Ground Level®: Amplifying Community Voices

Your story is powerful. The stories you share with others honor the complexity of our communities while forging a more equitable and vibrant future.

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We’d like to hear your thoughts and questions. Your ideas about solutions. How are your communities? What are you seeing today? And what do you want to see tomorrow?

Note that while we will exercise editorial judgment for language, length and avoiding personal attacks, we will not sacrifice your meaning. We will ensure your main message comes through on air and online.

Legislation in both Minnesota houses would spend $500,000 a year to create a broadband development office that would track and promote ways to increase high-speed Internet availability in the state.
See a video chat on whether Minnesota has a skills gap. We’ll talk to people from industry, the state and higher education.
A local-government-aid compromise moving in the Legislature would benefit suburbia and exurbia but also regional job hubs in outstate Minnesota. An initial increase of $60 million per year would rise with inflation.
Subscription farms boom in Minnesota
The number of CSA farms has grown dramatically in Minnesota, from just eight in 2004 to at least 100 today.
How a skills gap may be forming in high school
This week, MPR’s Ground Level and reporter Tom Robertson look at whether there really is a jobs-skills mismatch n Minnesota — what’s causing what we’re seeing, and what’s being done about it. (Hint: It’s a lot more complicated than you think.) I posted yesterday on a conversation Robertson had with Steve Hine, research director for…
Ground Level launches a look at why some manufacturers have difficulty filling jobs and why it’s only partly because of a skills gap.
Metro area creeps farther into rural Minnesota
The federal government has expanded the Twin Cities metropolitan statistical area from 13 counties to 16, adding three outlying “rural” areas.
More than a third of Minnesota’s counties are experiencing more deaths than births, but a few places with high immigration in recent decades run counter to that trend.