Imagine a nine-year-old boy we’ll call Oliver Anderson – the same age and first name as the plucky urchin immortalized in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist -- growing up desperately poor in a small farm town in rural northwestern Minnesota. Oliver’s single mom scrapes by on low-wage part-time jobs in town, and sometimes finds seasonal work, but she subsists on an annual income near the official poverty level. Sur... Read More
Tom Legg is a Growth & Justice Policy Fellow who has produced some of our most important research and analysis on inequality, providing global, national and local perspective. His latest commentary, reprinted here from the Ely Timberjay newspaper, offers sobering insights on worsening inequality within St. Louis County and northern Minnesota. Legg grew up in northern Minnesota and after a distinguished career at the University of Minnesota&rs... Read More
The charts and graphs that we policy wonks issue regularly provide a clear picture of growing economic inequality in Minnesota and United States over the last 30 years. But vivid human stories – with intimate detail about what it's like on either side of the divide between the high-riders and the stagnating middle and low-income families – are worth a hundred bar graphs and pie charts. An outstanding example of the latter is Mike ... Read More
Imagine one of our state's larger high schools or smaller college campuses, with an enrollment of roughly 2,500 students. Now try to imagine every single student in that school or college as homeless, trying to function, learn and build a path toward a career, without a safe or certain place to sleep at night. The latest newsletter from Catholic Charities of Minneapolis and St. Paul cites a Wilder Foundation estimate that at any given time ... Read More