Minnesota athlete Matt Krohn competed in the 2023 World Special Olympics in Berlin, Germany.
Matt recently sat down with KFAI’s Daniel Hood to recount his experience traveling independently to Berlin. Daniel and Matt share advice for athletes with disabilities and encourage others to never give up on their dreams.
A growing movement of âmemory choirsâ is changing the conversation around dementia care in America. KFAI contributor and documentary filmmaker, Mercedes Kane spends time with Grant West, a member of the Amazing Grace dementia-friendly gospel chorus, as he looks back on his life and rehearses with the choir out of Walker West, the music academy in St. Paul he co-founded with Reverend Carl Walker.
Amazing Grace follows the model of Giving Voice, a nonprofit based out of Minneapolis. There are currently 67 dementia choirs worldwide modeled after Giving Voice and a study is underway at Northwestern Medicine examining how singing in a chorus affects the brain. Mercedes is in development on a documentary film, SOUND MEMORIES that shares the stories and science behind these choirs. Visit Daisy May Films to learn more, or find out how you can support the film.
Story edited by Rob McGinley Myers. Field audio by Marius Anderson.
Research shows that the first years of a childâs life are crucial for their development. For a parent, those first years can be exhausting and overwhelming. The questions never end: Why wonât my baby stop crying at night? How much screentime should a toddler have? What age should kids eat peanut butter?
In the past 50 years, more than 4 million parents have leaned on a Minnesota-made program for advice on questions like these.
Early Childhood Family Education (ECFE) operates in almost every Minnesota school district, and staff members say itâs the countryâs oldest and largest program of its kind. Children from birth to kindergarten learn and play, while caregivers find support from fellow parents and licensed educators. Itâs not uncommon to see ECFE friendships continue to high school graduation and beyond.
The 1974 pilot was championed by the late State Sen. Jerome Hughes, who believed that education policy should focus on the entire family in a childâs formative first years of life. Funded through local levies, state aid and sliding-scale registration fees, the program requires annual assessments so that ECFE is always tailored to changing community needs. ECFE has evolved to serve parents learning English, LGBTQIA+ families, parents of children with disabilities and more. Programs vary by district, but all are designed with the same goal â to support the childâs first and most enduring teachers.
KFAI’s Michelle Bruch tells this story. Photo courtesy of Hopkins Public Schools.
It started with just one instrument, a fortepiano gifted to the Schubert Club, one of the oldest arts organizations in the country. Soon, more instruments arrived and several valuable keyboards were acquired to create one of the finest museum collections in the country.
Today, the Schubert Club Museum is located on the second floor of the Landmark Center in downtown Saint Paul. Open Wednesdays through Sundays, itâs always free. On display are a variety of instruments and manuscripts from the 17th to 21st centuries along with tantalizing stories and recordings of these instruments played by professional musicians.
But if learning and hearing is not enough, the newly renovated museum is fully interactive and invites visitors to make music of their own in the âMusic Makers Zone.â You can press buttons to hear music and put sounds together, plus pick a few instruments and play along. KFAI producer and musician Alison Young takes us there.
Jacquie Maddix is a 30-year veteran broadcaster in the Twin Cities. “Lady J,” as she is known hosts “Songs of the Soul” every Tuesday from 4-6pm on KFAI 90.3 FM in Minneapolis. Lady J is also the mother of two adult sons, Christopher and David, who have Hemophilia B, a bleeding disorder which results in spontaneous and excessive bleeding whenever injury occurs.
Twice a week, a home health care nurse named Sally comes to David and Christopher’s residences to deliver doctor-prescribed prophylactic care.
Sally has been visiting Christopher and David for years, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jacquie spoke conversation with the veteran nurse who has delivered a diverse range health care services around the Twin Cities for the last 50 years.
Thirty years ago, the Hiawatha/Highway 55 re-route and a MnDOT light rail project made a big impact on Minneapolis residents. But the impact was not always positive. The construction project threatened Coldwater Spring, the 11,000-year-old spring that furnished water to Fort Snelling for a century and was the birthplace of Minnesota. Coldwater Spring is on federal land and is contiguous with Minnehaha Park. The Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota community and the Park and River Alliance went to court against MnDOT, the City of Minneapolis, and the Park Board to cease the destruction of Coldwater Spring. Today, Coldwater is still flowing thanks to hundreds of young protestors who were joined by Mendota Dakota descendants of the people who lived along the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers when Europeans arrived.
Advocate and water protector SuSu Jeffrey opposed the re-route project.
Susu has written multiple articles on the history of the spring and the surrounding landscape. She has been leading full moon walks at Coldwater every month since the year 2000. Everyone is welcome to join in the group howl.
To learn more about Coldwater Spring, visit friendsofcoldwater.org.
The Little Free Library organization began in 2009 when Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin built a miniature model of a one room schoolhouse, filled it with books, and installed it in his front yard, inviting neighbors to take a book or leave a book.
The organization became a registered non-profit in 2012, spreading the idea of sharing free books by way of tiny front yard libraries across the country and then globally. Today, the organization is headquartered in Saint Paul, and it estimates that more than 150,000 Little Free Libraries have been installed in about 120 countries world-wide.
Reporter Rob McGinley Myers first noticed the free libraries when he began taking daily walks around his Como Park neighborhood in Saint Paul. He loved looking through the books on offer, but he began to wonder about the people who ran the libraries out of their front yards. So Rob started knocking on doors, asking the little library owners to tell him what inspired them to install their own library and how it had changed their relationship to the neighborhood.
For the last two decades, an innovative program called SOLO has offered dancers the opportunity to commission a choreographer to create a piece of work expressly for the individual dancer.
In 2024, the program celebrated 20 years of supporting the craft. KFAI’s Sheila Regan attended the 20th anniversary performance.
