Star Tribune
Sanneh Foundation is buying houses to offer affordable housing for its employees
Tony Sanneh’s foundation helps low-income kids through free sports camps, educational programs and food distributions. But some of his own employees struggle too.
After learning that six employees were grappling with homelessness, the Sanneh Foundation started buying up houses to rent at affordable rates to entry-level employees. On Friday, the foundation closed on the purchase of its sixth house on St. Paul’s East Side.
“We look at it like a 401(k) — a benefit people may need,” Sanneh said.
“They’re invested not just in the work I’m doing, but me as a person,” said DeAnthoney “Kojak” Acon, 23, an AmeriCorps VISTA member who works on social media and marketing for the St. Paul-based nonprofit. “This is a pretty big moment for us.”
Acon has faced homelessness and housing insecurity for most of his life, he said, but on Saturday he moved into one of the Sanneh Foundation’s houses — his first stable home as an adult.
“I’m building up my life, I’m rebuilding up my foundation,” he said. “It means a lot to me because it’s literally life-changing.”
It’s the first foray into housing programs for the foundation led by Sanneh, a retired Major League Soccer star. And now he wants to provide affordable housing not just for his employees but other nonprofit workers as well.
The foundation is proposing a $35 million Innovation Center off University Avenue in St. Paul with 100 units for nonprofit, education and healthcare workers. The facility also would offer training programs and house the Sanneh Foundation’s offices.
U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith have requested for $4 million in federal funding for the project, while bills at the Legislature are seeking $6 million in state funding.
“We’re trying to do this to scale,” said Sanneh, who was on the 2002 U.S. World Cup team and retired from pro soccer in 2010. “We could help more than just our nonprofit.”
Since starting the foundation in 2003, he’s pushed it beyond soccer and sports camps, adding education programs and food services to families in need during the COVID-19 pandemic.
When he first heard about some of his own employees having to couch-hop, without a stable place to lay their heads at night, Sanneh offered them spare bedrooms at his Bloomington house. In 2019, the foundation began buying houses with rooms that employees could rent.
The sixth purchase on Friday, a $350,000 recently remodeled house, was accomplished with the help of a $50,000 grant from the St. Paul Area Association of Realtors Charitable Foundation.
The 14 Sanneh Foundation employees who live at the six houses pay modest rent and expenses. All are entry-level workers or AmeriCorps members, who receive an educational award and are paid a living allowance amounting to about $17,000 a year.
“It gives workers a lot of stability,” said Faydane Ouro-Akondo, 23, who works as the foundation’s program coordinator and moved into the new house Friday. “If you don’t have to worry about a place to sleep, it frees up time for other things.”
The foundation has also hired a social worker who helps employees in a workforce development program.
Sanneh estimates the foundation has spent about $1 million on the six houses and townhouses. But he said it’s a worthy investment, especially for an organization that recruits a diverse workforce to reflect the youth they work with in the community. People of color make up 70% of the nonprofit’s employees.
“To change something generationally, we have to start at both ends,” Sanneh said, referring to both the foundation’s employees and the children they serve. “It’s only making what we do better.”
Star Tribune
Palestinian officials say an Israeli strike on a school-turned-shelter in northern Gaza killed 15
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — An Israeli strike on a school sheltering the displaced in northern Gaza on Thursday killed at least 15 people, including five children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The Israeli military said the strike targeted dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants who had gathered at the Abu Hussein school in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp in northern Gaza where Israel has been waging a major air and ground operation for more than a week.
Fares Abu Hamza, head of the ministry’s emergency unit in northern Gaza, confirmed the toll and said dozens of people were wounded. He said the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was struggling to treat the casualties.
“Many women and children are in critical condition,” he said.
The Israeli military said it targeted a command center run by both militant groups inside the school. It provided a list of around a dozen names of people it identified as militants who were present when the strike was called in. It was not immediately possible to verify the names.
Israel has repeatedly struck tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza. The Israeli military says it carries out precise strikes on militants and tries to avoid harming civilians, but its strikes often kill women and children.
Hamas-led militants triggered the war when they stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. Some 100 captives are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants but says women and children make up a little more than half of the fatalities.
Twin Amur tigers born at Como Zoo in August now have names — Marisa and Maks.
Two long-time volunteers who have worked with zookeepers to care for and teach the public about the zoo’s big cats came up with the names, the first to be born at the St. Paul zoo in more than 40 years.
Marisa, a name that the volunteers found to mean “spirited and tenacious,” call that a perfect reflection of her personality. The name also carries special significance for the Como Zoo community, as it honors a retired zookeeper of the same name who was instrumental in the care of large cats during her 43 years at the zoo, Como Zoo and Conservatory Director Michelle Furrer said.
The male cub has been named Maks, which is associated with meanings like “the greatest” or “strength and leadership.” The volunteers felt this was an apt description of the male cub’s confident demeanor and growing sense of leadership, Furrer said.
“Marisa and Maks aren’t just names; they’re a fun reminder of the passion and care that keep us committed to protecting wildlife every day,” Furrer said.
The newborns and their first-time mother, 7-year-old Bernadette, remain off view to allow for more bonding time, zoo officials said. The cubs’ father, 11-year-old Tsar, has been a Como resident since February 2019 and remains on view.
Fewer than 500 Amur tigers — also known as Siberian tigers — remain in the wild as they face critical threats from habitat loss, poaching and human-wildlife conflict, the zoo said.
Much of the wood waste in the metro area is sent to a processing site near Pig’s Eye Lake in St. Paul, where it is stored before being burned to produce energy at the St. Paul Cogeneration plant downtown.
Cogeneration provides power to about half of downtown and was originally built to manage elm-tree waste in response to Dutch elm disease. The plant burns approximately 240,000 tons of wood each year, according to Michael Auger, senior vice president of District Energy in St. Paul.
Jim Calkins, a certified landscape horticulturalist who has been involved in discussions about the problem, said he thinks using wood for energy is the most logical solution.
“The issue is, we don’t have enough facilities to be able to handle that, at least in the Twin Cities,” Calkins said. “So there has to be dollars to support transportation to get the wood to those places, or in some cases, to upgrade some of those facilities such that they are able to burn wood.”
Plans are in place to convert Koda Energy in Shakopee to burn ash wood, which could potentially handle around 40,000 tons of wood waste, but that would take around two years to establish, according to Klapperich.
In some areas of the state, cities have resorted to burning excess wood waste because they felt they had no other option. Open burning wood releases a lot of carbon into the air, Klapperich said.
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