At this month's Immigrant and Refugee Affairs Forum, speakers shared information and resources for immigrant and refugee community members on a variety of important topics, including upcoming changes to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety's customer services and a preview of DEED's legislative priorities for 2023.

Overview of Department of Public Safety's Language Access Program

In the last few years, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety (DPS) has made community engagement a major priority for their agency. By going out and listening to the community through town hall sessions, they were able to identify challenges and come up with solutions so that everyone can have easier access to their services. They quickly learned that Driver & Vehicle Services (DVS) customers who don't speak English as a primary language were facing barriers that resulted in increased time and resources spent on both sides. With this information, they teamed up with Google to enhance the DVS customer-centric service model by providing customers access to services and personalized information 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. By leveraging Google Enterprise translation technologies, DVS will create greater access for more customers through a single integrated system incorporating chat, speech-to text and voice. They plan to implement a chat box feature that offers conversational English, Hmong, Somali and Spanish with more languages to be added in the future. They will also offer text-to-speech and speech-to text options for certain enabled devices.

Preview of DEED's 2023 Legislative Priorities

DEED's Interim Director of Public Engagement, Deven Bowdry, shared a look ahead to DEED's budget planning priorities for the 2023 Legislative session. The 2022 Legislative Session was a supplemental budget year and while DEED proposed several policy and supplemental budget items, including the Office of New Americans, the majority of the agency's requests did not pass. In contrast, in the 2023 Legislative Session, lawmakers will need to pass a biennial budget for FY2024-2025 to fund the state government. The legislature left $7 billion on the bottom line last legislative session so we are anticipating a healthy surplus in the November forecast. DEED wants to hear from community members about how our budget and policy priorities can better support New Americans in the labor force as well as New American entrepreneurs and small business owners. If you have thoughts or questions, please reach out to Deven Bowdry at deven.bowdry@state.mn.us.

Community Updates

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month

Governor Tim Walz has proclaimed October as Disability Employment Awareness Month in Minnesota, recognizing that individuals with disabilities bring skills, experience and talent to the workforce and are a critical part of our economic success. Employers who want to connect to workers with disabilities are invited to utilize resources on CareerForce's website, which lists events, links to hiring and retention resources and more.

Save the Date for the Immigrant and Refugee Job and Career Fair

Thursday, November 3, 2022
1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
CareerForce Saint Paul
540 Fairview Avenue North, Suite 103
St. Paul, MN 55104

More details about this event will be posted on CareerForceMN.com soon.

Employers please visit this page to find out more about participating in this job and career fair.

If you missed this month's forum, access the discussion on DEED's YouTube channel.