Working for the Northside

The Northside Job Creation Team (NJCT) has a clear-cut goal: to help bring sustainable jobs to North Minneapolis that pay a living wage and offer reasonable benefits. With help from several colleges and units across the University of Minnesota, the NJCT has done just that.

The NJCT was formed in 2012 to infuse employment opportunities into the underserved areas of the community by the end of the decade.

“Most people don’t understand what underserved means,” says Heidi Barajas, an associate professor in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development (OLPD) and former director of the University’s Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center (UROC). “North Minneapolis simply didn’t have developers interested in looking for opportunities there. The city had never even mapped the available real estate places for businesses to come.”

The original goal of the NJCT was to help bring 1,000 sustainable-wage jobs to North Minneapolis by 2019. “At this point, over a decade, approximately 1,200 jobs have been created either directly by the NJCT or by its affiliated members,” says James De Sota, a former assistant director at UROC and now the director of program development and delivery at the University’s Center for Transportation Studies. “Now that they’ve hit that milestone, they’re looking at adding another 600 jobs in the next year or two with some advanced manufacturing companies that are expanding or moving into North Minneapolis. It’s pretty exciting.”

Besides its coalition of government, nonprofit, faith-based, and business stakeholders, the NJCT also has strong ties to the University of Minnesota. One of these is through the Carlson Enterprise programs, which are experiential learning programs for students in the Carlson School of Management. 

Over the years, Carlson School students have helped NJCT’s community partners make decisions about potential business ventures, including recommendations of how many people to hire, what parts of a business could expand, or whether a project is even worth the investment at all.

One recent project worked with former NBA player and current business developer Devean George and his company, George Modular Solutions, to see if a new modular housing facility would be viable in North Minneapolis. The Carlson School students found that it would have strong success, resulting in 166 jobs being created immediately, with that number potentially growing to more than 300 in the coming years.

UROC has been another partner from the very beginning. UROC’s mission is to “advance learning, improve the quality of life, and discover breakthrough solutions to critical problems” in urban communities. It has provided the NJCT with a meeting space, administrative assistance, and help with fiduciary matters.

“We were able to partner with people who understood the unique needs of community members and really wanted to develop the people along with their business,” Barajas says. “And it helped to have the Carlson research to help guide people on what kind of businesses were likely to succeed in North Minneapolis.”

More recently, the NJCT began working with the College of Education and Human Development and its Workforce Development and Research Lab (WDRL). Launched in 2021, the WDRL is an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including researchers and students, dedicated to addressing the challenges facing workers in the rapidly changing workplace by developing actionable research and strategies. The lab is a collaboration between the School of Social Work and the OLPD.

OLPD assistant professor Stephanie Sisco has been working on a sustainability plan for the organization. For a year, Sisco took a deep dive into the activities of the NJCT. With all the material she gathered, including a literature review, document analyses, observations, and interviews, she crafted a sustainability strategy, along with some recommendations.

“Right now, they’re just looking at the endpoint, ‘we get jobs.’ But there’s more to it,” she says. “I identified four themes they need to focus on if they are going to continue their work, productivity, and growth,” she says. These themes are leadership, structure and process, communication, and impact.

De Sota says Sisco’s findings are going to have an immediate impact. 

“The NJCT is undergoing quite a bit of transition right now,” he says. “What are the key things that really need to be a part of that transition going forward? Stephanie and her team were able to highlight some of those key components—What is the NJCT? What are the NJCT members doing? What could they improve on?—but with some actual metrics behind them.”

The story is adapted from stories written by the College of Education and Human Development and the Carlson School of Management.