Minnesota Youth Resources

Over the last 30 years, Minnesota has seen tremendous growth in immigrant populations, and this increase has been especially apparent in the southern parts of the state. These changing dynamics bring about questions of immigrant incorporation and the context of reception in rural communities. We partnered with the Nourishing Vocation Project to assess the situation immigrants are facing and communicate our findings to ELCA congregations. Funded by the Lilly Endowment, the larger project aims to help religious individuals effectively meet the needs of their communities by better understanding their local contexts.

Still in its early stages, the Nourishing Vocation Project is currently focused on working with ELCA-affiliated congregations in southern Minnesota that are willing and ready to begin the process of becoming better neighbors. We believe that this process starts with meaningful discussions and self-reflection guided by the materials our classmates created.

To build upon this foundation, we created a tool that allows community members to examine the location and accessibility of resources and services within their area. We focused specifically on youth resources, and narrowed our scope further to resources that are shown to promote social incorporation: child care and sports.

Using a combination of public data sets and hand-collected data, we mapped licensed and certified child care centers and YMCA locations to evaluate the availability of child care, and private soccer clubs to evaluate the availability of sports. Also, we have data on the number of students that speak a language other than English at home within each school district. This is meant to provide a general idea as to how many immigrants may be in an area.

We intend for this project to be used by ELCA congregations in rural Minnesota to gain insight into barriers to social participation for immigrant children. Below we have a map featuring the locations of the resources we collected. These points are overlaid across our school district language data, and there is a legend in the lower-left corner that tells you what each point or region color represents. Try finding your own town by zooming in or typing the name into the search bar. You can click on a point or school district to get a little more information about each data point.

This material aims to inform Minnesota congregation members of the salient challenges facing immigrant youths in the state. High cost, spatial and language barriers appeared to be the most prevalent challenges for the engagement with both sports and childcare institutions. Given the timeline and narrow scope of the project, we encourage future researchers on the topic to further widen the framework we have laid out to understand a bigger picture concerning youth resources in Minnesota and other states. Creating a more robust, country-wide database may help organizations identify underserved areas and provide communities with examples of how other places might have addressed issues or inequalities.

Further, this material shall inform conversations within congregations about the potential ways to assist immigrants in overcoming the challenges they are facing. Because of the status and power they hold in smaller communities, churches can utilize these assets to either act upon the problems we identify above (i.e., through consultations with local authorities or financial aid) or conduct further studies and reflection on the specific needs of immigrant youths around them. After all, we found that adapting to the cultural needs of immigrant groups is a critical component of healthy community engagement.