Star Tribune
Meet the St. Paul Snow Angel who matches snow shoveling volunteers with those who can’t
It was during the first winter of the COVID-19 pandemic that Heather Worthington got the idea of helping connect volunteers with shovels to the folks unable to clear their snow-covered sidewalks and driveways. And Saintly City Snow Angels was born.
Worthington, managing consultant for St. Paul-based Center for Economic Inclusion, has 25 years of leadership experience in local government, including Ramsey County, Minneapolis and Edina. Her work organizing snow shoveling is more on the grassroots level.
With winter right around the corner, Eye on St. Paul thought it might be a good time to touch base with Worthington and connect with her no-cost service. The interview was edited for length.
Q: How did this idea get started?
A: My husband used to take the train to work, from where we live in Hamline-Midway, and he came home one day and he said, “The sidewalks were so icy today, it was dangerous getting to the train.” And I said, “Gee, wouldn’t it be great if there was something like a community bulletin board where people could post if they needed help with shoveling and people would help them, and we could just connect people?” Then I realized: “Oh, well, you could do that on Facebook.”
Q: What you’re doing is just a little matchmaking, right?
A: Yes. It’s basically an electronic bulletin board. This year, we’re finally moving to a web-based platform [in February]. So now you’ll pull out Google maps, visit the website and it will pull out a form and it will find your location and be able to match you with people nearby. And that’s due to a grant from the city of St. Paul.
Q: How much of a grant?
A: I think it’s going to be under $5,000. We’re going to roll [the website] out in late February.
Q: How many people are involved?
A: We have more than 1,200 members. Maybe two-thirds are people who need shoveling. There can be any kind of physical limitation. A really common one is, “We’re both elderly now and we just can’t get out there.” Another one is, “I’m eight months pregnant and I can’t do it right now.” Or, “I have a chronic disease and I can’t shovel.”
Q: Do they need to ask every time it snows?
A: No. Ideally, at the beginning of the season, you put the ask out there. You connect with somebody who’s going to shovel for you and then you maintain that relationship through the season. I would say 80 to 90 percent of people do it that way.
And then there’s all kinds of people who don’t have access, or don’t want access, to Facebook. That’s when [co-administrator] Nakita [Godette] and I step in and do a little matchmaking. But that takes time.
There are parts of the city where we really need more volunteers. The East Side is a big part of the city where we need more. The North End. We need people in Frogtown. And Dayton’s Bluff.
Q: How do you do that?
A: I pull out those neighborhood Facebook pages and ask people. Sometimes that’s successful. Merriam Park, Como Park, in those areas it works really well. Highland, it works a little less. Just word of mouth.
Q: There’s no cost?
A: No. In fact, we’ve had people who say they’re willing to pay. And we say, “Then you should hire somebody because that’s not who we are.” We are for people who are in a situation where they don’t have money to pay someone to shovel.
The idea is you get help from very close by. Right? I use myself as an example. We shovel for a neighbor, and have for 10 years. We do our walk; we do her walk. We do our garage pad/apron, we do hers.
Q: What kinds of folks are volunteering?
A: Everybody. There are so many people. When we started, we were just Midway Snow Angels and we had about 85 members that first season. The next season, I want to say we grew to like, 200 to 300. And I said to my husband, “I think we should go citywide. It feels like everybody should get in on the action.”
We got calls from Roseville last year. Then we started getting calls from Fridley, Minneapolis. We said, “You can start your own. It’s not hard, you know? It takes a little bit of moderation.”
Q: That said, how long can you keep doing this?
A: I don’t think we can grow any more on Facebook, which is why we need to migrate it to a website. It will just make it more accessible to people. Ideally, after February, people who run elder care services will just go directly to the website, put in their client’s name and match them with somebody. That’s how it keeps going.
Q: Self-service matchmaking?
A: And it will be its own website. It will be mobile-friendly and people can just basically figure it out. Think of the person who lives in northern Wisconsin and has parents still in the Twin Cities. They’re thinking, I’ve got to get Mom some help. Nakita and I get that one, three or four times a week.
Q: So how many people are asking for help this winter?
A: We get one or more a day right now, but it’s not snowing. When it’s snowing, it’s a zoo. Last winter was nuts. It was so snowy, and it was just like one storm after another.
You bring your own shovel. All you have is the address. You don’t even have to knock on the door. There is no interaction between the resident and the shoveler. It’s easy.
Star Tribune
Biden calls out Musk over a published report that the Tesla CEO once worked in the US illegally
NEW YORK — President Joe Biden slammed Elon Musk for hypocrisy on immigration after a published report that the Tesla CEO once worked illegally in the United States. The South Africa-born Musk denies the allegation.
”That wealthiest man in the world turned out to be an illegal worker here. No, I’m serious. He was supposed to be in school when he came on a student visa. He wasn’t in school. He was violating the law. And he’s talking about all these illegals coming our way?” Biden said while campaigning on Saturday in Pittsburgh at a union hall.
The Washington Post reported that Musk worked illegally in the country while on a student visa. The newspaper, citing company documents, former business associates and court documents, said Musk arrived in Palo Alto, California in 1995 for a graduate program at Stanford University “but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his startup. ”
Musk wrote on X in reply to a video post of Biden’s comments: ”I was in fact allowed to work in the US.” Musk added, ”The Biden puppet is lying.”
Investors in Musk’s company, Zip2, were concerned about the possibility of their founder being deported, according to the report, and gave him a deadline for obtaining a work visa. The newspaper also cited a 2005 email from Musk to his Tesla co-founders acknowledging that he did not have authorization to be in the U.S. when he started Zip2.
According to the account, that email was submitted as evidence in a now-closed California defamation lawsuit and said that Musk had apllied to Stanford so he could stay in the country legally.
Musk is today the world’s richest man. He has committed more than $70 million to help Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and other GOP candidates win on Nov. 5, and is one of the party’s biggest donors this campaign season. He has been headlining events in the White House race’s final stretch, often echoing Trump’s dark rhetoric against immigration.
Trump has pledged to give Musk a role in his administration if he wins next month.
The only debate between DFL U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and GOP challenger Royce White started Sunday on the street outside WCCO Radio.
As White approached the building, he loudly called some two dozen flag-waving and cheering Klobuchar supporters a “whole lot of commies.” The 33-year-old provocateur and podcaster also told them to thank Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney — who endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris — because there was “no chance in hell” that Harris would defeat Republican former President Donald Trump on Nov. 5.
Klobuchar, 64, had arrived moments earlier, smiling and wishing “good morning” to her supporters. Once inside, the two took questions for an hour from moderator Blois Olson. Their tone was generally polite with White often interrupting a Klobuchar response with, “rebuttal,” indicated he wanted to respond.
The senator repeatedly raised White’s claims on X, formerly Twitter, that “The bad guys won in World War II” and that there were “no good guys in that war.” She called that stance offensive to veterans.
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar arrives at WCCO Radio for a debate with Royce White in Minneapolis on Sunday, Oct. 27. (Richard Tsong-Taatarii)
Klobuchar, who is seeking a fourth six-year term, portrayed herself as a pragmatist. She opened by saying that we live in “incredibly divisive times politically” but that she has listened and worked with Republicans to bring down shipping costs, drug prices for seniors and to help veterans and push for more housing and child care.
“Courage in this next few years is not going to be standing by yourself yelling at people,” she said, her opening allusion to White’s rhetoric, which she said is often vulgar.
White, a former NBA player, is a political novice, but a close ally of Steve Bannon, the jailed former chief strategist for Trump and right wing media executive. Last summer, White won the state GOP endorsement to run against Klobuchar.
“Our country’s coming undone at the seams. I think we can change that,” White said in his opening statement. He said he threatens the status quo, decried the “permanent political class” and referred to the two major parties as the “uniparty.”
Other buildings destroyed at Khojir and Parchin likely included buildings where Iran used industrial mixers to create the solid fuel needed for its extensive ballistic missile arsenal, Eveleth said.
In a statement issued immediately after the attack Saturday, the Israeli military said it targeted ”missile manufacturing facilities used to produce the missiles that Iran fired at the state of Israel over the last year.”
Destroying such sites could greatly disrupt Iran’s ability to manufacture new ballistic missiles to replenish its arsenal after the two attacks on Israel. Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which oversees the country’s ballistic missile program, has been silent since Saturday’s attack.
Iran’s overall ballistic missile arsenal, which includes shorter-range missiles unable to reach Israel, was estimated to be ”over 3,000” by Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, then-commander of the U.S. military’s Central Command, in testimony to the U.S. Senate in 2022. In the time since, Iran has fired hundreds of the missiles in a series of attacks.
There have been no videos or photos posted to social media of missile parts or damage in civilian neighborhoods following the recent attack — suggesting that the Israeli strikes were far more accurate that Iran’s ballistic missile barrages targeting Israel in April and October. Israel relied on aircraft-fired missiles during its attack.
However, one factory appeared to have been hit in Shamsabad Industrial City, just south of Tehran near Imam Khomeini International Airport, the country’s main gateway to the outside world. Online videos of the damaged building corresponded to an address for a firm known as TIECO, which advertises itself as building advanced machinery used in Iran’s oil and gas industry.
