St. Cloud Non-Profit Aims to Build Strong Families

ST. CLOUD -- A St. Cloud non-profit is focusing on building stronger families.

Promise Neighborhood of Central Minnesota is based in St. Cloud. There are also two other Promise Neighborhoods in the Twin Cities. The organization works to help families in southeast St. Cloud achieve educational and economic goals.

John Smith is one the organization's leaders. He says what makes Promise Neighborhood different from other non-profits is it is completely run by the community.

"Our entire organization is community lead. Which means people from the community we serve make all of the decisions, serve on the board of directors, serve on the committees that we have and they are all of our staff."

Smith says the main goal of Promise Neighborhood of Central Minnesota is to help families move along and achieve their goals.

"The way we do that is, we provide year-round quality out of school time programming. So we have after school math club, reading club, mentoring during the winter. Then in the summertime, we have a five-week summer academy that we host ourselves."

The organization also recently started to host more summer daytime activities for kids this year. Smith says they needed to make more events to be able to serve the kids more often.

"Because our kids are struggling. Some of our kids don't have mentors and they don't have the support system that they need so we decided to add some programming."

Promise Neighborhood doesn't just focus on kids though, they also are trying to help parents get to a better economic status.

Smith says the group hosts several workshops focusing on computer skills, writing skills and other subjects. He says these workshops are designed for parents and are eventually taught by the parents.

"We're having workshops for parents that have kids ages 0-3, this work is funded by the Morgan Foundation, and we're getting that information out but the other thing that we are accomplishing is our parents are learning how to facilitate and co-facilitate these workshops. So it's people solving their own problems."

Promise Neighborhood of Central Minnesota is always looking for volunteers if you're interested visit their website, you can find the link below. Their main office is at 1114 9th Avenue SE in St. Cloud.