ST. PAUL, Minn. -- With less than two months to go until Super Bowl 52, the Minnesota Super Bowl Host Committee Legacy Fund continued their 52 Weeks of Giving campaign.
The campaign is a yearlong effort to make Super Bowl 52 a statewide event--awarding 52 communities with grants focused on improving the health and wellness of Minnesota's youth.
On Tuesday, CLUES (Comunidades Latinas Unidas en Servicio) in St. Paul was awarded a $100,000 grant that will help them build a teaching kitchen.
"We were built 36 years ago for Latinos by Latinos," said Ruby Lee, president of the nonprofit. "Our programs and services connect families to resources, skills, institutions, and systems and create an environment for people to be engaged and empowered."
The teaching kitchen will help Latino youth and adults learn about healthy food habits, meal preparation and more. The facility will be part of a larger project to expand its headquarters in St. Paul.
"The building expansion is doubling the size of our current headquarters in St. Paul so that we can create more classrooms, create more opportunities for educational enrichment," Lee said.
St. Paul Mayor-elect Melvin Carter attended the grant announcement and said, "My hope is that the Super Bowl is an opportunity really for two things: For people who come into town from around the world to see how amazing St. Paul is and for our residents... to get a chance to participate in some of the Super Bowl activities."
CLUES expansion will cost about seven million dollars. Lee said they still need about one million dollars more in private funding.
They plan to break ground in the spring and be open by 2019.