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"Stupidity"

A plan implemented in Corporate America requires the players to look around and see who might be doing a project in this area better in an effort to collaborate or get more funding for the project by grouping  organizations together headed for the same mission. The Minneapolis Urban League has sold out the training and job creation model for the Black community to the Minnesota Department of Transportation for a mere $150,000. What a shame!

by Donald W.R. Allen, II – Editor in Chief/IBNN NEWS and USA Radical Black’

Minneapolis, MN.(IBNN NEWS/July 6, 2010)…Let me make it perfectly clear, I am not a fan of training programs that don’t have a pipeline to jobs and careers.

Some north Minneapolis non-profits have changed the meaning of a job to a temporary “program” that has no future for the participants, their families or life in general.

Enter the Minneapolis Urban League.

On a August 4, 2010, a story by Dan Olson on Minnesota Public Radio titled, “MnDOT grant to help minorities get construction work,” citing the Minnesota Department of Transportation awarded a $150,000 grant to the Minneapolis Urban League to help minorities get highway construction jobs.

Several things are wrong with this “granting” of “Negro Money” to the Minneapolis Urban League.  

First of all, those of us that understand process or work in Corporate America know that $150,000 is maybe just one persons salary; however, those of us that has followed MnDot for the last few years know that the agency has not made their goals in minority hiring for the last 17 year and in a report sent out by MnDOT’s Civil Right director Mary Prescott, six months into 2010 reporting a bleak outlook for MnDOT’s outcomes of engaging the minority workforce. (Read “Minnesota Department of Transportation and Mary Prescott, Director of Civil Rights (MnDOT)–Strike Three…You’re Out!”

The Minneapolis Urban League, its board and especially its “green” president R. Scott Gray thinks they can pull off a monumental training program, modeled like one in Milwaukee where the unemployment rate for people of color is just as bad as Minneapolis. “No Scott – there’s not room for everyone at the table.”

This is where we go wrong in the Black community when White agencies pit us (Blacks) against each other.

The Scenario:
Summit Academy OIC has the Twin Cities number one training program for people of color who want to learn Green Construction, Highway Heavy Construction and a host of other entry-level training opportunities.

Both Summit Academy and H.I.R.E. Minnesota have been very vocal about MnDOT’s lack of inclusion for minority-ethnic contractors holding funerals to mark the death of job opportunities for another year at MnDOT.

The Minneapolis Urban League, which is in need of funding, comes to the table with a half-cocked plan of training minorities in an effort to increase DBE participation with MnDOT without doing the homework or even calling SAOIC to collaborate.

Sources tell IBNN NEWS that when invited to address the issues of MnDOT’s catastrophic failures in “Black work,” the MUL has declined the offer citing “not wanting to get involved.” Now we know why;

On the backs of those that have marched, worked, listened and met  – the MUL has sucked up to MnDOT to facilitate the grant.”

MnDOT’s Civil Right’s director sees and opportunity to slight SAOIC by granting the Minneapolis Urban League $150,000.00 in a effort to “keep the Negros happy” understanding all along that, if SAOIC who “specializing” in training can’t make headway with MnDOT – giving money for a faltering agency like the Minneapolis Urban League might repair their (MnDOT’s) public image in the Black community.

Were is the Request for Proposal (RFP) from MnDOT?

Again, I say, we’re not falling for the “okie-doke.”

This move by MnDOT was nothing more that a public relations repair grant.  $150,000 isn’t enough money to train anyone successfully, for that matter the amount isn’t even enough to idea, plan or implement a “training program.” MnDOT knows this already.

What the story on MPR should have been titled: “The Minneapolis Urban League sells-out the community and training to MnDOT for $150,000.”

“Nothing good will come of this.”