Outcome of Recent Minnesota Legislative Sessions
The Saint Paul Children’s Collaborative works closely with the Ignite Afterschool Policy Committee and uses a board-approved rubric to decide which legislative issues to support. We are excited to report that the 2023 and 2024 Sessions had many successes for young people in Minnesota, including:
- MinneKIDS Act: This legislation sought to establish a statewide Children’s Savings Account (CSA) program. The final outcome in the 2023 Session was $100,000 appropriation to seed a state infrastructure for CSAs at Youthprise; as well as four $100K start-up grants for four pilots (one urban, one rural, one suburban, and one tribal).
- Survivor benefits for fosters: This bill would have immediately stopped the practice by counties of keeping social security benefits that belong to fosters served by their county, while also providing funds to replace the social security dollars for the counties. The bill did not pass, but an alternative bill passed creating a study of the issue. One positive aspect of the study is that counties will have to report to DHS how many fosters in their county are impacted by this practice, and what the dollar amounts are. The report and recommendations were submitted to the Legislature in January 15, 2025. In addition, in 2024, Foster Advocates led passage of another bill requriing counties to provide written notice and keep accounting records of benefits that they receive as payee for a foster’s SSI benefits.
- Afterschool Community Learning Grant Program: This has been a long-term priority for SPCC, and the outcome in the 2023 session was success! The final conference committee included $30M over four years ($7.5M/year for four years) for out of school time programming across Minnesota!
- The Heading Home Ramsey bill was passed in 2023, appropriating $37,500,000 per year for the next two years from the general fund to fund and support the Heading Home Ramsey Continuum of Care, including maintaining funding for a 100-bed family shelter (Project Home).
If you’d like to help advocate for funding and policies impacting young people, check out the Afterschool For All MN Advocacy Toolkit. There you’ll find all kinds of helpful resources to help you build relationships with your own legislators. These tools are designed to also be used to teach young people to become advocates.
