Mall of America, where civil liberties go to buy

By |

[See original post here: http://www.bluestemprairie.com/bluestemprairie/2015/02/mall-of-america-where-civil-liberties-go-to-buy.html]Bluestem’s editor has been to the Mall of America three times in her life: once to shop in the mid-1990s, once to stop by a bookstore where a friend of a friend worked, and a final time to meet a former student for lunch as he was on his way to Hazelton.Thus, we can’t honestly say we’re boycotting a place we don’t patronize to begin with. Had we enough money for reckless consumer spending, we’d indulge our tastes locally, with purchases of pasture-raised pork or beef raised by family farmers and prints by prairie photographers.Two stories underscore the liberty-loving nature of our shopping preferences, both centered on MOA. First, the complaints brought up against people involved in the pre-Christmas Black Lives Matter protests. Just three days ago, Minnesota Public Radio’s Emily Kaiser looked at that issue in Black Lives Matter: The legal issues behind MOA protest:Black Lives Matter and local civil rights groups have denounced the charges, suggesting their participants are being unfairly singled out. The city attorney is also seeking restitution for the cost of policing the event.”I think the charges and the nature and number of charges being brought are disturbing,” said Bruce Nestor, attorney and member of the Black Lives Matter legal team on MPR News. Continue Reading

The Miracle of Two Minneapolises in Prenatal Care

By |

While looking around for some data for another project, I ran into Minneapolis Health Department’s Reports. There’s a lot of great data there, but not all of it is necessarily in amazing condition for people to build off of. One data set, entitled Minneapolis Birth Data, caught my attention. Locked away in mostly tabular PDFs are a lot of interesting numbers that tell you how Minneapolis’ neighborhoods fare by way of birth statistics: with a demographic overview of mothers’ race, age, education, marital status; what trimester they began prenatal care (if at all); how adequate that care was; what their baby’s birth weight was; and whether the birth was premature.After extracting some of the data, I made a map of the report from 2009-2011. In map form, the data is both shocking, and sadly not surprising when you know about the racial and socio-economic demographics of Minneapolis’ neighborhoods. A familiar pattern emerges, where the whitest and richest neighborhoods have a better overall access to prenatal care (West Calhoun, for instance, had 43 kids between the survey period of 2009-2011, and100% are listed as receiving adequate care. Continue Reading

Event Honors Native American Women

By |

“I just don’t want to see Native American women feel invisible anymore,” said White Earth band of Ojibwe activist Winona LaDuke An event at the  Woman’s Club of Minneapolis made sure that Native women did not feel invisible. A panel discussion and musical event featuring Eve Ensler, Winona LaDuke, Louise Erdrich, Patina Clark  and Chastity Brown highlighted some of the main issues facing Native American women today, including sexual and domestic violence. Eve Ensler, author of the Vagina Monologues and the founder of One Billion Rising, a global campaign where people come together and dance to celebrate. Their name reflects a statistic that 1 in 3 women across the planet will be beaten or raped during her lifetime. In other words, that is one billion women and girls. Their website, onebillionrising.org, says, “We rise through dance to express joy and community and celebrate the fact that we have not been defeated by this violence. We rise to show we are determined to create a new kind of consciousness – one where violence will be resisted until it is unthinkable.” LaDuke envisioned Tuesday’s event. Continue Reading

Minneapolis Marchers Honor Indigenous Women

By |

On February 14, a group of Indigenous men and women in red shawls and colorful robes marched down Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis, undaunted by the cold weather. About a hundred participants gathered to remember of the lost members of their community. The Annual Women’s Memorial March is held each year on Valentine’s day in Canada. It calls for the awareness of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) across Canada and the United States. Sponsored by The Indigenous Women’s Net, Native Lives Matter Coalition and Idle No More Minnesota, Women’s Memorial March aims to bring awareness to the colonial and gender based violence upon indigenous women from North America. This is the first time it was held here in the Twin Cities with title Sing Our Rivers Red. Continue Reading

First homeless Youth Shelter to open in “African suburb” of Brooklyn Park

By |

The first of its kind in a Minnesota suburb, a homeless shelter for youth in the City of Brooklyn Park, will open tomorrow (Saturday, Jan. 31) during an open house to celebrate the achievement. Brooklyn Park and the surrounding northwest suburbs referred to as the “African Suburb” is home to the largest concentration of African immigrants in the state that are homeowners.Called Brooklyn Avenues, it is a 12-bed, short-term shelter and transition housing program, for teens aged 16 through 20. The Minneapolis nonprofit, Avenues for Homeless Youth, will run the shelter built by the City of Brooklyn Park through its Economic Development Authority at a cost of $950,000. The City will lease it to Avenues for $1.The grand opening ceremony on Saturday will be open to the public in the form of an open house that will run from 1-4pm.According to the renowned Wilder Research in Saint Paul, more than 4,000 youth are homeless and living alone in Minnesota on any one given night. Continue Reading

Meet the Abu Huraira Islamic Center

By |

With a box of Little Caesar’s pizza and a chai tea, Abdirahman Omar sits down at a long table inside the building at 3055 Old Highway 8 in St. Anthony. He’s meeting with other members from the Abu Huraira Islamic Center, who convene almost every day to discuss current needs and events.Omar, an imam and spokesman for the group, says they have many hopes for the building, which they’ve owned since August 2012. One is to make a floor dedicated to healthcare for Somali people, who require a different cultural confidence in their medicine. Spaces could be rented to dentists, urgent care and other healthcare providers.More than that, they want to make this building something that can belong to the Somali people, for the community and beyond. Continue Reading

Lawmakers listen as educators share ‘achievement gap’ success stories

By |

As Minnesota leaders in K-12 education continue to work toward their shared goal of narrowing the achievement gap, the House Education Finance Committee is looking to the educators themselves for examples of progress.On Tuesday, principals and superintendents from public and charter schools and school districts that have reported improvements in that arena shared their success stories.The purpose of the hearing, said committee chair Rep. Jenifer Loon (R-Eden Prairie), was to allow the committee to glean from educators successful tools and strategies they have used that have proven effective in closing the gap between students of color and white students with respect to their scores on Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCA) exams.One of those schools is Global Academy in Columbia Heights.The public charter school with an enrollment of 430 kindergarten through eighth graders — 75 percent of whom are students of color — has been designated by the Department of Education as a “Reward School,” a status that recognizes the top 15 percent of Title 1 schools that have demonstrated exceptional student outcomes in helping to close the achievement gap.“‘How do we do this?’ People ask us that a lot,” said Helen Fisk, director. “Sometimes we are pretty stumped ourselves. But I think the answer is really pretty simple: it never occurred to us that our students wouldn’t be anything other than very successful.”Fisk pointed to the school’s International Baccalaureate learning program, ability to control quality of teaching staff based on at-will employment model and its one-to-one student-iPad ratio as a few of the reasons for its high MCA scores across the board in math, reading and science.About 68 percent math of its black students in grades three through eight were measured to be proficient in math, Fisk said. About 63 percent measured proficient in reading and 62 percent in science.In the most recent round of MCA results released by the Department of Education last fall, the gap between white and black students continues to persist on a statewide level. In reading, 33 percent of black students in grades three through eight were achieved proficient for their grade level, compared to 67 percent of white students. Continue Reading