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Friday AM Daily | October 23, 2020
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LAST DAY: Take our 2020 Leaders Survey
Today is the last day to take our 2020 Leaders Survey, in which we poll leaders like you on key issues affecting the region's business community. We ask questions like …
- How secure do you feel in your ability to retire?
- How difficult do you perceive it is for businesses to find adequate talent to fill open positions?
- Will the growing number of Amazon facilities in Central Iowa will help local businesses?
Each question offers an opportunity to leave a comment, which helps provide the "why" behind your answer. We'll compile your responses to publish the results in the Nov. 27 edition of the Business Record.
Thank you in advance for your time sharing your thoughts.
-- Emily Barske, Business Record associate editor
TAKE THE SURVEY
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Kub Stevens, left, talks to DaVossi Wisdom, in front of stacks of pillows, as they plan for the Dream Cube project, which will be revealed next week in downtown Des Moines. Stevens and DaVossi worked with other young people from the Polk County Youth Action Council during brainstorming sessions at the Iowa Homeless Youth Centers in downtown Des Moines. Organizers say the cube will be reassembled at each site each day it is on display. Photo submitted by Group Creative Services
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Bravo, partners use art to bring social issues out of the shadows
By Michael Crumb | Senior Staff Writer
Residents of Des Moines will soon see a public art display that is designed to tackle the issue of youth homelessness head-on.
The project, called the Dream Cube, represents the importance of having a place to lay your head at night, said Kub Stevens, the artist behind the project.
Pillows "stand as a physical representation of what's needed in order to dream," Stevens said. "You don’t have dreams if you don't have a safe place to sleep. You can’t dream of a better future if you don't have a safe today, a safe place to call your own right now."
The project, an 8-foot-tall and 7-foot-wide cube of more than 200 white bed pillows mounted on aluminum poles, is part of an art and social impact project funded through Bravo of Greater Des Moines and the Mid-Iowa Health Foundation, with additional support from the Iowa Arts Council, Capital Crossroads and the Community Foundation of Greater Des Moines. The pillows, Stevens said, were purchased from various Walmart stores around Central Iowa.
The project, along with an artist-in-residency project that launched this month, is designed to use art to raise awareness and create action to social issues in the community.
Bravo, best known for its grant-making mission to support arts and culture, also budgets $100,000 for what is known as "Lead Beyond Grantmaking." With that funding, Bravo helps support projects that cannot be accomplished with a grant to a single organization, said Sally Dix, Bravo’s executive director.
The nonprofit organization is funded almost entirely by the local hotel/motel tax, but that revenue has significantly decreased as travel and tourism have drastically fallen off because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Dix said that while Bravo’s grantmaking mission, referred to as community investment, could see a nearly 50% decrease in 2021 (just over $4.5 million was granted in 2020), its board of directors has committed to maintaining the $100,000 for community impact projects, such as the pillow project and the artist-in-residency initiative.
"It has tremendous added value," she said of the Lead Beyond Grantmaking fund. "It’s still relatively small. We’re not losing sight of our primary function, but it’s incredibly important that we continue to make the case that arts and culture should be at every table for every discussion and can move every objective forward faster, and if we don’t do this work, then this doesn’t happen and that’s not good for the sector or region, either."
The Dream Cube project, which received $10,000 from the community impact fund, is designed to demonstrate how arts and social issues intersect.
"It’s a really exciting interactive public arts project … to demonstrate that art amplifies the message of how critical an issue this is to our community," Dix said.
The use of pillows is a metaphor for "If you don’t have a safe place to dream, how can you realize your full potential?" she said.
Suzanne Mineck, president of Mid-Iowa Health Foundation, said the idea for the pillow project is an extension of work already being done to eliminate homelessness in the community.
She said she and Dix were talking one day about the role art can plan in "tackling some of our hardest community issues."
"Art has a way ... of helping us see something or visually experience something that otherwise many of us would never know or be able to get intimate with enough to respond to with action," Mineck said. "So we talked about a range of issues where art could help elevate that awareness and experience, and our youth homeless work seemed to rise to the top of being at the tipping point for the broader community to become more engaged."
Mineck said a pretty rigorous request-for-proposal process was undertaken to find the right artist, and Stevens, 23, of Ames, was chosen.
While the project required some financial investment, it also required thought about how collaboration can result in change, she said.
"It required us pressing a pause button to know how else can we work together to bring necessary change to our community, and I think that’s one of the most critical parts of this partnership," Mineck said.
Part of that collaboration is Stevens’ work with members of the Polk County Youth Action Council to help create the vision for the Dream Cube.
One of those young people is DaVossi Wisdom, 21, who has been with the action council since it was formed in 2017.
He’s been spending time with Stevens and other council members at the Iowa Homeless Youth Centers in downtown Des Moines, brainstorming and building a prototype of the Dream Cube, which will be assembled each day on-site when it’s unveiled.
It will be on display on Thursday, Oct. 29, at the Wellmark YMCA, 501 Grand Ave.; on Friday, Oct. 30, at the DART Central Station, 620 Cherry St.; and at Cowles Commons, 221 Walnut St., on Saturday, Oct. 31. It will be on display from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. each day.
Wisdom said the Dream Cube is personal for him, having been homeless for a while after he turned 18.
Although he spent some nights on the streets, much of his time being homeless was spent in houses where he was with "negative people, negative things," he said.
Wisdom, who today is living in a safe place and has a 1-year-old son, said he hopes the project raises awareness and action that will help keep his son from having to experience what he went through being homeless.
"I don’t want anyone to have to sleep on the streets alone or with guns under their pillows," Wisdom said. "That’s not a life. If I can stop homelessness or have an impact on it, I’m good. If I can help save a handful of people, I’m good."
Group Creative Services, which works to use art to activate larger community goals and engagement, participated in the process to select Stevens and in the coordination of the Dream Cube project. It also is helping to facilitate the artist-in-residency project, which received $15,000 from Bravo with support from Invest DSM.
The artist, Eleanor Kahn, is embedded with a team at Invest DSM and will visit old neighborhood business districts that need increased energy and vitality, said Teva Dawson, director at Group Creative Services.
"She’s getting a sense of what they are and meeting with people who are current owners, neighborhood leaders or stakeholders," Dawson said.
She said that Kahn, an Iowa State University graduate who now lives in Chicago, will work with stakeholders over the next six months to determine "what their hopes and dreams are and what the potential is."
The goal of the project is to help organizations approach their goals with more creativity and innovation, Dawson said.
"She’s there to provide a spark of creativity toward the revitalization of those business districts," she said.
Dawson’s partner at Group Creative Services, Mat Greiner, said Kahn, who has a background in scenic design for the theater, will help expose the community to new ideas to enhance and amplify what’s already happening in those neighborhoods.
"It is ultimately up to her creative insight to work with what she understands from the naturally occurring energies in the space that she works in that will determine what she actually does," he said.
Dawson said she would anticipate a vision being developed by the end of this year with implementation coming next spring or summer.
Projects like the artist-in-residency and Dream Cube are examples of the important role public art can play in the community, she said.
"Art is there for more than adornment," Dawson said. "Art can and should be used to address issues that are critical to our community, such as youth homelessness or revitalizing neighborhood business districts."
Stevens, the artist on the Dream Cube project and a student at Iowa State University, said he hopes the project will bring people together to facilitate change that is needed to reduce homelessness.
"I saw this as an opportunity to create a place where those who have been affected by homelessness and those who have not been affected by homelessness can meet and have an exchange and a dialogue, and that we can grow stronger as a community as a result of that," he said. "I’m excited to see what that synthesis of different people will look like."
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NEWS BRIEFS
Survey measures how businesses are dealing with pandemic
A survey by the Greater Des Moines Partnership hopes to help businesses and organizations better understand how their peers are coping with the coronavirus pandemic. The Business and Workforce Survey was sent out to Partnership investors, members and the community to gain insights on current and future business and workforce plans, according to a news release. Information obtained from the survey will also help the Partnership identify how it can best help organizations and the community, the release states. The survey, which was announced Oct. 14, will close soon, officials said. To take the survey click here. The survey follows the Partnership’s COVID-19 Business Impact Survey completed in March.
TAI to host virtual 2020 Iowa High School Tech Summit
This year’s Iowa High School Tech Summit will be hosted virtually on Nov. 17, hosted by the Technology Association of Iowa and the Principal Foundation. The summit is open to all Iowa high school students and takes place from 9 a.m. to noon, featuring discussions led by young IT professionals and networking opportunities with universities and employer representatives. The summit is free to attend; registration is open online.
GreenState pledges $125,000 to African-American Credit Union Coalition campaign GreenState Credit Union, Iowa’s largest credit union, announced a $25,000 per year pledge for five years totaling $125,000 in support of the "I’ve Got Five on It" campaign, a financial inclusion campaign of the African-American Credit Union Coalition. Jeffrey Disterhoft, president and CEO of GreenState, said in a statement that "AACUC and the Commitment to Change Initiative exemplifies the community service spirit of the credit union movement." The movement unites credit unions with one voice to make a positive impact for communities they serve, he said. The North Liberty-based credit union’s pledge is the first and largest of its kind to the initiative, which is led by the Young Professionals of AACUC. The nonprofit was incorporated in St. Louis in 1999 and is now based in Snellville, Ga. "We at AACUC are convinced that the first order of business is for communities of color to become economically self-sufficient, and financial inclusion is at the core of what we do," stated Renée Sattiewhite, president and CEO of AACUC. Greenstate Credit Union has more than 240,000 members in Iowa.
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YESTERDAY IN INNOVATION IOWA
Think like a technology company, 3C webinar says to small businesses
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One month after releasing its findings on the digital safety net for small businesses, the Connected Commerce Council (3C) hosted Iowa businesses, community supporters and State Auditor Rob Sand in a webinar exploring how small businesses and individuals used technology tools to stay operating during the initial COVID-19 pandemic shutdown. Read more
Sign up for the Business Record's weekly innovationIOWA e-newsletter.
Read more at innovationia.com.
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NEWS BRIEFS
Teddy Maroons becomes D.M.’s first Whiskey River
Des Moines Register: Opened to much anticipation on Des Moines' Ingersoll Avenue business strip in late 2018, Teddy Maroons is no more. Founded under the auspices of the Orchestrate Hospitality group, the pub and bistro is now Des Moines' first branch of the Whiskey River chain, which was launched in Ames in 2010 and established an outpost in Ankeny in 2016. Nicki Romare, who with husband Joe founded Whiskey River, said she began talking to one of Teddy Maroon's founding partners, Kolby Jones, early this year about the switchover. Former managing partner Chris Diebel of Orchestrate bowed out and Romare is now working with Jones in the new venture.
Quad Cities telemarketers must pay $820,000 for fraud
Quad-City Times: A Scott County judge has ordered a Quad Cities-based telemarketing operation to pay a judgment of more than $820,000 for defrauding small business owners in at least 13 states, according to a release by the Iowa Attorney General. District Judge Mark Fowler found in the ruling that Misty Barnes, Paul Michael Barnes and their businesses had committed 19 violations of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act. In February 2020, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller sued the Barneses and their companies, PM Specialties and Milestone Consulting. The allegations included a range of violations, including cold-calling consumers and falsely saying they had past-due bills that needed immediate payment; selling nonexistent services; and making unauthorized charges to customers’ credit card accounts.
COVID-19 drug remdesivir fully approved by FDA
Wall Street Journal: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted a full final approval to Gilead Sciences Inc.’s remdesivir, making it the first COVID-19 treatment deemed safe and effective by the regulator, the company said Thursday. Remdesivir has been widely used to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients since May, when it received a provisional clearance from regulators known as an emergency-use authorization.
- Appeals court: Uber, Lyft must treat California drivers as employees (New York Times)
- U.S. airlines report a 70% hit to revenue last quarter (New York Times)
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ONE GOOD READ
Getting serious about diversity: Enough already with the business case
BY EMILY BARSKE: As diversity issues within business have become paramount while movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have swept the country, underrepresented people have brought to light the need to not just be represented, but to be included and valued as important team members. It’s why it’s so important that leaders are trained in this area, but further, that they know how to take that learning to develop a better culture within their organizations. "Educating oneself is important, but it will be meaningless unless leaders take the next step: investigating how their organization’s culture has reproduced systems of oppression, undercutting some groups’ opportunities to thrive and succeed, while giving others a boost," Robin J. Ely and David A. Thomas write in the Harvard Business Review. The authors debunk the business case often made for diversifying your company and leadership, which is that more diversity helps your bottom line. Through a scholarly lens, they argue, there might be correlation but not direct causation. The reason to diversify your company is because inequality is bad – why do we need any other argument than that? "If company profits come at the price of our humanity, they are costing us too much," they write.
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In recovery, investing in the region will bring long-term growth
Speaker James Chung, President, Reach Advisors
Watch the video and hear for yourself the insights into Greater Des Moines recently offered by James Chung, a data analyst who advises cities on their strengths, weaknesses, and challenges. The takeaways will be discussed by leaders for months to come as the region seeks to become more resilient, including his challenge to continue investing in the region coming out of a recession and to focus on diversifying the population. FULL ARTICLE >
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KCCI TOP STORIES
State unveils new system for victims to track rape kits online
Iowa now has a system that will allow sexual assault victims to track the status of their rape kits. As recently as 2017, more than 4,200 rape kits went untested as evidence. Most have now been tested due to federal government grants. To keep such a backlog from occurring again, the state of Iowa will now use the Track-Kit System. The system tags and tracks all rape kits from the time they're taken from a hospital or clinic. It also allows victims to track the kit online. Some victim advocates say Track-Kit could help survivors feel like they finally have control, unlike they may have felt before. Read more
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Today:
Mostly cloudy skies. Much colder. High 42. Winds NNW at 15 to 25 mph.
Tonight:
Mostly cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. Low 24. Winds N at 10 to 20 mph.
Get the latest KCCI weather.
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MOBILE SPEED UNIT LOCATIONS
Today:
1600 block of Indianola Avenue
3100 block of Park Avenue
3600 block of Southwest 14th Street
See the full week's listing on the Des Moines Police Department's Facebook page.
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BUSINESS RECORD IOWA INDEX
The Iowa Index is an unweighted average of all Iowa-based public companies. Below is a live look at those Iowa companies, plus additional companies with large operations in Iowa.
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