thank you for tuning in April is National Youth violence prevention month nvp began in 2001 as an initiative to bring communities together to raise awareness of the youth violence epidemic that is plaguing our country one of office of neighborhood safety's key focuses is youth violence prevention Minnesota state statutes 120 B22 and 145. 958 are both statutes that were created in order to mandate youth violence prevention education did you know that the state policy says that public education is required to implement 1 hour of violence prevention education a year will you do now during the month of April all of our episodes will be dedicated to youth violence prevention education just like our work here at the city of St Paul youth violence prevention is every month welcome to the on podcast with your host lanaa Jacobson welcome back you guys to our on podcast brought to you by our partners at face to-face Academy ons stands for office of neighborhood safety I'm your host Lena Jacobson and I am a member of the on team this podcast was created for departments like us and Community organizations to come on and talk about our services all of our episodes are about connecting you to Alternative public safy safety measures programs and your local growth and healing opportunities today we're going to talk about the office of neighborhood safety's goals not guns campaign put together by your neighborhood safety Community Council so I'll just give you guys a little background history mayor Carter and his administration established what they called the Community First Public Safety framework in 2020 pulling together all of which the city uses to assist in all things Public Safety I like to refer to this method as kind of like the tool belt as a part of that framework they formed a 48 member commission to dissect and analyze these tools which include resources policies and procedures making recommendations how they can be corrected or what can be added to enhance the positive outcomes as the commission's report was produced and they concluded the neighborhood safety Community Council was established as one of their recommendations as a continuous way of having Community Buy in with representation from all seven Wards to carry out the work making sure the outcomes and recommendations from the group were truly established and there is oversight we look at problematic Public Safety areas and assess what we as community members can do to address these concerns we work with our law enforcement Partners fire department parks and wreck grassroot organizations and partner with larger nonprofits as well as provide stability resources so in 2023 on launched a request for proposal for our first initiative which was gun violence prevention this was to recruit Community organizations that had programs targeting sources that could lead to gun violence instead of just handing out Financial Awards we also wanted to be physically involved in making a change and wanted to Pilot a program that would pull our youth in and stand against gun violence with us which was forward thinking on our part because when I went back through the report I noticed a blurb in there that said 95% of the commission recommended that we dedicate our resources to youth programming and by youth I mean ages 24 on down so with that being said please help me welcome executive director of alpus Enterprises Paul Ramer face-to-face Academy's academic director Jennifer Plum and Community liaison author and North Minneapolis football team coach Charles Adams welcome ladies and gentlemen Paul is the founder of alpus Enterprises in addition to elpus he served as the program director at the Minneapolis JC's charitable foundation in the 1990s he helped design other Innovative youth programs including youth networks and Bolder options he has a background in the hospitality business and a master's of education and Youth Development leadership from the unity University of Minnesota welcome Paul thank you nice to be here I have some iceberger questions from you great all right so grill cheese sandwiches and tomato soup or roast beef on a roll with a oh that's a tough one but uh I would say if I'm at home it's a tomato soup okay and a grilled cheese cuz that's what you can make that's what I can make if I'm out if I'm out we're doing the French dip okay all right all right so second question is you just got your grass cut and fertilized you got the greenest grass on the Block you just happen to be standing in front of the window with the breeze coming through on a Sunday morning and it's spring Miss Ross comes walking down the street with her Yorkie terrier mix and it number twos and number ones on your lawn what do you say well I love dogs okay so that's not a problem really not a problem you don't say Diana what you doing with your dog on my lawn no no you just let her you just let her go I just say these are dogs this is what dogs do so oh my goodness Paul I think you're just saying that for the radio all right so Paul give me a 30 second briefing about who elpus is what elpus is elus Enterprises is is a nonprofit organization at its root is it a job training program for young people who are experiencing homelessness uh whose employment experience has been negatively impacted by circumstances such as unstable housing or teen parenting or exiting the foster care or connections to the justice system what we would call Opportunity Youth and they referred to the program through a a group of referring agencies in town including face tace for a a three-month paid work internship okay and a supportive work experience in one of three social Enterprises that we own and operate and then we help them do some career awareness and some career exploration and and help them connect to either the next job or to connect to more education or training when they're done so tell me what your initial thoughts were when I first brought the idea of the program to you and what made you want to take advantage of this opportunity I think that a big part of elus in the programs and the businesses that we own and operate is the question of stewardship we have these great facilities and it's like how can we benefit the community we can run a business obviously but there are just other things that we can do and so when we saw the RFB come out about the gun violence program we said there has to be a way for us to use the screen printing business to make an impact in this subject and that's where the idea came from you know to do a t-shirt contest and to get young people creative juices flowing and to think about how they could communicate their thoughts about anti-gun violence on a T-shirt and then we could print those make sure kids had them and get the message out and in as many ways as we could plus give the community an opportunity to buy those t-shirts and help the school raise a little money tell our audience how the goals not guns program aligns with your overall mission at elus Enterprises so the social Enterprises are a huge part of what we do it's a supportive work experience it's a chance for young people who have not been successful with employment to come in work with a team work in a professional setting uh and do something real for the community in this case screen printing t-shirts most of the customers that we have are other nonprofit organizations with a variety of different missions and so young people work in a team producing uh t-shirts for orders that come in and this particular project is a chance for them to learn a little bit themselves about how young people in the community are talking about antigon violence and some of the ideas and then those t-shirts get printed for the school uh and they get to be a part of that process all right so next we have Jennifer Plum Jennifer has a ba in English from the University of Minnesota in 1996 she has been teaching at face to face Academy since 1999 as a language arts instructor in her role as the academic director she works with the Academy school board organizes and leads the professional development for the staff and prepares the testing cycles for students she also enjoys connecting with members of the community inviting them to speak to Academy students about their unique experience welcome Jennifer thank you for having me so give me a quick 30 second background on you that I haven't already mentioned if you can think of anything 30 seconds 30 seconds okay I like you mentioned have been working here at face to face for over 25 years I am the longest tenured staff person if you can imagine so I've seen a lot of people come and go congratulations thank you I've also been um just lucky enough to like build programming and find my husband at work congratulations thank you it's a very normal thing to do okay so I have some quick questions for you some ice breakers okay okay on your Sunday you would rather be a on my couch with a blanket drinking cocoa eating cheesecake and binging Love is Blind B somewhere warm putting on a sundress and some flip flops head it to the Mimosa brunch or C in my jeans sweatshirt on my way out to do some thrifting and antique browsing with $ 300 extra dollars in my pocket okay I'll take the 300 extra dollars in my pocket and you only get one and go to the beach somewhere warm okay sounds good so tell us a little bit about face to face like how and when did your organization get started and what is the target audience and population you guys are serving sure we are a charter high school we were founded in 1998 I started a year later and our mission is to serve students who historically haven't really been successful at school so they may have fallen behind their graduating class if they already started high school they may have kind of struggled in a traditional school so maybe the school was a little bit too big maybe the class sizes were a little bit too big and they just needed something that was a little bit smaller a little bit more supportive and then maybe their former School wasn't really fully addressing their type of learning style so we are just small we're alternative and we'll pick you up regardless of what school looked like for you last year and you mentioned that some of your students have dealt with gun violence and been affected by gun violence how did you feel and what was your initial thoughts when I first brought the idea of the program to you when you first brought it to us I was very honored and like really excited and thought that this was like really creative and alternative and just really Innovative so I felt like we can do it this is the right place to do it and then after I kind of like caught you know kind of settled down and caught my breath it was like o this is l this is going to be really really hard mhm and we just had some significant traumatic incidence with a couple kids in our school so I would be taking this lesson to someone who recently just was shot I would be taking this lesson to someone who just lost a family member due to gun violence so it was going to be really really really difficult to pull off mhm mhm so tell us about the current and healing and change you've witnessed in your student body when participating in the campaign number one nobody left the classroom oh wow yeah so when we kicked off the unit we had mentioned that this is going to feel pretty emotional it can feel triggering it could feel kind of traumatic and potentially like a little bit too close to home and that if anyone felt uncomfortable or if they felt like you know I just want to go go to math class I don't want to talk about gun violence that they could leave the classroom so we sort of set those ground rules right away mhm and we kind of thought we could pull it off maybe in five weeks but we ended up like expanding it to 10 weeks and then I expanded it to 15 weeks okay so I just kept like lengthening and lengthening the unit so when I say literally nobody left the classroom that was schoolwide for like 20 weeks yeah so the kids were like really engaged they were really engaged yeah and it worked really well because when I went to go look for curriculum there's really not a lot of curriculum out there MH and being an English teacher I'm like well I have to somehow connect this to literature so I have to find something that we can read sort of like as our backbone to the curriculum and that's how I stumbled upon Charles Adams book so tell me about what you came up with for a curriculum so in addition to talking about Charles Adams book I went to what people in our community were saying about gun violence so we looked at like what's the governor saying about gun violence and I copied different like public statements that he had made about gun violence and then the students sort of reacted to those and then I brought it closer to home and did St Paul's mayor so Melvin Carter like what is he saying about gun violence and kind of brought it closer to home and then the students talked to each other about like well what I think about gun violence so we just kept bringing it kind of closer and closer and closer to home and then when I was kind of checking in with you I was like well these students are working really hard for 20 weeks I think you know we should have the mayor come on in and like congratulate them for talking about gun violence for 20 weeks and that was the best idea ever cuz we had already planned to have a celebration but for you to think outside of the box and make it bigger and invite our city officials in that was an epic idea and I thank you for that too thank you cuz it was so much fun and he was so great with the students yeah and I think it and it does something for the kids right it makes them feel like okay he's going to step away from his busy agenda and he's going to come be here with us and celebrate us and that's amazing it's amazing he really showed up for them and showed up for the topic tell us a little bit how what were the kids reactions like how did that play out the ne over the next couple of days with his VIs here uh well they were very very excited that he was coming I don't think they had like a lot of history with him that he was going to be like so charismatic and such a like um really good speaker but what happened is after his speech and then we awarded and picked the winning t-shirt he did not spend time with like us as the adults in the room he went right up to the students and was like hi my name's Melvin what's yours and was like talking to all the students in room and they just felt like just so seen and heard and validated that's awesome well because of you I don't know if a lot of people know maybe I didn't mention this earlier in the program but face to face was our pilot for this program and we're so appreciative that they agreed to engage and and take this on so that was prior to having a curriculum formatted and in this I sat down with Jen and got a lot of feedback from her and that was one of the things that you mention is that we need to have some sort of curriculum to go along with this program otherwise teachers is just trying to pull things and put things together and then that's how we started working with Charlie Adams well in addition to the mayor coming uh Charles Adams also came on site so after we read the book again you helped with this Len you hooked us up which was great and we're so thankful uh we were able to invite our author of the book that we just read to come to to campus so he did a public speaking and he did a little bit of reading from his book he signed the different copies of his book that we had gotten he stayed for lunch and then he did a podcast with a couple students and that leads us to Charlie Adams you guys Community liaison and Arthur he is a former Minneapolis Police Officer for 20 years where he was not just a public safety official but primarily worked in fostering positive relationships within the community he lives in and served as part of this relationship building Charles mixed his passion for mentoring and protecting youth with football and formed the perfect job working part-time with Minneapolis public schools as a lead coach of the North Minneapolis polar football team welcome Charlie glad to be here are you trying not to laugh you're hilarious okay I'm sorry I have two questions for you you're really going to be laughing now I'm about to get you which best describes you on a Sunday barbecue Bros and American football or I'm going to make myself a sandwich cut the grass and then take a nap who in the world says number two why you have to some people number one barbecue Bros football all day every day listen some people are antisocial and want to be at home cutting grass and going to sleep okay maybe in May you don't know when this is going to air maybe in June not not during the fall second question you've been eating healthy all week and it's time to break that fast after spending all week preaching to your football team about making healthy food choices you pull up to Wendy's and one of your students is working the drive-thru do you order the Baconator or the grilled chicken sandwich that's a great question and you have to answer it even if you don't eat Wendy's bacon Wendy's hey I will get the grilled chicken sandwich with aide of some chicken nuggets how about that and if they say anything I'm making them run okay all right I guess they going to be quiet then okay so tell me what your initial thoughts were when I first brought the idea of the program to you I think it was just um the opportunity I think just the opportunity to continue to to have a voice in the community and I think so much with with this last few years of some of the things that I've been involved with I think this was just another piece for me to continue just to help mold people in this community help mold me as a person but giving some of my knowledge and and support um in this way and I honestly thought you know it was a no-brainer to me just because I want to constantly be able to be a valuable resource so I I thought that obviously coming from you anything that you you had recommended was obviously a great great thing and and I just thought it was something that I'm just I have to be a part of in and I think it's a great opportunity I'm going to go off on a side like a side street for a minute give us a little bit about your background and and growing up and where all of your morals and your values and your passions really kind of came and evolved into this kind of work oh certainly well I grew up on the North side of Minneapolis played basketball played football at North High my whole family went to North we're polar for some odd reason my brother and sister didn't go so we can excuse them for that she actually went to Patrick Henry which is our rival she just wanted to be different yeah exactly you know you know how y'all do in in the same sense I I watched you know I grew up in a law enforcement family MH so my father who's you know still currently and he's now the um inspector at the fourth prec on the North side the neighborhood that we grew up in obviously and then my uncle so we were law enforcement my sister now was sworn working on the North side as well well it was law enforcement is what what our family was and and and I think the connection to the community with my dad growing up in the projects and then us growing you know us growing up just a block or two away from the high school regardless of us being a law enforcement family we still we still seen everything that was going on in the neighborhood and for you know a lot of times you know I think the connection that my my father and my uncle had established in the community kind of helped us out in some way because people were more um willing to um provide information if things were unsafe and then and it kind of flowed into when I I started as an officer to where you know the same kind of relationships that my family had built I was able to kind of carry those on and um being able to navigate the dangerous situations and and and dealing with people um because it's basically the people that you grew up with that you know so you know with my career my my main focus was the mentorship of kids putting them in the right spot you know starting from the police activities league and coaching them there then going them to the high school and coaching kids in high school keeping them you know out of trouble steering them to the right place but then also giving them opportunity to play at the next level and um I think building all that together and not letting our kids be labeled as what people may think they are mhm and giving them hope not saying that I was a single provider of that but just giving them the hope that they can have to be successful and people always say you know when it comes to football they'll say hey man you you got a great team you got some good kids and I'm like that's what's here it's always been here I'm them you know and I I try to uncover whatever um the Diamonds in the Rough we say so we have plenty of those in our neighborhood in the city Twin Cities completely and um I just want to be a part of being able to help more with that I think what's unique about you and you were on that trajectory with your family history before they even started implementing that whole thing about um policing where you live community policing and all that other stuff but you were already in that mold because you grew up you end up policing and the neighborhood that you grew up and that you still live and then you're you have relationships with the kids because you work at the school so it's like this natural organic relationship like I I mention all the time I lived in North Minneapolis for 12 years and just bumped into you numerous times when you weren't policing you know what I mean you're volunteering at church and being in security at church and you're just at the grocery store be in security at the grocer like you're everywhere like you can't go anywhere without bumping into you and that's the biggest thing you know and it's it's crazy that you say that because that's just how I was raised I was working on a situation where uh you know there was a a situation at the police department where somebody needed something and um I told that person I'd get back to him and I didn't get back to him quick enough so that person who I grew up with his kids and he grew up with my daddy and my mama he calls my daddy he says hey man Charlie call me didn't call me so then what what do you think my daddy does man call Mr so and so I mean and that still sticks and um I think one of the biggest things too is showing the kids that we mentor and that we're around how important it is for like the Unity part and like they treat my dad like he's a grandpa so sometimes they try to tell on me and he always tells them stories about how I was was when I was a kid so but I think that's the beautiful part you know and as you say like just working at church you know working at church we grew up in the church and that's a situation where I figure I gotta be there I mean it's my neighborhood and if Pastor call me I got to be there at the church so I mean that's just how we think so so can you talk a little bit about how this program fits into your line of work and aspirations for our young people I know you touched on that a little bit but can you just give us a little bit more detail about how the goals not guns program aligns with everything that you do I think it's just important that to have the goal a goal and when you talk about goals and not guns these are giving our young people the opportunity to strive for something other than what people say that's just what it is growing up a lot of kids think that all they have is homelessness and and poverty and gang bang and prostitution all these things these bad things that they see in the movie and the things that infest some of our neighborhoods you have the opportunity to have goals and set them a lot of times kids think that just because it's not instant gratification and it doesn't happen right away that it's a complete failure so having enough courage to work with kids and and work with people young adults and help them achieve their goals with a a different route I think it's just important and I think we need more people like you and just like the whole organization that we can continue to spread that word and let people know that we're here support but you know hey you can be the best at whatever it doesn't have to be this and and how can we support you to be in in that role so what I want to do is I want to take like five minutes just for us to talk about why gun violence prevention education is so important and Charlie I'm going to start with you I think that um whenever you're dealing with youth or just a community with with issues there's no way that you you can address the gun violence situation and whenever you uh are in put in a position where you can help people I think it's important for you to be able to make sure people know what's important to avoid and how to uh reach out to to the community to help them avoid some of these bad situations so you know in my eyes you know just growing up in North Minneapolis I think I seen all kind of all the gun violence that you know we still see today and being able to navigate and and avoid those situations but also letting these young ones know how important it is to avoid those situations I think it's important definitely in this culture of kids Paul what about you why do you think it's so important that we have gun violence prevention education I can safely say that every young person that we have had at elpus over the years has been personally affected by gun violence in the Twin Cities along with along with everybody on the staff you know it's just such a huge problem and this is an opportunity for young people to be involved in a in a program that brings awareness that gets it out in front of people's faces you know uh t-shirt advertising is is just a great way uh to do this you know to get a phrase or a saying or a a motto or something on a shirt that says hey this is this is AIG big problem you know and we need to work on it and we need to talk about it you know and we can't solve it if we don't talk about it I thought that that when face tace did their program and they put all of the ideas up on the wall in the hallway and we got to walk down and look at all of these different drawings and artwork that kids had created and then one of the teachers said the real learning started to take place once we put these up on the wall and all the students could see everybody every other student's ideas that that's when the learning really started to to happen and that's when the communication started when when kids got to see what other kids thought about this subject then that's where the understanding starts to take place it's not a problem we're going to solve overnight it's not a problem that probably never will go away 100% but it's a problem we can certainly make a dent in and we can certainly make a difference in that part messaging is powerful right nobody wears something on their chest that they don't believe in that's right and I think that that part of the T-shirt component and the education that comes along with it that goes hand in hand because you're educating and then you're carrying on that message to others you're showing what you believe in and what you're what you tolerate and what you're not going to tolerate and what you want right messaging is powerful so Jen why don't you weigh in why gun violence prevention education is so important to you I think it's the number one thing we should be talking to kids because I think it threatens kids and I think we can prevent the threat do you guys talk about it a lot at face to face well the thing with gun violence the word gun it's like saying bomb at the airport right no one really wants to talk about it and every time you bring it up it's really hard to talk about it and it is important to talk about and I do talk about it with our students because unfortunately our students have been victims of gun violence just as any other High School can say thank you to those that are tuning in another episode for you St Paul remember working together and getting the word out on how the community can access our program is key to learn more about office of neighborhood safety and our community first Public Safety initiatives please visit stpaul.gov click on Resident and scroll down to Public Safety