive resources.

Nearly 2,000 children were served with early intervention and prevention services in 2023.

817 children were given access to daycare that otherwise would not have been had.

Now, throughout the work we've highlighted tonight, in addition to the many undertakings left unmentioned, St. Louis County is providing a safety net to families and individuals who otherwise would find themselves in desperate situations.

By keeping our residents safe, sheltered, and healthy, everyone benefits.

And now back to you, Maarja.

- Thank you, Denny.

Now we're joined by Jessica Peterson, the manager of Duluth's Parks and Recreation Department.

Jessica, thank you for joining us on "Almanac North."

- Thank you for having me.

- Let's start with sharing a little bit about yourself and what you do with the Parks and Rec Department.

- Sure, so I've been with the city's Parks and Rec Department for about 5 1/2 years.

I manage our Parks and Recreation Division, and I work alongside our park maintenance crews and our facilities crews to take care of our parks and provide awesome programs and activities throughout the city.

- And that's kind of a heavy task 'cause Duluth has a ton of parks and lots of green space.

- We are incredibly fortunate in Duluth with the park system that we have, over 11,000 acres of green space, a couple hundred miles of trails, and about 40 playgrounds to boot, and that's just scratching the surface of all of the activities and amenities.

- And this is kind of the season for our parks.

I mean, our parks are wonderful all year round, but they're busy right now.

Are there some hidden gems that, from your lens, you think that people should really check out?

- Sure, so I would say one of those is Lincoln Park.

You may remember that we celebrated the grand reopening of Lincoln Park last fall.

And since then, the grass has grown in.

We've put some finishing touches on it.

We're reprogramming it, bringing in concerts and activities this summer.

And it's just way more functional and enjoyable for the community.

So I really do encourage people to check out Lincoln Park.

- And let's talk about some of the benefits of being able to access these parks and green space in general while living in the city.

- Sure.

So we know that our parks provide physical wellness connection to other people, so social connections, connections to our natural surroundings and natural resources.

We are very rich in those connections and resources, but we also know that sometimes people need a little bit of help in making connections to our park spaces.

And so that is why we also provide some programs through our Parks Department specifically, but we also collaborate with community partners to bring people out into the parks for safe, healthy, and welcoming experiences.

- And I know you have some mini free programs, but let's talk about the financial assistance program and why the city decided to create it and what it does.

- Sure, so our financial assistance program rolled out in 2019.

It's a council-approved program, and what it does is it helps lower financial barriers to participation in our fee-based programs.

So as you mentioned, many of our programs are free or very low cost, but some of those more specialty programs, skill building programs, et cetera, do have a cost for our sustainability and our long-term programming to the community.

But we know that some people need a little bit of help to get there.

And so we provide a very straightforward financial assistance program.

It offers up to $300 per person annually.

As long as they're a Duluth resident and have a demonstrated financial need.

- And so what type of programs does that help?

What kind of fee-based programs do you offer?

- Sure, so some of the most popular examples are summer day camps, and that also sort of crosses over into the world of childcare for a lot of our families.

And so we provide a certain number of weeks of half day and full day day camps to the community in our parks.

So you can receive financial assistance to support some of those day camps, but it also goes to some of our smaller programs.

So we offer open skate at the Heritage Center once or twice a week, all year long, $3 a session, but you could get almost a year of free skating with that $300 worth of financial assistance.

And it goes all the way up and down from there, and it will cover some of our senior programs as well, which are key to social engagement and active lifestyles as people are aging.

- So have you seen an impact since the financial assistance program has begun?

Has there been more involvement?

- Sure, so since 2019, of course we weathered the pandemic.

We delivered a smaller number of programs there for a few years.

We came back in full force, and I ran the numbers in 2023.

Last year, we served 31 different families.

They participated in 134 free programs, and we were able to support them with about $8,800 in financial assistance.

- Oh, wow.

Wow.

That's also a lot of programs that you are managing.

- It's awesome.

- And so is it just for individuals and families, or can organizations take advantage of it?

- Sure, that's a great question.

So we do offer a category for reduced program fees for nonprofits in our community.

And we offer a number of free programs to our youth agencies in particular.

So for example, the Valley Youth Center, the Boys & Girls Club, and a couple of others.

We do about 20 free programs per year.

And that's a way to bridge kids into our programming and services when signing up for individual programs is a little bit more work.

Sometimes you just don't have the connections to resources to do that on an individual basis.

So we work organization to organization to bring those programs out into the community and serve more kids that way.

- So what does the application look like to fill out the financial assistance?

Is it a heavy lift?

- It's not a heavy lift.

It's a pretty straightforward application.

It's available on our website.

Of course, if someone wanted to stop into the office, if internet were an issue, we would always help them with that as well.

It's just the front back of a piece of paper.

And if there's ever concerns or a question on qualifications, they can always give us a call, and we'll always find a way to work through it.

- Looking ahead, do you see evolutions of the program, expansions, or any changes?

- I think that's a really good question.

Right now, we'd like to see how it's working with a year over year comparison with a couple of normal years of programming.

Any changes to the program would likely need a council review and approval because we do realize that fees are an important part of our sustainability model, and that access to programming is important to our community as a whole.

So right now I don't know that there'll be specific changes.

It's just something that we'll continue to look at and evaluate.

- So free programs, there's a ton of those.

I mean, you do have the fee-based, but you offer dozens of free programs.

Can you share a little bit of some of those that are going on right now maybe?

- Absolutely.

So this week, for example, on Friday, we have our first of a couple Pop-up Splash Pad events.

So this is Friday at 3:00 to 5:00 PM at Keene Creek Park.

It's a great way to cool off.

Now that summer is finally here with the heat outside, and we partner with the Duluth Fire Department to bring in the water for that and the setup of all of the spray equipment and supplies and fun.

- Oh, that's awesome.

- So there will be a few more of those as we move through the summer.

You'll also see a few beach safety parties that we put on with some of our partners at the beach house out on Park Point.

And one of our more popular, two of our very popular programs are Play Gyms, which are for our youngest kiddos, toddlers and younger, to just get together with other families and play with some of our equipment at some of our community centers.

And a lot of those same families enjoy the partner program that we put on with the Duluth Public Library, which is Story and Play.

And we move that throughout our parks all summer long.

- And I think you had a big press conference, an opening this week that maybe you wanna share a little bit about.

- That's right.

So earlier this week, we did celebrate the opening of another section of the Waabizheshikana, the Marten Trail.

The access trail head to that is just off of Falcon Street in Morgan Park.

And this trail traverses an area of the remediated US Steel property in the Morgan Park neighborhood.

Eventually it will connect to another long segment of the Waabizheshikana heading back east towards Munger Landing for example and beyond.

And so it is a crushed stone, ADA accessible trail and does provide access to shoreline fishing, as well as just a nice walk or stroll or bike ride along the kind of renewed riverfront.

- Oh awesome.

Great to see our trail still growing.

Well, Jess, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

It was a pleasure.

- Thank you.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - Next up on "Almanac North," we are joined by Public Health specialist Meghann Levitt from the Carlton County Public Health and Human Services Department.

Meghann, thank you for joining us.

- Yeah, thank you for having me.

- Well, can you share a little bit about your background and your role with Carlton County?

- Yeah, so I work for Carlton County as a public health specialist, also a grant manager for the Northern Minnesota Suicide Prevention Regional Coordination Program.

- Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about that program and how it helps the 87 counties in Minnesota and especially underserved areas?

- Yeah, so Carlton County is one of two grantees from the Minnesota Department of Health.

And the regional coordinators, there's 13 of them total that cover sections of the state in their designated regions where they provide training and technical assistance, and programming, help local communities develop strategies for suicide prevention, intervention, postvention, so kind of across the spectrum of preventing suicide, suicidal thoughts before they even start to intervention where somebody might be having suicidal thoughts and how do we prevent action.

And then postvention is kind of follow up, supporting a community after a loss and doing some planning for prevention further down the road.

- Okay.

So how does the coordination between those coordinators and the local communities, schools, work sites, address the needs of those with limited resources?

- That's a great question.

That's really the structure of the regional coordinator model, is to address, to make sure that all 87 counties are covered with some support for technical assistance for suicide prevention in some way.

So everyone has access to a resource to do some planning.

So really the regional coordinators work at a population level.

So they're working on policies and systems, putting new ones into place, or kind of fixing systems that might be not benefiting populations.

And so some examples of that might be a regional coordinator comes alongside of a school who wants to put together a protocol for helping a student who might present in crisis during the school day.

So they kinda work through a planning process of, at your school, what does this look like so that all teachers and staff who encounter a student at risk know what to do to make sure that that student gets the help that they need.

Another cool thing that they're working on, especially as we talk about limited access to resources, is regional coordinators working with a work site right now to set up telehealth.

And so the employer really encouraging it's employees to access help when they need it to be able to see a counselor, a therapist.

So they've set up a special space within the facility to support their employees to access help during work hours.

So they pay the employee up to a certain amount of time to actually attend that visit with a counselor or therapist.

And then it's also reducing on missed productivity because the employee is able to go right to that spot, do their telehealth visit, and then go right back to work.

So in our rural communities, it's reducing the need for all of the excess transportation to get to appointments.

- That's a great solution.

- Yeah, yeah.

And one of the other ones that I wanted to highlight too, for access issues for a lot of our community members, is the availability of mobile crisis teams too.

They're also available across Minnesota's 87 counties.

So if people are struggling with the ability to pay for visits or transportation, that's the nice thing about mobile, is that they can go to where somebody is to meet with them.

So how do the regional coordinators work with the Minnesota State Suicide Plan to ensure the underserved populations receive the help they need and their needs are met?

- Yeah, so we're really lucky in Minnesota to have a State Suicide Prevention Plan that helps kind of guide what we do at the local level, but that's part of it.

It is a guide.

So there are some populations pulled out that might be at higher risk in that plan.

What the regional coordinators can do then locally is compare our local data with the state plan.

Some of it might align and we can kind of coordinate those strategies at the state level, but sometimes we might find that there's differences in our data locally, whether that's demographic differences, age differences, cultures, race, ethnicity differences.

And then beyond demographics too, in the populations that we're serving, those that might be dealing with some different social determinants of health, so healthcare access, education, kind of their neighborhood or built environment, or access to transportation needs.

So they can, regional coordinators can come alongside local organizations, schools, work sites, then to kind of figure out.

We have the quantitative data, the numbers that are telling us one thing, and also we wanna hear locally what's going on and can help compare that data and fill in gaps that might be existing at the local level.

- So a part of that plan is the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Right?

- Yeah.

- So can you tell us more about the importance of that and then maybe the impact that it's had?

- Yeah, so the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is something that's evolved over the last few years.

Many people probably known have known it as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

So now it is accessible by phone, text, and chat, which is really helpful for the different modes that people want to communicate.

Different population groups are able to access different services.

So when you call, or text, or chat in, you can access the Veteran Services Lifeline, the Spanish Language Line, and then the LGBTQI+ Network.

And then also if somebody is deaf and hard of hearing and they have a video phone, they do have services via ASL on that video phone as well.

So a lot of different ways that we're able to kinda meet people where they're at.

A way that we get them back to local resources is by area code.

So if somebody with a Minnesota area code calls in, texts in, it's still very anonymous, but they can get you to a Minnesota Lifeline Center that will have more local resources for your area.

So I do have a success story if we have time.

- Oh, wonderful, yes.

- Yeah.

So this was something that one of our local providers here in Northeast Minnesota shared with us, and they shared that she's happy to pass it along to anyone it would be helpful for.

So she says, "I'm working for another mental health center in Northern Minnesota doing telehealth in their outpatient program.

I have open access time in my schedule for whoever needs help a few mornings a week and Thursday afternoons.

So here's my story.

I checked my schedule at 1:00 PM and noticed an appointment for a comprehensive evaluation from 2:00 to 3:30.

This is required to access services.

So this appointment was not on my schedule at noon.

I dialed in and there was an adolescent, about 17, and her mom on the screen.

I got through the demographics.

And then prior to jumping into the eval, I asked, 'What brings you here today and the purpose of our meeting?'

The mom literally said, 'I called a 988 number for crisis as my daughter has thoughts of suicide.'

When asked when she called, she said about two hours ago.

So she called the 988 number, talked to the local mobile crisis response team, and was added to an open access slot in my schedule and assessed within three hours."

So the therapist said "I have to say I was excited to hear this from them.

The system is working.

She was assessed for safety, determined she was okay to return home for now, and was smiling and engaged in conversation at the end of the assessment.

She's agreeable to therapy and support services.

It was so satisfying to have this experience."

So it's neat to see how a national resource can then get us back to very local supports - It trickled down and quickly.

So for people who maybe they work in a school, or they have a work site, or they just want more information to be prepared, how can they learn more information or get connected with a coordinator?

- Yeah, so on Carlton County's website, they can find the map of the regional coordinators.

And our northeast region is to be filled right now, should be filled shortly.

And they can just email or call the regional coordinator directly.

And I'm always available too, as kind of the point of contact for all of Northern Minnesota.

- Well, Meghann, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for the work you do.

- Yeah, thanks for having me.

- Now let's look ahead and see what you might be up to this weekend.

Saturday from 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM at Bayfront Festival Park is the Festival by the Lake.

Music, exhibitors, food, and fun are available.

Adult tickets are $5.

Children 12 and under are free with an adult.

The festival is a fundraiser for the Bluebird Foundation, which supports high school-aged children involved with the performing arts.

This Saturday, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM walk or boat into the inaugural Dragonfly Benefit for the Itasca Area Cancer Crisis Fund.

Fundraising is through the community foundation of the Grand Rapids area.

Free live music will be performed by Small Town Sindrome.

More details are available online on their events page.

And Sunday from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM, the WonderTrek Children's Museum is hosting a five and under outdoor play lab in Brainerd.

Children can explore the wonders of art, nature, mud, and water.

The event is free.

Well, that will do it for this week's show.

Make sure you go out and enjoy your weekend.

For everyone here at "Almanac North," I'm Maarja Hewitt.

Thank you for joining us.

Goodnight.

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