Hey everyone, I'm Sheila Jenkinson and you're listening to the Growing Small Town Nebraska podcast where my co host Marcie Sextro and I ask community leaders and business owners about their efforts in revitalizing the Cornhusker State. If you love your small town and you're looking for ways to make it even better, or maybe you're interested in what this revitalization that may mean for you and your family. Join us as we talk with small town Nebraskans making our state the definition of "The Good Life."
Hello everyone, I'm Marcie Sextro. We're coming to you from the Intersect Co-working and Incubator podcast booth in downtown Norfolk. Intersect is a co working community that gives workers the spaces and tools they need to succeed. Join a like minded community of founders, remote workers, startups and freelancers with 24/7 access to a dedicated office or private desk, extremely fast internet, and as much coffee as your heart desires. Intersect is your place to collaborate with others and get things done. Find out more on their website, intersectcoworking.com Or follow them on Facebook or Instagram. Welcome, everyone. We're just a couple of weeks from Christmas and I just wanted to share with you on our social media, we are sharing tips on how you can help your small town thrive. Now these tips are great throughout the whole year. But we wanted to just encourage you that during the holiday season, get out and help your small town thrive. So you can check that out on our Facebook or Instagram.
That's right. And also check out our website for a lot of great information. Current Events, you can send us your events so we can put that on there as well. And check out Sheila's shout outs and Marcie's Musings.
Angie Stenger is with us today. Many of you may know her from her days at US92. But in February of 2020, she became the Executive Director of Northeast Nebraska Growing Together and we are happy to have her with us today to learn more about this Aksarben Workforce Initiative. Morning, Angie.
Well, hello.
How are you doing this morning?
Well, great. Just always exciting different days every day of my life.
Oh I am sure. New projects.
Yeah
So the northeast Nebraska area is changing a lot and Northeast Nebraska Growing Together is a big part of that change. Can you tell us about it and what your goals are in impacting this region?
Well, I should go back and start how this started.
Okay.
And it's been about almost five years now that the Aksarben foundation out of Omaha made an effort to try to be make sure that they are more statewide effort. They're known for their scholarships. They're known for their community grants. They are the ones who recognize farm families like pioneer farm families. But they really wanted to make a greater statewide impact. And so they reached out to one of their board members, which is Mike Flood, and said, What's northeast Nebraska need. And they gave him a data scientist, he gathered this a large group of community people, we had educators and politicians, elected officials, I guess, as the official word. City employees, we had doctors, we had farmers, we had retired elected officials and all sorts of different people. They did all this data and research we're very numbers based. And what it found was that our numbers were dwindling. That you know, as we looked at growth in northeast Nebraska, like for example, just to give you in Norfolk, we were growing at about 26 people a year. That doesn't sound bad like, hey, at least it's positive. But to give you an example, Kearney was growing at 460 a year.
It's a big difference.
And I know I've always been the one to say Well, Kearney's got the university and it's got a 4 lane, you know, it's got the interstate, but what else do we have that we can do? And how do we take what we have and make it a success. And so they put this plan together and printed an 86 page book, which I brought one, but is also available on our website a flip book on it. And with the plan of like, Let's do these things. And they had everybody working on these ideas. And then come February of 2020 is when they said probably need somebody to actually be I don't want to say be paid to do this work, but be the coordinator, be the convener, bringing people together and making sure that the projects are working otherwise it was all volunteer. It was a lot of the City of Norfolk staff was getting tasked with some of those projects. And, and so Mike and I have been business partners and friends for many, many, many years. And he's like, what if you took this on. So I stepped away from the day to day radio station TV station, and took this on, you know, month and a half before a pandemic. The interesting thing that had helped us then is I was able to sit down and have conversations because people weren't as busy, businesses weren't. I interviewed about almost 100 businesses over the next six months, a lot of them by zoom some on phone, a few eventually, you know in person and it was a four page workforce survey that we did have like, tell us who your staff, is tell us how they're educated. Tell us how you pay them, what's your retirement? And then we went a little more in depth and how do you see your business changing when it comes to automation, technology ,things like that? And what's your biggest workforce need? Like, what's your retirement looking like? Because we know the big, you know, the baby boomer retirement phase is going to take a lot of institutional knowledge out of places. And then we started talking about internships and tell me what your internship interests are, and have you used them and when we did those and that really helped us again, keep moving toward what do we need to be doing to make a change. And so Growing Together's program, it truly is just an initiative. That's not a political movement. It's not a government movement. It is honestly a community group that is trying to increase our population in the area. So when we talked about Kearney that they have a university, they have planes, what do we have that we love? We have rural kids who grew up on farms with grit with tenacity, we just need to keep them I mean, everybody in the country wants them.
That's right.
Oh, you grew up in a dairy farm in Nebraska, that means you're a hard worker, probably go out and figure out how to get things done. You're willing to get up in the middle of night and milk the cow? Yeah, that's who we want to hire. Well, we did too, but we need to keep them here. Right. But to keep them here in Northeast Nebraska. And it's not just Norfolk, it very much is northeast Nebraska, because we know with Norfolk raises, all small communities raise, if small communities fail, that hurts Norfolk. Norfolk is a what's the word I want to say is a commuter city. We they say we're 24 25,000 people is our census, I think. And right now they say our population swells each day to 43,000, because of the number of people who live in small communities and drive it,
right.
So we know that that's helping small towns. And so back to all these ideas, how do we keep them? One of those ideas was downtown development and creating density, creating this concept of everybody living in a closer area, kind of like you would have in a big city. Because if these young people aren't around people like themselves, they feel isolated. We had the story of you know, the news or the TV station, we'd bring in young reporters who loved their job, loved the people they worked with, but on Friday night would go home and unless they went to the bar, they weren't going to meet anybody like them. So this idea is let's let's move people downtown, create false density, let's get as many young people living and working and playing in downtown Norfolk. The idea would be that maybe Chris will come out of his apartment and see Molly coming out of her job over there and say, Let's go you know,
throw axes
listen, throw axes, listen to music over here. And maybe the follow up, get married and then the
They have eight kids and they all stay here.
Yeah, exactly. It wants to move back to Randolph or to Osman or to stay in because, you know, they want to be near their family so they can raise their kids. So this idea of creating downtown and it is the Riverfront Development. It is everything that's happening in downtown, Norfolk. It's recreation we have seen especially through the pandemic, that younger 20 to 29 year old, outdoor is very important. You know, Norfolk is built well for families. We have the water park, we have great parks. But those young people want to be able to kayak, to be at concerts. So downtown density and downtown development was one of them. The other thing was then, how could we feed people into this area, and Wayne State came to the table. Now we love Wayne State, 35 miles away from Norfolk, they're never going to move to Norfolk. So they're not going to pick up and move their university. But Dr. Matta Seamus is the president there and she's phenomenal and has vision and can move at the speed of business, not necessarily at education sometimes that can be slower. And she had the idea and worked with her faculty to build this Co Op scholarship program and the program is that students will see as a freshman, sophomore and junior year be on campus work on campus, do their education on campus get basically four years of their education done in three years. And it's either in communications, business, education, computer science, or industrial technology and construction etc. And then their senior year moving them into downtown Norfolk. New housing is being built for them and they will intern working full time 30 hours a week at the Norfolk businesses. So A they're gonna graduate in four years with a year of experience with a four year degree.
Experience that is so invaluable.
Right, right. And so our first one's moved in next August, the housing will be done and that's the first third And then the next year is 45. And then after that perpetually it's 75. Well, so we'll have 75 Young people moving in to downtown Norfolk. And so that was a great program. There's $24,000 in scholarship funds that go with that, pay for their housing, they get paid for their internship, Aksarben foundation paid for their first cohort, the first full 30. And then after that, we're utilizing Griff scholarship money that Governor Ricketts organized and, and put before the legislature that passed and so the students can get paid back. So that was the second, the third we're living in the middle of and that is here at Intersect Coworking center. We were working founders and entrepreneurs, those were who we wanted to focus on, we knew if we could get people like that into our community that increases our wages, that increases the creativity, you can't automate creativity. And so we worked with Invest Nebraska, they're going in, they opened the co working center. So that was the third was the founders. And then the other is workforce retraining, working with Northeast and people that maybe their jobs will be automated, eventually, if we can work to train them up, we're not putting them out of a job, let's get them better skills, they can make more money, they can be working. And in today's world, they can help because as automation comes in, because workforce is such a hard piece, then that will be that our local companies can continue to do the work and have the same output with less people. So that is part of that piece too. Arts and culture was one of our pieces that we worked on, because an artistic community is an economically viable and vibrant community. And it makes a difference. When businesses come that they see that there's arts and culture. You see the sculpture walks down, or the sculptures downtown that change out every year, the murals that have gone up, we have now officially been certified as a creative district. And that means that we are going to work on having working artists working downtown and living downtown and artists in residencies and more festivals and concerts and things like that. And then the sixth program or sixth piece that wanted to be talked about was early childhood education, A the quality of it, B the capacity of it. And interestingly, it has changed drastically in the four years. Because in the book originally, the idea was oh hey, what if we could provide free childcare to everybody? And that goes back to I know a gal in Denver, who's paying 40,000 a year for one child?
Oh, no.
In a preschool setting. So early childhood education. Mike has a friend who's in Des Moines paying 32. So like, oh, look, we could basically give somebody a $40,000 raise that they moved to northeast Nebraska and give them free childcare? Well, how do you build that program?
Exactly.
So it has moved away. So that was the original idea. And all of these things have tweaked somewhat. But that was the original idea. And that isn't a viable idea. And now, it is even more of an important conversation because of how we have seen the workforce shortage, especially in childcare. And so there's there hasn't been a lot of movement. But there is lots of conversations that have started, especially in the last year about how can we address early childhood education and quality childcare, especially in smaller communities. Not the Norfolk doesn't have its own problems. But we want to make sure that Osmond and Battle Creek and Neligh and Wayne, you know that everybody is able to have the childcare that they need. So that was a really long answer to the six things that we are working on this Growing Together.
Childcare thing, as our listeners hear that, if we have somebody out there who has some ideas, some solutions, some input what they think of that, or
They can email me and I can invite them to the conversation. You know, the interesting thing is that it has become kind of a, I'll tell you that six, eight months ago, I went, I don't think this is a Growing Together thing and I kind of pushed it away because we weren't getting any traction, and we didn't have a plan. Well, now there are businesses stepping up and saying nope, we think we should help. There's one business that has said, what if we started just a small daycare in one of their spaces in their building, you know, even if it would be for five students. And they said if we created a plan, maybe other businesses could do the same thing. I had a conversation with a minister whose church has a daycare and said, Oh, believe me, this is not a money making proposition. It's hard for churches to do it, if they aren't willing to subsidize it, let alone these people that are trying to do it as their business. And so his idea was what if we go to some of these small communities and say, you have a church that sits empty there throughout the week, has Sunday school rooms, could it be a five to 10 basically considered an in home daycare, but be in a church, they would probably need some subsidy like could there be a fun created that said, if you need five, we'll give you $5,000 a year to help. But we have to make sure that our educators are being paid correctly in early childhood. You know, we work with Northeast and Northeast does an amazing program of helping bring up these educators that are taking care of our kids. Yes, but we're in a catch 22. A lot of these centers can't pay enough to keep their people from leaving to go working in any of the other amazing jobs in town that even some of the openings that are at 15, you know, fast food that's at $15 An hour and daycares paying 10.
Right
So that's a hard one. Because for them to be able to pay competitively than what they would have to charge for daycare starts reaching those numbers we were talking about in the big cities. So it is a catch 22. It's a conversation that is happening with no answers and no plan. Like I can tell you all the other five, here's the things we're working toward. Yeah, I'm not there. No one's there yet,
But it's a start. And that's how things get rolling.
Right. Right. I don't know that answer. But it is an interesting conversation that needs to be and it's statewide. And it may be nationwide, I would assume. But I know statewide. It's a big piece of what could be done. How could it happen. We all know, in Albion, Boone beginnings, that was a community effort where they raised the money to build their new center. And you know, it's gorgeous. I have been told of a story, I think it's an Oshkosh where a bank knew that a lot of their staff was having trouble and with finding childcare. So they bought a building next to their bank that was empty, they remodeled it and made it a childcare center. But they said we're not in, we are not childcare providers. But we know it's important. So then they found a business person or a person who was willing to take it on and open their business, they will provide the building and the space
What an awesome opportunity
to give you that and know that when you're done with it. If in five years, you say I'm out of business, and 10 years, that we still own the building. But so that bank did that, you know, so little communities are doing it differently. And we all just have to keep looking at what are some of those options that can make a difference. And I do think I know of a gal who works here in Norfolk, lived up by Osmond and wanted daycare there because that's where her husband worked during the day. And that's where our in laws were didn't want to have the child on the road. And I can't plan something up there. I'm not coming back to work. But you know, those types of things are which that we need to think about is how does it affect where people work? If people work? And can people work? So
Well, when you when you're dropping your kids off to daycare when you have more than one especially? And you feel like perhaps you're working for free while somebody else is watching your kids, then that does sometimes take you out of the workforce, because you have that decision to make.
Right, right.
So yeah, oh, that's fantastic. I love the talk that's happened with the talk.
It's just, a talk so far. there's, like I said six months ago, I was at the end of like, I don't even see how this is going to go anywhere in conversations have started now. And so but it also took businesses stepping up and saying, No, we need to talk about how we can help us even some factories in town said, we've talked about do we build? They're like, we're factory people. We do day care, but they're like, do we need to build one next to our facility? Would that help their people? And I said it's something I asked that question. Do your people want it in Norfolk? Because you have a lot of staff that drives in there. They rather it in their hometown. And it's, you know, there's your catch 22 Also, because the mom goes, Oh, but I'm half an hour away from, you know, if I'm coming from Neligh you know, or I have to be on the road with my child for half hour, it's it's six of one half dozen, or it's 47 million of one.
A little more accurate.
So those Yeah. So those are the six things that a Growing Together, which it's funny when I say oh, yeah, we focus on six things. Yeah, but each one of those include a different piece that are constantly working with
Yeah.
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The Makerspace and that whole thing that's coming into Norfolk, that's going to be huge for workforce development.
So Makerspace wasn't in the book wasn't one of the six things workforce retraining was but not envisioning a makerspace. And somebody on our committee and different people that got involved were like, you know, wouldn't it be cool if we had a place that people could do this, and Dr. Leah Barrett at Northeast who came to town in January of 2020, and joined our group, she had been in Wyoming and had helped build a program out there. That was a massive makerspace. And, and so different people were talking, so I'm the convener. I don't have any knowledge on my own. I just bring people together, let them talk. It's.
That works.
So again, I put it out there like, Alright, does anybody want to be on a makerspace committee and the college came, and some manufacturers came and educators, you know, it just was a good group. And we've talked about things like, what would we do with it? Why would we need it? How could we do things. And then we went to Lincoln, and toured the Innovation Campus down there, and their Innovation Studio, which is their massive Makerspace that has everything from metalworking, to woodworking, to a photo lab, to a quilting room, textile, everything, welding, you name it, and it was cool. And we toured the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Arts, which is video and cool emerging art, things that come up. So those are the things we talked about, we came back and we kept meeting and thinking, Yeah, we want to figure out how to do this. Well, in that process, invest Nebraska applied for the grant, the Build Back Better grant. And in their program, they envisioned a robotics program that will start in middle school, and you'll build curriculum. And I'm working with Mortheast and Metro, but Northeast being the pilot project. And that's where this Makerspace will be built. And so they did get their grant that it's going to include, like starting seventh grade, seventh and eighth graders, and maybe even younger learning about robotics, and learning how to program. And what I have learned so much about this, about robotics is it isn't even just the person who likes to build the robots, there's just as much we have a guy who's totally dedicated just to the math and figuring out the angles and things. So that's their interest. If there's somebody who's in the electronics interest, if there's somebody in the video, because they do video, all of their competitions, all these different things that kids can start to learn. And so that curriculum will be built out as part of the MakerSpace. But also, then those people who have ideas and need to build a prototype, they'll be able to go there and say, Okay, here's my vision, I have no idea how to build it, or I don't know how to use this equipment, or heaven forbid, I can't afford to just have that piece of equipment. So can I come here and do it. Those people who are want to be in like in a sign business and metalworking and things like that, they can just be a member and do the work there on the equipment. So they can be creation, we can help entrepreneurs, you can take classes, there'll be this workforce retraining, manufacturers in town and in the area are excited because they're going to be able to get their people trained, this will be their workforce retraining center that is building. And so it has been a great again, without Invest Nebraska as part of our Growing Together team, this would have happened. And but because they know that we are trying to transform our population, our economy, the way we do things. They were at the table. And so that's why it has been and again, I get a lot of credit to Leah Barrett, because they see that this is a college that is willing to work and make these changes.
I think the time is right. And the reason I think the time is right is because we're seeing all of these different groups and organizations and just individuals who are all saying, Yes, this is needed. We live in a great area. We want to keep it we want to keep our small towns, and we want to keep our people here and everybody's working together. And I think that's why the time is now
It is, it really is and no I have to give a lot of credit to the City of Norfolk because their economic development staff and even Mayor Josh Moening has this vision, putting things in place that help people and so anytime people can work together and attract that young crowd, it makes a big difference. Now, I will say the one thing everybody has to remember this is your all's is this is your assignment that I heard how it's been a year and a half ago, I think at a conference, a gentleman from Hebron say I Don't ever remember being told when I was in high school that I should come back. He's like we I was never invited back. He's now moved back. He's probably in his 30s and working in Hebron, but he's like no one ever told me to. And as I've had that conversation with people, I know gentleman, he's like, Oh, my dad was like, Whatever you do, get out of this town. Don't stay here, not Norfolk. It was a smaller community that has any, it was the 80s. Like, my dad was like, No, you're not staying here, you have opportunities to get out? Well, we have the opportunities. So we need to, but we need to invite them. And so now when I see somebody, and they're like, Oh, we're going to Chicago for the weekend to see our son and like, remember to invite him back. And the first time she went, I said, No, if we don't tell them, we want him back. They won't know. And so she's like, Oh, I love that. Just make sure when you go see him tell himwe want them back,
I'll remember that and you remember that as you trek to
always invite them. And so as I talk to career fairs, as I go and see kids in high school and junior high, I always end with just know, you're invited to either stay or come back. We will help you whatever you want to do. If you want to take over a family business. If you want to start a business. If you want to get your degree, whatever it is, we will help you but we will always welcome you back. Because if we are going to grow, it does take everybody working together
It does.
Angie provided so much great information that we're going to have a second part with her. Marcie,
yes.
So everybody can look forward to that coming up on our next episode.
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Join us again next time as we talk with business and community leaders who are working to revitalize the Cornhusker State. Thanks for listening
