Annual Fall Festival at St Pascals

Saint Pascal Baylon's annual fall festival is Sunday, September 27 from noon to 5p. Join the family

fun with children's games, a spaghetti dinner, tacos, beer and wine, bingo, raffles, a boutique and football! This is taking place at the church at 3rd Street and White Bear Avenue. For more information call 651-774-1585.

Community Gathering - Meet your Neighbors!! 9/19

East African Community Link and the Lower Afton/South East Ramsey County community are holding a neighborhood gathering on Saturday, September 19 from 4-9p at Highwood Hills Elementary School, 2188 Londin Lane, St. Paul, 55119.

This is the second annual "Meet your neighbors Gathering" and their will be free food, fun activities, and artifacts from Africa and Sweden.

Food and space is donated by Saint Paul Public Schools and neighborhood businesses.

Notes from Steering Committee of the Dialogue to Action project

In attendance – Lisa (D2), Christine (D3), Leslie (D5), Chia, Betsy (D1)

The agenda for this meeting was approved and there was a review of notes from June and July by those members who had been absent, with time for any questions or clarifications about the notes.

Status of the work: Chia had spent some time looking for Parks curriculum because Everyday Democracy is no longer advising us closely as they have been. She found a set that had been based on Everday Democracy’s work on the website for the Parks and Recreation National Association. Steering committee members present in July worked on localizing it to our area. In addition, 4 Community Action Team members came together to work on a different curriculum that de-emphasized using a racial equity lens. The Steering Committee decided to take the second curriculum and use it as comments to tweak the original curriculum to assure that these dialogues continue to focus on how our racial and social positioning effects how we interact with city services. The purpose of these dialogues is to create a safe forum for open and honest conversations about racial equity in our city.

We reviewed the August timeline – It is time for Steering Committee members to send their second invoice to the D1 office. We are getting ready to train facilitators on Saturday August 29. We need to assure that we have at least 3 facilitators per group if the groups are going to be large (i.e. 25 or so). CHIA will create a flyer to recruit for both dialogues that can be distributed to potential recruiting partners. Both sets of community dialogues will be done before Thanksgiving. Locations are now set (Police/Youth at Wellstone Center, and Parks at Arlington Hills). We will look at fall events prior to the Parks dialogues starting on October 19 to see if there will be continuing opportunities to recruit. Our police partners are recruiting both police members and reaching out to local faith organizations for potential participants. We need a concentrated push to recruit.

Review of the budget: To date, most of our expenses have been in staff time. Most additional funds are set to be expended when the actual dialogues are taking place. We had a lengthy discussion on how to award stipends for facilitators, given that the PED event has a separate planning group. This PED dialogue could be a large group. District Council staff members will facilitate the PED dialogues. WSCO had a staff member on the planning group for the PED discussions, WSCO will look who it can send as an alternate to that group. The budget line for participant stipends led to lengthy discussion given that we are looking at more participants now than when the proposal was developed – two times as many… The emphasis will be on using these funds to minimize impediments to people’s participation. 

LISA (with help from Chia) will draft a participation form that will alert us to the barriers folks may face.  BETSY will draft a standard form people can fill out to receive the stipend to address their barriers to participation. BETSY will contact Smart Trips about potential help on free bus passes (NOTE: Smart Trips was able to get Metro Transit to donate free bus passes). BETSY and CHIA will go over the specifics of the budget line items and let the steering committee know how stipends will be dealt with (NOTE: up to 10 district councils can receive stipends for staff participation – starting with $360/council. Should fewer than 10 councils participate, additional funds will be available to the PED Planning group members). Printing costs should be covered by the line item amount with additional printing being provided by participating steering committee councils.

CHIA will send out both versions of the curriculum for Parks so committee members can edit.

Recruiting – need to recruit district councils for PED dialogue; LESLIE will check with Arlington Hills about PED dialogue location (NOTE: that location is now confirmed).

Next meeting for Steering Cmte will be September 8 from 10-12p at D1 office.

NOTE: Police and Youth/Family dialogues are Mondays September 14 – October 12 from 6-8p at the Wellstone Center, 179 E. Robie Street

Parks and Community dialogues are Mondays October 19 – November 16 from 6-8p at the Arlington Hills Community Center, 1200 Payne Avenue

PED and District Council dialogue is Wednesday October 14 from 2 – 8p at Arlington Hills 

Notes from 8/3/15 Community Action Team Meeting

The Community Action Team of the Dialogue to Action Project met on Monday August 3 at the Wellstone Center, El Rio Vista Rec Center on the West Side.

There was an initial welcome and personal updates from individuals attending. It was a small group this month. In attendance were Chia and Betsy (District 1); Clara, John S and Steve (D4); John L, John B and Kurt (Police Dept.), and Diane (City and D16)

We had a recap of ground rules and added a rule to stay on task, noting that we have had a lot of side conversations in previous meetings that have taken us a bit off track at times. In light of this we reviewed the purpose of this group in the Dialogue to Action project – trying to clear up misunderstandings about what this group is. This group is not focused on having the actual but is intended to do the planning needed to have the dialogues be successful in the fall. The 4 task forces set up at the July meeting with membership from this planning group are going to do work on Police guide, the Parks guide, on recruiting for the dialogues, and on finding the background data that is necessary for each dialogue.

Diane reviewed the data used in the original cross cultural dialogue. These included data from MN Compass showing disparities in median income, home ownership, poverty level, non-insured status, and education level among different racial and ethnic groups. There were also data at the state level on the prison population by ethnicity. We discussed what of these data we wanted to include and what additional data we would like to have. The main focus was on looking at the local level as much as possible. There was a suggestion that we look at ASANDC survey of Frogtown residents about  their use of Parks for the Parks guide. The CAT asks the data task force to get together and then look at the options and figure out what needs to be background information for the fall dialogues. Diane will send out a meeting wizard to set up a meeting of this group.

The next topic was Strategic Planning for the dialogues. The steering committee proposed dates and locations for each set of dialogues. They proposed that the Police and youth dialogues take place at the Wellstone Center from September 14 – October 12, with a goal of 50 participants. These will be divided into 2-3 groups each with 2 facilitators – the number is dependent on the total number of facilitators. We discussed the breakdown of composition of these groups in terms of the proportion of youth, to community members to police. The suggestion was that there be no more than 1/3 of the total be police officers and 2/3 be youth and community members. Then the question was how do we recruit police officers? It was determined that 5 officers per district (E, W, C) is the goal. There was a lengthy discussion on how to keep youth and their guardians engaged throughout the process.  Police have tried several approaches and are concerned about long term commitment through the entire dialogue process. They have found that focusing on the very, very local means that there actually weren’t incidents that people had experienced that they could talk about. There was some discussion about whether a 5 session model would really work and some discussion of different models of how to do this. In the end, we will stick with the dialogue model and its curriculum.

We decided that by recruiting from churches throughout the city we could enlist the pastors to help identify families that would be interested and have the commitment to stick with the process. A list of faith organizations was developed and a plan for contacting them and recruiting. We discussed that the final location needs to have breakout rooms, need to be accessible for a variety of transportation options and that we will need to identify transportation needs of potential participants. We will limit the space for other community members (not youth and their families).

The critieria for participation are that folks be residents of Saint Paul, committed to the effort, that the youth be mature enough to participate, that all parts of Saint Paul are represented, that the family be willing to attend, and that we are made aware of any transportation needs.

The facilitator training is proposed for August 29, noon to 4, Saturday – MayChy and Thaoke will be providing the training at the District 1 offices.

There will be a run-through for Police Guide – August 17 location TBD 5:30-7:30

There will be a run-through for Parks – September 15 location TBD 5:30-7:30

Additional materials to be included in Police guide should be a list of law enforcement agencies operating in Saint Paul, flyer of how police prioritize calls, etc.

The meeting was adjourned at 7:20p. Next meeting is the run-through for Police Guide.