Overview

Over 67,000 Saint Paul residents live in poverty, including 25,000 children. And the poverty rate in the City of St. Paul stands at 24% — that’s enough to fill the Xcel Energy Center 4 times! Opportunity Saint Paul aims to actively engage the community in solutions that fight poverty. Building on work previously completed such as the Commission to End Poverty in Minnesota by 2020 and Community Action’s Community Blueprint to End Poverty, we want to give the entire community a chance to work together to effectively combat poverty in Saint Paul. Most importantly, we are ensuring that people living in poverty in St. Paul have a voice in the work that directly affects them. We began with a conference on April 4, 2012, at St. Paul’s RiverCentre, and will now spend the summer and fall in working groups, and end the year with a report back and celebration of the work achieved.

Our Goals

• Inclusion: All sectors of the community, particularly members of the low-income community who are most affected by the work we are doing, are working together to develop meaningful and effective action steps to reduce poverty.

• Collaboration: Opportunity Saint Paul is working with other nonprofits and the findings from the Legislative Commission to End Poverty and Community Action’s Community Blueprint to End Poverty to develop new ideas to reduce poverty instead of duplicate what has already been done.

• Action: Opportunity Saint Paul is about finding and helping to fund actions to make a tangible difference in the fight against poverty. We aim to develop actionable tactics that could be put into practice in 2013.