Hennepin County and the University of Minnesota are partnering to reach the ambitious goal of having every University student count in the 2020 Census.

The Hennepin-University Partnership at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs connected Hennepin County's Census team with Kendre Turonie, Program Director of UMN Off-Campus Living. Hennepin County is providing funding for a student worker to help implement innovative tactics to ensure a complete count of the off-campus student community who, unlike their peers living in the dorms, are not automatically counted by the University.

“On one call in particular, the person was not a citizen, and so…

People Serving People, Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), Research in Action, and Hennepin County, are pursuing a pilot program to grow family stability by demonstrating sustainable alternatives to self-pay for families experiencing homelessness. We are further pursuing the goal to build family financial power and make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring.

Families directly impacted by homelessness and self-pay know what is best for themselves, and we must center their experience, voices, and choices. As people impacted by system decisions, they should inform and influence them.

…

In May of 2019, the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) held a multimedia release event for “The Illusion of Choice: Evictions and Profit in North Minneapolis” research project that included a presentation, a video telling the stories of tenants and landlords in North Minneapolis, an art installation with photos that explore the phases of eviction, and an illustrative simulation developed with the Juxta Art Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) team called the “Social Service Runaround.” Evictions are a social crisis in North Minneapolis caused by decades of…

School based mental health programs (SMHP) provide critical services to students in order to mitigate the myriad of negative outcomes associated with mental health problems. However, limited applied, evaluative research has been conducted examining the effects of such programs on student outcomes. In particular, problems exist regarding the measurement of student mental health (needs in school settings. The purpose of this project is to improve measurement of SMH needs by engaging in two related studies. The first study will investigate the psychometric properties of the Minneapolis Public Schools (Behavior Screener Checklist 3 (BSC), which holds promise as a critical indicator of SMH…

This project will rigorously evaluate the effects of Minnesota's School-Linked Mental Health program on academic outcomes, mental health services outcomes, and juvenile justice outcomes, for children and adolescents. This program has expanded progressively across Minneapolis, Hennepin County, and more recently the state, as a way to reduce barriers to identifying and treating mental health problems in school-age youth. We will take advantage of the staggered implementation of school-linked mental health services across schools between 2004-2016 to estimate difference-in-differences models that will isolate the causal effect of the program on the outcomes we have identified. We will use…