Jessie Rae

On November 17, the Community Engagement Team for a new $5 million HUD grant (see sidebar) held an information session about the grant for the community that was less than informative.

I sat down with Hussein Samatar on a sunny Sunday afternoon at Mapps Coffee, across the street from the African Development Center in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. Samatar is the director of the African Development Center (ADC), which he founded to help new immigrants adjust to Minneapolis and gain financial success. Samatar emigrated to Minneapolis 17 years ago from Somalia and is active in the Cedar-Riverside community. He was just elected to the Minneapolis Board of Education. 

Ryan Colbert, a first year student at the University of Minnesota, can see his childhood in the distance. Growing up in the Riverside Plaza Towers for the first twelve years of his life and now living on the West Bank again as a student in the U of M's Middlebrook Hall dorm, he has seen multiple aspects of the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. In this interview, Colbert offered his unique perspective on the neighborhood.

It is tough for a student who attends college out of state to try and decide where he or she should vote. Should they make their voice heard in their hometown or their college town, an area that is affecting them in the present? When several University of Minnesota students not native to Minnesota were asked where they were voting, all four of them replied that they were voting absentee in their hometown.