Meet the Community Innovators Making Saint Paul Safer in 2026

Building Safety by Helping Young People Flourish

Building a Saint Paul where everyone can be safe isn’t just the job of City government. “We’ve always wanted to work alongside community,” says Tyler Bouwens, the Office of Neighborhood Safety’s liaison to community-based organizations. “Lots of new initiatives in the City have been provided by faith-based, culturally specific, and nonprofit groups.”

That’s why, every year, the Office of Neighborhood Safety puts out a call for proposals to Saint Paul community organizations: If you had a City contract for up to $50,000, and just one year to do the work, what would your organization do to make Saint Paul safer?

Members of the Neighborhood Safety Community Council work with ONS staff to evaluate all the proposals they receive, and they award City contracts to the most promising ones.

The annual call for proposals, Tyler says, “is an opportunity to use City resources to support the most promising work in neighborhood safety. There’s certainly drawbacks to an annual budget cycle, but it does allow us to be super-flexible. These one-years partnerships help us meet the actual needs of our communities as they change.”

For the 2026 budget year, ONS asked for proposals focused specifically on young people. Out of dozens of pitches from organizations all over town, Tyler’s team and Saint Paul residents on the NSCC selected just four. These projects, already well underway, will help keep our City safer by helping young people flourish.

New Training for Better Youth Work: 180 Degrees

Young people at risk of sex trafficking are also vulnerable to substance use—one reason why traffickers deliberately use drugs to manipulate the young people they exploit. Staff members Brittany’s Place, a Saint Paul shelter for girls affected by sex trafficking run by 180 Degrees, routinely welcome young people in the grips of severe substance-use trouble.

“Over the years, it’s been apparent that the mental and chemical health needs are increasing.” says 180 Degrees grants manager Paige Burditt. Young people come to Brittany’s Place with more and more substance-use challenges, and staff need better ways to support them.

That’s exactly  what ONS has hired 180 Degrees to do this year. In partnership with the University of Minnesota’s Youth Health and Housing Lab, 180 Degrees experts are creating a new substance abuse–prevention curriculum to train youth workers like those at Brittany’s Place to support young people who are struggling with substance use more skillfully.

Combining academic research, on-the-ground experience, and feedback from the young people at Brittany’s Place, the training curriculum 180 degrees develops will help youth workers there feel confident and supported. After that, the new curriculum will be offered to anybody else who needs it—starting with the case managers, life coaches, and outreach specialists on staff at the Office of Neighborhood Safety. “It’s more imperative than ever for community to lift each other up and collaborate,” says Paige. “We want this curriculum to be knowledge-sharing for other organizations to build on.”

“Preparing our staff to support youth who are coming in with chemical health issues is what we’re most excited about,” she adds. “When you have staff who feel confident, supported, and trained, that can only translate into better youth work.”

One Young Person at a Time: TONE UP, The JK Movement, and Face 2 Face

Founded by Antonio Williams, TONE UP is a Saint Paul program that provides support, education, and leadership development for people who’ve been incarcerated as they start to rebuild their lives. In their work for ONS this year, Antonio and team will hire peer navigators with real-life experience of incarceration to provide one-on-one support to Saint Paul young people who have been behind bars. Called “Building Power through Peer-Led Recovery,” TONE UP’s pilot will provide mentorship, Clean Slate Act navigation, and links to housing, employment, and community support.

The JK Movement is also focused on “young folks who have been in challenging circumstances,” explains namesake Johnny “Knuckles” Allen, Jr. Their 2026 project “is an opportunity to strengthen our relationship with ONS while innovating different approaches to young folks today.” This year Johnny and his team will run two 10-week groups of 20 young people each, using the “healing-centered engagement” approach developed by Harvard education scholar Shawn Ginwright. The groups will focus on “using the principles of cultural identity, relationships, meaning, and aspiration,” says JK Movement development director Heather Huseby. “There’s self-advocacy, job-training, and follow-up built in. The 10-week program includes an opportunity for participants to build a social venture that will serve the community.”

Like TONE UP, Face 2 Face is a Saint Paul organization that specializes in supporting young people touched by the criminal legal system. Their work for ONsS will provide mentorship, advocacy, mental health, and wraparound support for 40 young people referred by the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office and other law enforcement agencies. They’ll also meet young people one-on-one every month at the Ramsey County Correctional Facility. “Although this project is smaller in scale, it’s an important way to redefine public safety,” explains Face 2 Face public funding coordinator Adam Oliansky, “especially for youth who have ended up in the justice system through no fault of their own. We’re working with ONS to reimagine public safety as rehabilitative, rather than punitive—and we’ve proved that the work we’re doing reduces recidivism. It’s one youth at a time.”

Learning Together

“We use a cohort model so they can learn collectively,” Tyler says. “Last fall, we met together to work through the nuts of and bolts contracting with the City. It’s more efficient for the City organization to have community partners working on the same contracting timelines, and it’s helpful for them to have us available to answer questions in real time.”

Now that the organizations’ work is underway, the group continues to meet monthly. “We have the time and space to bring in people to do shared learning—about procurement, digital storytelling, and more,” he adds. “People get to know others in the field, find ways to connect personally and professionally to inform each other’s work, and create referral networks.”

Beyond the work itself, building those connections among community organizations helps make Saint Paul safer, one conversation at a time.