Minneapolis businesses, community groups partner to for Adopt a Youth Worker program

As the temperature heats up, so does crime, especially the kind involving guns.

The youngest victim in the latest surge in Minneapolis shootings was a 15-year-old girl who was taken to the hospital. Police arrested a 14-year-old boy and a 15-year-old in the Loring Park neighborhood early Sunday morning.

"It seems like it gets worse every summer," Lisa Clemons, founder of A Mother's Love Initiative, said.

Clemons responds to many of these shooting scenes. She says they keep seeing younger and younger shooting victims and suspects.

"So I just try to do my part to reduce the violence and invest in young people so that they can see what they can be," Clemons said.

A Mother's Love has partnered with businesses and community groups for its Adopt a Youth Worker program.

Fifty young people are working at seven locations throughout north and south Minneapolis. Their salaries are paid by community donations.

"We employ 12 to 18, so that's the group that is getting into these cars and picking up guns, and we are trying to break that cycle," Clemons said.

Some of the youngsters work inside the Cub Foods in north Minneapolis.

"So they go over and bag for tips," Clemons said.

Another group of young people is learning to be entrepreneurs. It's a four-part series that ends with them building their own lemonade stand.

Kids also work at V3 Sports, Salvation Army and Wolf Pack Productions, where they are learning how to design and press T-shirts.

"This is my way of preventing and intervening in violence and breaking those generational cycles of trauma," Clemons said.

Last month, Minneapolis police launched a specialized unit to investigate non-deadly shootings. Before that, homicide investigators had those cases added to their workload due to staffing shortages.