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I came to Community Action Duluth because I have been out of the workforce for 12 years, while I cared for my parents.
When you get to the part of your job application, where it asks what you have done in the past three years, and you have zero.
It’s very difficult to get back in and make an employer look at you as if you have any value at all
Seeds of Success and the Stream Corps are really the first time that Community Action has moved from being an agency that does coaching and counseling of people with regard to employment to being an actual employer of people.
We’ve been able to demonstrate the concept, to demonstrate that it is possible to use urban growing as a means to employ people and to give them a positive work experience - something to build on as they move forward.
We do transitional employment, but we do it in such a way as to provide a couple of other benefits, include neighborhood revitalization through creating gardens in otherwise abandoned, vacant lots.
Community Action Duluth’s mission is to fight poverty and increase equality and strengthen the social fabric in the community.
The way Duluth Stream Corps fits into that mission is that we are providing jobs for unemployed community members, and teaching them good job skills to hopefully prepare them for a successful future career.
Our goal through the project is to plant 20,000 trees, and a big part of what we are doing is not just planting trees, but its educating people.
Back in the 1930’s, we had the civilian conservation corps that put three million young men to work doing environmental and conservation projects – so we are trying to bring back that idea in this country.
Getting a regular paycheck and getting health insurance back is a pretty big deal.
There are dozens of very neat streams that flow right through the city. Unfortunately a lot of them are heavily developed, there’s a lot of erosion, there’s a lot of high water temperatures.
So what we are doing is working with private land owners that live along the streams to plant native trees and shrubs to help alleviate some of those problems.
We are pulling the community together and we are trying to create something here that will provide a legacy for the next generations.
Hopefully we can make this successful and be a model for other organizations throughout the country, because this is something that is badly needed.