Student Consulting Opportunities

Minnesota continues to struggle with generating enough teachers of color and indigenous teachers to effectively serve, inspire, and educate our increasingly diverse student population. This challenge is further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustice within our community, social issues that have had grave implications for recruiting and retaining talent in the education workforce. While young people, schools, and nonprofit organizations are engaging in this work, these efforts are not currently coordinated or supported by cross-sector efforts. To fill this gap, this project focuses on utilizing intentional and coordinated cross-sector collaboration to enhance the early stages of the teacher of color and indigenous teacher pathway.

This project seeks to ensure that Minnesota has the workforce it needs for the future through providing a shared tool or toolbox for employers more effectively to source, hire, retain and advance African American, LatinX and Indigenous talent. The specific, initial focus of the project will be on for-profit employers of management, business, financial and health professionals. The project group seeks in the first instance to complete a landscape overview of initiatives or tools that have been successfully developed and applied for these purposes and that could be generalized to be useful to a number of different employers. The group also seeks specifically to become aware of approaches or tools that have been used to change employers narratives from landing scarce employees to growing the number of such potential employees who consider working and remaining in this area.

The St. Cloud area is the second fastest growing of the thirteen Economic Development Regions in Minnesota and is facing workforce shortages — particularly in the construction and professional/technical services fields. The aim of this project is to provide a bridge to connect emerging leaders in these fields with potential employees who may or may not have the traditional qualifications to fill these jobs possess or may be readily trained to possess the necessary skill sets. The project group has identified awareness, resources, and tools as potential “bridging” mechanisms to make these connections.

This project starts from the premise that youth health and wellbeing are significant concerns for workforce readiness in Minnesota. In particular, the project group — whose members include a high school principal, healthcare advocate, and future employers — has identified youth suicide, gun violence and the disadvantages of underserved youth as major concerns to Minnesota’s future economic vitality. The project seeks to develop an arts programming tool or toolkit that can provide “upstream” (preventing or mitigating anxiety, anger management or other mental health challenges before they occur) opportunities for high-school aged youth to reflect and express themselves.

This project seeks to develop an “arts and culture” toolkit — potentially including local resources, talking points, instructions for arts and culture projects in various media, positive narratives, and facilitation techniques — to address racism for discussion and use by groups, professions, organizations or communities. The toolkit should be adaptable for a virtual or post-pandemic environment. The MYALP Project Team requests that graduate students assist them in the following ways to shape the project to be ready to deliver and evaluate its first prototype toolkit.

The goal of this project is to tackle the problem of inequitable leadership throughout the Greater Mankato Area. The MYALP team has identified a lack of BIPOC, Women, and Young Adults involved with leadership roles throughout our community. The team believes that increasing such representation in nonprofit boards provides lower barriers to entry and could be a jumping-off point for further advancement.

This project aims to retain talent in the Greater St. Cloud Area and understand why talent chooses to leave or remain in the community. The project will bring together businesses, community leadership groups, and young professionals to create networks and learning opportunities for retention. This project focuses on strategies and actionable recommendations for retaining talent within the region.