Minnesota’s Legacy Amendment raises revenue for Clean Water, Outdoor Heritage, Parks and Trails, and Arts and Cultural Heritage. Libraries are beneficiaries of a portion of the Arts and Cultural Heritage Funding.
The Index of Biological Integrity (IBI) is a tool that can identify water pollution problems based on the type and abundance of selected plants or animals. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) uses IBIs for fish and macroinvertebrates (stream-dwelling insects and other critters) in streams to help determine whether these waterways are impacted by water pollution. The DNR has developed a similar tool for fish in lakes and uses a tool for aquatic plants as supporting information on lake biological health.
Affordable transportation is one of the biggest barriers for schools' ability to plan field trips to Minnesota Historical Society sites and museums.
By June 2011, nearly 600 schools across Minnesota will access the Society's Legacy Field Trip Support Fund, which means more than 50,000 students will be able to learn about history through field trip experiences they otherwise might have missed.
Every year, more than 2,300 people volunteer in support of programs and projects delivered by the Minnesota Historical Society. With the addition of more than 100 Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund (ACHF) projects, the need for volunteers also increased.
ACHF funding enabled the Society to recruit, coordinate and supervise volunteers helping with Legacy projects. As of December 2010, nearly 80 new volunteers were recruited, trained and placed, including 10 percent from diverse communities.
Partner Organizations: 1000 Friends of Minnesota (renamed Envision Minnesota), Twin Cities Public Television (TPT)
Through this partnership, Minnesota history will be made more accessible to thousands of Minnesotans. The "Legacy Letters" project will result in up to 25 one-minute films that draw their content from a sampling of the 150 people, places, organizations, events and natural features of the state as compiled by the Minnesota Historical Society's MN 150 exhibit and book.
This project will initiate the process of community engagement in the LeSueur River watershed by assessing the needs and interests of the community and bringing a diverse set of stakeholders together to determine how best to foster action in improving and protecting water quality.
This program resulted in permanent protection of three parcels totaling 350 acres. All three parcels are now being managed as Wildlife Management Areas (WMA) by MN DNR. This exceeds the original goal of 319 acres. Acquisition of two other parcels were attempted, but the offers were turned down by the sellers.
The Lower Mississippi River Habitat Restoration Partnership is a long-term effort to restore habitat connectivity and improve water quality in critical areas along the Mississippi River corridor from the Twin Cities to the Iowa border by reconnecting tributaries to their floodplains, revitalizing backwaters and channels, and protecting and restoring floodplain forests, wetlands, and prairies that are essential to sustaining the incredible diversity of plants, animals, and human uses provided by this great river.
This project will establish a groundwater monitoring network in the 11 county metropolitan area. The network will provide information about aquifer characteristics and natural water trends by monitoring healthy aquifers (non-stressed systems). The project will also develop an automated system that captures groundwater level and water use data. This system will enhance evaluation of changes in aquifers that are stressed by pumping from existing wells.
Legacy-funded programs at the Minnesota Humanities Center demonstrate our determination to collaboratively create humanities programs for the broader public by forging strong partnerships with local, state, and national cultural organizations. These programs show the broader community how the humanities can be used to address issues important to their everyday lives. Each activity, event, and program shares an Absent Narrative with participants, which help residents across the state engage in a more sophisticated understanding of their community.
Partner Organizations: Preservation Alliance of Minnesota, Department of Employment and Economic Development, University of Minnesota Extension Center for Community Vitality.
The Minnesota Main Street Program is a comprehensive strategy that helps Minnesota communities preserve historic buildings, while providing training, tools and support for commercial revitalization. ACHF funding has enabled the re-launch of this program.
Partner Organization: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
Through a partnership with the Minnesota DNR, the Minnesota Historical Society has digitized the full run of the DNR's Minnesota Conservation Volunteer magazine. All issues of the publication dating back to 1940—or 28,000 pages—are available to the public online.
The Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) is a statewide, multi-institutional initiative to make the rich historical resources of the state’s public and academic libraries, archives, museums and historical societies available to the public via the web and to preserve the resources for future generations.
The new Minnesota Naturalist Corps, year-round naturalists and seasonal naturalists will be added at the busiest seasonal parks and trails to expand conservation education programming and increase overall attendance at interpretive programs. The Minnesota Naturalist Corps will offer more interpretive programs as directed by new legislative guidelines.
There are 67 Minnesota State Parks and 7 Minnesota State Recreation areas that each have facilities to serve outdoor recreation users. Funds in this category are used for developing new facilities and include visitor centers, trail centers, roads, parking lots, bridges, campgrounds, and so on.
HCHS added 29 standard Minnesota history titles to broaden public accessibility to historical resources. The grant was noted in HCHS's newsletter and in four county newspaper press releases.
Midwest Viking Festival (MVF) presents Viking-era arts, cultural traditions, and folkways with demonstrations, hands-on activities, and performances, including weaving, wood-turning, metalwork, carving, fiber dyeing, pottery making, felting, rune writing, songs, and more.
This program proposes a 15-year goal to provide protection to the remaining 90,000 acres of native prairie/savanna, a 20-year goal to restore and protect an additional 500,000 acres of diverse grasslands/savannas, and a 10-year goal to increase management capacity to annually manage 300,000 acres of grassland and savannas per year. This proposal takes the first steps to achieve these goals by initiating a comprehensive, coordinated and collaborative prairie conservation initiative. Annual investments by the LSOHC will be required to realize these ambitious outcomes.
Minnesota Public Radio is the state's largest cultural organization, providing 96 percent of the population with free access to some of the best broadcast cultural programming in the world. Minnesota Public Radio is using a grant from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund to implement projects around the following four goals:
This funding is for arts, arts education, and arts access, and to preserve Minnesota's history and cultural heritage.
The Minnesota Children's Museum will develop a literacy focused exhibit to catalyze community engagement around early childhood learning and education.
This project will create a high accuracy elevation dataset - critical for effectively planning and implementing water quality projects - for the state of Minnesota using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and geospatial mapping technologies. Although some areas of the state have been mapped previously, many counties remain unmapped or have insufficient or inadequate data. This multi-year project, to be completed in 2012, is a collaborative effort of Minnesota's Digital Elevation Committee and partners with county surveyors to ensure accuracy with ground-truthing.
