 And we will post the recording there as well. So also just something I wanted to mention too. So I had been in contact with Kathy Strombach from the North Dakota tax department, office of the tax commissioner and the sales tax report should be out today. And so maybe that's something you in your community want to pay attention to. I suspect there'll be a positive increase in local sales tax just based on things I'm hearing and seeing. And so that report should be out today. And I might want to consider some kind of shop at home campaign or what those numbers mean for your community. I suspect it'd be quite positive. So with that, we have three speakers lined up for today to share resources with all of you. The first one, Scott Meyer, and I'll have Scott introduce himself. He'll speak first. And then Lori Sapoos from the rural development. She's a rural development director, the North Dakota Association of Rural Recovery Cooperatives, and then Jessica Hayek from the Rural Farmers Union. So with that, Scott, would you introduce yourself and please share the resources regarding the NICE Center? Yeah. Hey everyone. Scott Meyer here. Great to have you all. Good morning. I hope that you're all doing your best to get through this. I think Danielle, if you want to mute real quick, I think that's a good little echo there. So it is, I am the executive director of entrepreneurship at the NICE Center at North Dakota State University. The NICE Center is the entrepreneurship center where we help both students, faculty, and community members to launch their ideas. And what we found is in this time of COVID, it's become kind of the rapid reaction force. We're really thinking about how can a university be mobilized to help the community when we think about the problems we're facing it's not just health issues, but also social, economic, and of course a lot of businesses. And so we kind of saw an opportunity to help businesses digitize. So we have a team, two full-time employees and then a team of 13 student workers. And we thought we could help businesses get online and promote their products and services digitally, more effectively. So we launched that shortly after my birthday, March 20th. And then we've helped about 50 businesses across the state of North Dakota so far. I either launch websites, digital marketing campaigns, getting their inventory online. And that's been really successful. So I'd love to show you a little bit about how you and your communities could take advantage of that. And then a few other resources and then definitely open for any questions you might have. So I'll go ahead and share my screen if that's all right, Jody. And let's see, so you might have to enable or make me a presenter if you want me to share my screen. I'll put the link in the chat though, why would you do that? So if you go to the nicecenter.org slash COVID and all the businesses have to do to be able to take advantage of this is fill out a quick form and we give them a call back and we'll talk to them for even five, 10 minutes just to get a sense of what they're trying to do and the best approach. We're finding that we can answer the questions really quickly for a lot of them like even within one phone call we're able to help a lot of them get direction. But people who need support, our team does all of that for them free of charge. So our student teams are building the sites, they're creating the marketing campaigns and so we see it as a really positive experience for these students to not only learn how to help launch a business but also to feel proactive in their communities being able to help them out. So that's one opportunity I would definitely recommend you can share among your communities. When you think about people who this would be good for it might be for your local stores who don't have an online store, could be for restaurants who are trying to take, pick up or delivery orders. Anyone who has a larger inventory we can help them get that started or someone who's already online but trying to do more. Some of the more interesting campaigns we helped a bar here in Fargo take their trivia night digital so they're doing digital trivia. We help the game store in town get all their games online so people could buy games and puzzles for their families and get them delivered locally. So those are all kind of different examples of what's possible. So I'll show you what this site looks like just so you can kind of see it and know where you're going. So you can probably see my screen now. You can see we're at the nicecenter.org slash COVID. Again, we're at North Dakota State but we work all across the state and we should have a link right at the top on COVID right there. So you can just click that and we have a couple of different programs we're doing. So the one I just mentioned is this digital support for local business. So you can direct your businesses or if you have a business yourself feel free to take advantage. We're typically responding within 24 to 48 hours on the weekdays. So pretty quick turnaround and all are welcome. We'll tell you if we can't help you but so far we've done pretty well. Another opportunity I would recommend is we are doing all month we're doing a weekly creativity and isolation series. And so this is all about helping people who are working from home to be creative and to stay mentally healthy as well. So there's a four part series. Last week we did our first one. It would really highly recommend you can go back and watch the video. It's on mental health and isolation. So it's with a veteran who went through a lot of his own mental health challenges and now actually takes people to the outdoors as a way to improve mental health. And so he talks about how we can stay sane and how we can also give ourselves a little bit of cut ourselves a little bit of slack in these times. Today is our second session at 1 p.m. central with Matt DeCure. So he is a friend of mine who started a company and he's worked by himself for a year and a half and he's talking all about how to work alone without being lonely. So you can check all of that out as well at the NiceCenter.org under the COVID link. And you probably have all heard from the governor but we're also helping them promote their Care 19 contact tracing apps. I'd recommend if you have an iPhone you can download that right now and the Android's coming out very soon as well. So those are a few quick things that we're doing at the NiceCenter. I think the bottom line is we see ourselves as people who are helping generate ideas but also helping people survive, right? So we need to help entrepreneurs that are already out there working. And anyway, we can do that. We would love to chat and share that with you. We have a lot of other ideas we're trying to do over the course of the coming months and years. So any support or help or ideas you have, please share them with us because we're here to really bring your ideas to life. So Jodi, I can go deeper but maybe we can open up for questions there if we want and happy to answer anything. Thank you, Scott. Appreciate that sharing that information. Does anyone have any questions for Scott or the NiceCenter, how that works? Hey, Scott, this is Rebecca. I'm good. How are you? I'm good. This is Rebecca from Oaks. I've already referred a few of our businesses to you. It's really awesome. This is a really, really awesome resource for especially those that have zero web presence, right? I'm wondering if, I just wanna be sure that I understand the scope though of other things that this group might be willing to do. So you mentioned marketing or just general promotion. So we have a few businesses that do a really great job with their general, maybe it's Facebook but primarily Facebook around here but I think they might be at a point where they could use a little extra capacity getting a creative just on the marketing side of it. So using their asset, is that something that your team would do or is it really just more about getting them onto a web presence whether it's a website or social media? Yeah, the way we're sort of thinking about it is we're not gonna be good at any ongoing work but if it's a one-time thing that's a fit for us whether it's design or strategy or setup. And so yeah, if you want someone to do your Facebook page or to send your emails, like then that's where we'd wanna refer you to a marketing agency that's also trying to make it, right? But I think we're really gonna be there to just point that people in the right direction and say, yes, you're doing this right or you could do this instead. I think the biggest advice we've found is that we're helping people realize what options they have already. So if they have a point of sales system like a restaurant or a retail store, there's a lot of ways that they can actually just launch a store with that POS system very quickly. So what's the easiest way to get them up online and then we can give them ideas on how to improve it but I'll tell you right now, the first thing we always do is we give people like a really easy assignment because we wanna make sure they're willing to do a little bit of work themselves. So we wanna help the businesses, we wanna teach them to fish essentially, so. But yes, I'd say send anyone our way and we can always tell them like, here's some other people who could help but we'll do our best. Well, I appreciate that and I think it's good. When I think about referring somebody to you if there is that pre-assignment, we have some business owners that like literally don't use a web presence like I said, of any kind, right? So if I know that you're gonna have them, we could maybe be that source for them for that first step, even to help them figure that first thing out so then they're really ready to work with you. That helps me a lot because I think, I get that you're not gonna do marketing plans for them ongoing, but I just wasn't sure if, I wasn't sure how much you would support in the way of marketing right now, just on the creative side of things because you kinda have to think of the outside of the box right now. Yeah, no, we're definitely able to help and I think we're learning a lot by seeing a lot of businesses, right? So that helps us to be able to recommend different strategies. So we've helped everything from like a music teacher who's doing virtual music classes to an artist who's trying to sell their paintings online to restaurants, bars. Cody had asked about restaurants in retail, like what kind of hardware would they need for order processing? So we would actually be able to set someone up if they don't have anything on site. So if they're trying to sell nails online, like we could set them up with a store even if they don't have that capability in-house, but most stores, even people who aren't online have some kind of system in-house that they are using for credit card readers. And often it's easiest to build your site off of that because all your inventory is already in that square device or in the toast device if it's a restaurant or in the BNG thing or whatever it might be. So that's a great question from Cody and yeah, that's one way we can help too. And I'll just give, oh, go ahead, Mikayla. Or yeah, did you have a question, Mikayla? Sorry, okay, sorry. I was just gonna give a quick plug. We are working on another program we're really excited about. And I think this audience is perfect to help us help realize that. And we're really interested at the nice center of also thinking about entrepreneurship at the high school and middle school levels and how we can get more students to think about this. So that's one kind of opportunity we're just starting to look at. And so I'm gonna put a link in the chat to a program we're conceptualizing called Nice Idea. And so if you are someone in your community is interested in kind of bringing this idea, essentially what we're looking at is a community idea competition. So students would get a problem that's facing a local business or local government and then they would have a chance to come up with a solution to that problem. And then all the solutions would be in a statewide competition to figure out which ones are best for winning money and resources to actually make them happen. So we're really trying to take this idea of right now we're getting our college students involved in their communities to take action. But then how do we extend that to high school and maybe middle school to say, here's things our communities are facing. You already have the talents and knowledge to help. And so let's just encourage you to do that by giving you a little training on entrepreneurship, a mentor to help you out and then like a competition to incentivize you. So I just put that link in the chat right now we're calling it Nice Idea. So if you go to the nicecenter.org slash Nice Idea there's a little video. And really what we're looking for here is people to join our steering committee. And that could be a teacher, a community leader, someone working in the chamber, like a lot of you are. So I just wanted to share that because that could be a way for us to take this program that we're doing right now and actually extend it a lot further and help those high schoolers learn some of this stuff so they can do it on their own and hopefully then use it for their own business ideas down the road. So we'd love your help with that too. Thank you, Scott. I think it's very timely. I think all the research that's coming out in regards to community development and economic development is that, you know, the old concept of the big get and going up the big business is a thing of the past. We need to be better at growing our own entrepreneurs and starting in grade school and high school is really what we need to be doing as community members. So I think that's all really timely. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, of course. So if there's any other questions for Scott, type them in the chat box and I'll stay on and answer. So yeah, feel free to share them and you can always email us or just go to the nice center.org the contacts probably the easiest there and we'll answer. So if you have questions or ideas, just go there and help them and we'll connect. Perfect, thank you. Great. So our next speaker, Laurie Sapoo, will give a brief presentation. And again, Laurie is here from, she's a Rural Development Director of North Dakota Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives and Laurie and her shop has been, they've been very instrumental in addressing the local rural grocery store issue. And so I think it's interesting what's happening in many of the rural grocery stores I'm following on Facebook in this interesting time that we're in. So I thought Laurie could give some interesting perspective to what's going on with that. So Laurie, welcome and thank you. Well, thank you, Joey, for thinking of including rural food access and rural brochures in this conversation. We appreciate it. I'm just going to give a little background and then I'm going to share with you some of the resources we've been sharing with the grocers to help you think about ways you may be able to interact within your communities. And I'm also going to talk a little bit about the supply chain and give some understanding of what might be happening there as well. So we've been tracking the health of the rural grocery sector for the past six years and we initially set out to identify opportunities to improve sustainability, but instead we bumped into this deep decline in the number of our grocery stores. And so we have used the data that we've collected through three different surveys to document that decline and some of the factors behind that decline and we've shared it with the state legislature and they approved a study during the last legislative session. And so they're in the process of determining what the state should do, what their role should be in the distribution and the transportation of food to rural places. So anyone wanting to track the study progress, it is SCR 4013. So over the past six years, we've lost about 20% of our rural stores. We only have 98 stores remaining in communities of 2,100 people or less. And so of course in North Dakota, that's the majority of our 300 towns in reality. And of those 98, 15 are nonprofits and 10 to 15 are on the brink of closing at the current time. And although this number fluctuates and given the current increases in volumes due to the pandemic and people shopping locally, those numbers of stores that are in threat of closing should improve just a little bit for a while. And so we're concerned about local food access for several different reasons and having local food access during an emergency was one of those reasons. And we really didn't expect to have a test run of that but here we are and we did. So we are currently conducting a survey of the rural grocers at this time to determine what the impacts of the virus has had on their operations and whether there's any support needed. And so our grocers are cash strapped and they're short of labor. They're dealing with the surge in sales and changing operating practices is a challenge for them right now. They haven't been able to add more labor in most cases. And so we've been pushing out information as it becomes available. One piece that we developed was in partnership with the University of Minnesota. I should say they developed. We just provided some input. And it's a 14 day emergency meal kit. You can access that on the NDARUC website. This meal plan, it's a meal plan and a shopping list for one person for 14 days of shelf stable, healthy, affordable foods. It's intended to help grocers adequately stock their shelves and to serve as a guide for volunteer groups that are interested in getting foods to those who are unable to shop for themselves. We also shared information with grocers on how to implement curbside pickup. I know a few have moved to this offering and some may need help because they are short staffed. And most also do not have online shopping capacity which makes this task all the harder for them to do. Worker protection is a concern as well and having adequate protection supplies and that we're with all to offer that protection. And in Minnesota, they're reaching out to church quilters to make masks to protect the workers. This might be something that we could also initiate locally. There are SBA disaster programs that grocers should be looking into. The COVID-19 disaster loan program provides up to $10,000 of a forgivable loan. If the terms are met, it's not forgivable if they also participate in the payroll protection program but the terms for that then would be forgivable or the terms are still favorable, I should say. And the payroll protection program is another one and it provides funds for payroll and rents, mortgages, employee protection costs and other miscellaneous items. And this loan is forgivable again if all conditions are met. And we have had some feedback from the grocers that it isn't as simple as it might seem to access or complete the paperwork for these programs. So a contact from a local developer, an extension agent or a banker to get them the right assistance might be welcome at this time. There's also a new farm to grocery toolkit that the University of Minnesota just released. It's predicted that we're going to experience produce shortages over the next year. And some of this will be a result of the difficulty of getting workers across the border, making it impossible to harvest some of the handpicked crops that are ripe right now, such as blueberries. Some of it will be because of the difficulties imported from other countries and their own supply shortages that they're experiencing. There's an increased push to beef up the local commercial gardeners in your area to help supply the grocery stores during this upcoming growing season. And so, Joe, I don't know if you've been able to share the, I see that you're sharing the links. I've put together where you can find this information. And so again, it's from Minnesota, this toolkit and some people may find a lot of it useful although some of our regulations might vary just a bit. And you've probably been hearing about some news about supply chain disruptions and initially it's been a switch from commercial to residential, our consumption. And so as we shifted to in-home dining to and working from home, the types of products being produced by manufacturers needed to shift to make sure there's adequate supply for everyone. And so then rather than commercial size packaging of toilet paper or mayonnaise, we're now requiring more of the residential customer size. And so this is gradually working itself out. Manufacturers are also temporarily revising their product lines which is gonna lead to the appearance of sparsely stock shelves temporarily. They're now producing more of their more popular items and discontinuing production of their least popular items. So some items might be difficult to find for a little while. And now we'll begin experiencing other types of supply chain disruptions as the workforce is affected by the virus and may cause temporary shutdown such as the pork plant and soup falls that we're all just now starting to hear about and at least 10 other meat plants in North America that have been shut down. Another issue that's going to affect supply is the tie of producers to specific markets. So for example, farmers who produce for the restaurant market are now tilling their crops under because of the demand being down and there's in the buyer for their produce or they're just so tied to their supply chain it's difficult for them to get their product in short term to another supply chain. So in the meantime, while that supply is down on the restaurant side food banks demand is up by 40%. So the nation's food chain is primarily a just in time economy. We don't stock some of the products or we do stocks in products with long shelf lives but not the perishable foods. So this destruction of the product will most likely lead to shortages because our consumption hasn't changed but to change just where we're securing our food from. Trickle down unexpected consequence of the grocery supply woes is the closure of some small restaurants and while I should say small town restaurants. And so the wholesale food supply is volume based and it's volume based because many small restaurants purchase their supplies from their grocery store. I should say it's volume based and so since they're so small they're not able to secure their products typically from a supplier they need to get it through their grocery store. And when the store is unable to get their product it led to the closure of the restaurants. And these restaurants are depended on for truckers and other essential workers in our communities as well as in some places it's the senior meals. So the Commerce Department has been working on getting them back up and running and getting the food to them. We've also heard that big box store suppliers are more apt to get product over grocery suppliers which may be why you're able to find products more easily at Walmart versus a cash wise. And I'm simply using trade names here I'm not really calling anybody else specifically. And we do have 10% of our surveys back already we got them back in the first day. The grocers are concerned about getting wholesale products in the future. They are concerned about keeping their employees and the public safe. They are still having difficulties in securing paper products. The wholesale prices for dairy and meat have increased quite a bit. Local shopping like Jody had referred to has increased in some locations by over 100% based on the small sample that we've received back. And while grocers are really thankful for this increase in volume, they're really concerned that shopping habits are gonna return back to normal once the pandemic threat is cast. So this emergency has really highlighted the importance of local access to healthy foods and the need to bring some of our production back locally to bolster the sustainability of our rural grocery sector we need to continue to develop ways to concentrate our buying power for rural areas to keep our product affordable and accessible in rural places. And we could also benefit by producing more locally. I'd be happy to take any questions if there are any. Lori, there was one question from Scott in the chat. If you could see that. Has the pandemic led to any conversations about the importance of subsidizing local grocers? Groceries either now or continuing to the future to keep options available for rural residents. Has that come up? You know, so the study bill SCR 4013 in essence is somewhat a conversation about that. This test run of the, it's not even a test run. This emergency has given us the opportunity to collect data to show the need for rural access to our legislators to document that demand. So hope we, it hasn't brought up that conversation yet but I'm hoping that it will continue. I mean, specifically related to the pandemic. All right, thank you, Lori, for that insight. Anybody have any questions for Lori in regards to rural grocers? I did post the North Dakota NDA REC link in the chat as well as a resource page Lori created and that's also located there. I do see the one question who are the legislative members. Jodi, can I just share it with you after the call the link to the study members so you can share it with the group? Sure, we can get that posted when we have to do that. Yes. Great. Thanks, Lori. Just so we don't miss these, we have a couple of questions coming in about the idle program and Cody responded to that. And then thank you, Bob, for your post as well. So I know we have Bob and Mike both on representing, who won't say representing, but are in the banking industry. Could we just talk about that for a minute? What else you're seeing? And maybe we could help Julie with her question. Julie is in Lisbon. Well, I just, this is the first customer that I just got an email from this morning that it applied for the idle loan that it indicated they had a response and that was the response that she had gotten. Now she's self-employed as a beautician. So she has, her employee is herself. So I really don't know a lot about that program other than Al Hout on a webinar earlier or one day last week did indicate that a lot of information that was being disseminated by different groups were insinuating that it was an automatic $10,000 advance to anyone that applied. And, but that was not coming from the SBA. The SBA verbiage is that it's up to $10,000. So I don't have a lot more information or understanding of that particular program other than what I just shared here. Thank you, I appreciate that. I didn't mean to put anybody on the spot but it's just an opportunity to share what we're seeing out there. Thank you for that. I'm gonna go back and ask Gloria a quick question. So I received an email from Mary Stump from your office. Is that in regards, is that, who is that open to and what are you hoping to gather? That's not the grocers, our survey, is it? It is. Yeah. So that went specifically to the No Grocery Initiative Task Force and that would be why you got that Jody and then the grocers themselves. So is it fair to say we would, we should encourage everyone on the call to reach out to your local grocers and ask them to respond to the survey? Well, that would be helpful. It's a quick survey, it will take less than 10 minutes. They don't need to access any of their data it should be off the top of their head. Information. And I've heard that their email is just full right now that it's difficult for them to keep up. Okay. All right. If there are no further questions, I would ask Jessica, if you're ready, could you, I can share my screen and show the website that I asked you just to touch on if you're ready. Yeah, I'm here. All right. Thank you. You can introduce yourself and. Okay. Hi everyone. I'm Jessica Hake. I'm the membership director here at North Dakota Farmers Union. And the site that Jody is going to share with you is one that we put together with partner organizations. So essentially what we were finding is that we were receiving a lot of phone calls from people who had a lot of questions but were coming to North Dakota Farmers Union as a trusted resource and somebody that they know and they know is involved in legislative work and advocacy and they've been to our events and they trusted us. And so when there's so much information out there, it's really hard to navigate it if it's a place that you've never, a space that you've never experienced before. And a lot of the people that were giving us a call were people in the service industry, whether they were hairstylists or bartenders or whatever it might be. This is a space that they haven't really experienced filing these things before. So what we did is in close conversations with people that we do a lot of advocacy work with is we decided to create a landing space for all of the resources that are available should someone find themselves out of a job or underemployed if you will where they can find what they're looking for items that they didn't even know they might qualify for. And then we as a group, so if you go to partner organizations under more, yeah, so these are all of the organizations that came together and sort of lifted up the voices that the feedback that we were hearing from our members and members together. So you have the North Dakota AFL-CIO talking about what's going on with workers, North Dakota United, obviously talking about public employees and teachers, and then us, ACLU, Cascade Food Partners, the Hunger Free Coalition Resource Council, and then housing is a big issue as well, human rights, native vote, and the women's network. So we all got together through the North Dakota Voices Network and we put together what our policy recommendations are to sort of try to make people feel whole and how, so if you could go to the policy recommendations page, please, Joanie, thank you. The discussions that we were having over some of the concerns that people who were laid off were again underemployed and some of the issues that workers that are essential that they're facing right now. So that's kind of all it was in a nutshell is we are the trusted voice and so are our other partner organizations. I mean, if you're active in these organizations, that's who you're gonna fall to if you're not sure how to navigate an application or I've helped people fill out a lot of unemployment applications and some of the loan applications just because they know Farmers Union and they've worked with me in other ways in the past. So that's kind of, we put that all together so that could be a landing space. We are open. I wanted to add that if you scroll all the way to the bottom, if your organization would like to join beyond board and be a part of this and share some of the resources that you guys are creating or using, we're absolutely open to welcoming you there and being able to share. If you wanna click on the resource page, here, I'll share it in the chat. And we have been approached by, you know, Farmers Union has by entities that aren't used to doing advocacy work and so helping them lift up their voices and share their concerns in a constructive way with either their employees or their members, we've been happy to help there. But if you are a group that you are a part of would like to join and just sort of share your resources and the information that's out there and if there's any policy changes that you would like to see that could help communities or how workers and families that find themselves in uncertain situations, as many people do, we'd be happy to add this to our website. Great, thanks for sharing that. And that's really what this call is supposed to be about. Just sharing some resources. I know we are inundated with just news and resources and websites and Zoom calls all day. And so I just wanted this to be an opportunity to share some resources for people. So... But somehow you became, your microphone is off. There you go. Sorry, thanks, Marie. Just wanted to thank Jessica for sharing that and just know that we, you know the opportunity for the call is really just to bring people together to talk about all the resources. We're inundated with that throughout the day for several days now. So it's just another opportunity to seek out some of those resources. So Makayla, I'm gonna call on you. You had a comment in the chat. If you wanna expand on that comment a little bit, introduce yourself and then what you wrote here and what your experience has been. Makayla? Makayla, we can't hear you. Oh, oh, okay. So one thing I see that Garrison, so Makayla is from Garrison. And I think she has been the one posting information on their website. And one thing I think that's pretty important is she had posted that Garrison had only returned or the response for the census has only been at 40%. And so they're encouraging citizens to respond to their census, not to forget about how important that is to our rural communities. So has anybody else in your community been trying to get people to respond to that or do you have other numbers in your communities or how are you promoting that? Promoting it in Jamestown here. And how so, Emily? We have a complete count committee. So through the county and the city, we have different representatives. One of our biggest things right now has actually been we ordered a bunch of stickers with a QR code on them that would lead you directly to the census. And we gave them to all the coffee shops and restaurants and all the people doing takeout. And they put them on all of the boxes or cups or whatever. And so we've been seeing these blue stickers all over. And when people post that they're supporting our local restaurants, they are also showing the census sticker on them. So that's kind of cool. Important message. That's really great. Thank you. So Rutland is less than 40%. We promote it through the county complete count committee. It's also regularly in the paper. Okay. Good. It's important to get that information out. It's vital that our rural communities respond to that census. Okay. I see that Maggie Marsdorf from the Bush Foundation is on. I know they have some resources as well. Can we ask Maggie to speak to that? Yes, please. I'm sorry I didn't see Maggie was on here. Yeah. I was just putting that link on to the chat. Yes. We have quite a large connect list of resources for nonprofits. And there's a number of emergency webs or emergency resources. There's some coming out of North Dakota. We funded the Impact Foundation to support nonprofits. So that connection is on there. We've also provided some funding to what's called the NBN Collective for Native Organizations to get some emergency assistance. I know strength in North Dakota, there's various community foundations that have some emergency resources. So I will put that link into the chat room. I was just doing that as you asked me to, Marie. Thank you. You're welcome. And Maggie, I did have that. I was going to put that in there and then I saw you come on. So I did have it at the ready. So I did just put it in the chat box. Okay. Yeah. If you have other- Oh, there it is. It's twice. Okay. Perfect. You know, we do have what we call our community innovation program and we are getting a number of applications for innovative responses to... There are so many problems. We all know that. So we don't have a ton of new resources, but we are trying to be responsive to those that kind of meet our criteria and can then inform the field as well. So let us know if you have questions about that. We have an inquiry line, or you can just call us directly. It's all on our website. And Maggie, when I was on your website, I was also, I saw an area for like the arts. And so that was unique too, for anyone in the arts, musicians, artists, things like that. Yeah. So look at that. I don't know if that's North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota, but check out those links as well. Thanks, Marie. Thank you for sharing that, Maggie. Appreciate you being on the call. I'm gonna go back and just make sure we have answered all the questions. Dr. Johnson had a question, Lori. I don't know if you have the answer to that in regards to the legislators involved or going back down the chat. Who are the legislative members of the study on the Grocer study? It's a larger committee. It's the Commerce Committee. So I'll share that with you, Jodi, after this call. And perhaps you can just share that link with the rest of the group. Be happy to. Thank you. Okay, so, okay. Micaela's having audio trouble, but that's all right. I just had a question about, I was just curious if anybody else was, looks like Julie's had some struggles with hearing back from SBA. Has anybody else had any other experience or has tried to assist other businesses in your communities? All right. Well, I don't have anything else. Again, I'll just remind you to be wary that the sales tax report for the last quarter should be out today. That might be interesting to see what's happened in the last month for sure in our communities. I, again, am confident that local spending has increased quite a bit. Again, in the chat, I did post a link to Lori's resource page that she has there. And also we'll get that posted on our extension site. And I see Kelly posted something in regards to an update from the region, the Red Cross. Okay, Kelly, yes. Hi, everybody. So the Red Cross wants to thank everybody in the state that donated blood and kept their plasma donations for the last few weeks, because we are back to a normal capacity on blood donation, so that's great. And they're asking that if you can still continue to keep those appointments from the future, that would be helpful as well, but we're no longer in a shortage. The Red Cross's offices are still closed to the public, but we are still responding to emergencies and we've begun to re-offer first aid and CPR classes so that we can keep medical staff certificates current. So the Red Cross is still responding. They're still working to forecast for floods on the eastern side of the state and still plugging forward. Thank you for that update. Thanks, Marie. So Cody, could you, so Cody Cooper is the economic development director in Wishick. He writes that the Wishick JDA just approved a $75,000 budget for $2,500 loans to businesses as far as what we're doing locally to help. Cody, what's the interest rate? Is that some kind of low interest program you're offering businesses and are there regulations on that or what are provisions of that? If I may, I was actually going to ask that as far as regulations go. I know there's the business incentive thing, but to qualify for a business incentive reporting, you have to have a incentive of $25,000 or more. I don't think that we have to report for the $75,000 thing. Our JDA is authorized to do this sort of thing. We give 0% loans out, apparently. Frequently, the way we are structuring it is that they have to sign something that says they were in business on March 16th and substantially affected. You don't want to means test this, trying to get it out as quick as we can. Repayment period, we phrased as beginning three months after North Dakota governor declares North Dakota reopened for business. And we're trying to just do a 25 month repayment period to make it easy, under bucks a month once it starts getting paid. Nice, great. Thanks for sharing that. I'm just a reminder too, I'm sure many of you have accessed that, but the Department of Commerce has a number of those resources posted on their website as well. So don't forget to utilize that resource. So I don't see any other questions. Anybody else have anything to share that's going on in their community? Jody, this is Mel. Hi, Mel. How are you? Hey, doing well. Thank you for joining us. Sam's just gonna tell you that our programs are still there. If you know of anybody, especially with COVID-19, that we do have people with housing loans that are in financial difficulties, they can apply for more touriums. There's deferrals, there is other things. And same thing with our regular programs, whether it's the business programs or the community facility programs, those programs are also available to have some kind of deferral and that type of thing. So please keep us in mind, USDA Rural Development, just find our website. Give us one of a call. A lot of us have been in contact with a lot of yourself. If there's anything you need, please get ahold of us. Thank you. I thought this was like a co-op program between Jersey State, GAI, and Chamber. Could you hear me now, Makayla? Thanks, Mel. So Melanie is with USDA Rural Development. And so don't forget to utilize those resources for Rural Development. Thanks for sharing that. All right, so I will get this posted with the help of some of, well, I think Sonya is on. Sonya will help us get this posted as well as the resources that Lori will email me. Makayla, I see you're still on and I saw something that you were posting. I'm probably gonna catch you off guard here, but you're good. Okay, do you want to talk about that just briefly? Just kind of about the resources that I posted on Facebook. So after our last town hall meeting, I kind of created a resource, sort of just went through our community and figured out what local resources we have to try to keep people staying at home, visiting with all of our grocery stores, finding out that they all do delivery. Our local transit bus is actually doing deliveries now too because they're not taking people to appointments. They're actually delivering in whether it's food or groceries and whatnot. So it's a great service for those that live in small communities that don't have a grocery store in our county or outside of the city limits and can get things delivered. So just a ton of different information, I guess, I put together for my weekly column and then I ended up posting it on Facebook in little posts or whatever and it received a lot of traction. I had a lot of shares and that was really helpful for the community because there's a lot of people that just aren't even aware of all the things that our community is doing to help keep people home and healthy or pharmacy, for instance, and I'm sure many other communities, same thing, they're doing free deliveries and free mailings and just a lot of different things like that. Is that kind of what you were thinking, Jodi? Yes, so Kasia is extension agent in Emmons County. She's located in Linton and I just saw that she had posted a number of resources, just I thought that was a great idea, a way to utilize the county transportation bus. Many counties have that, that take seniors to communities or to doctor appointments or to the grocery store or whatnot and so they're just repurposing and so I thought that was a great thing to share. So thank you for that. I think we underestimate that people know about all of the resources in our communities. So make sure that you're sharing those things with people in multiple resources. Andrea had shared with me yesterday on an email about how various generations are receiving and looking, seeking out information for COVID resources and every generation, as you can imagine, utilizes various sources. So don't forget to reach all of those generations, okay? Whether it be social media or in your local newspaper and maybe it's a community newsletter, whatever format you might use, make sure you're reaching your citizens and letting them know what resources are available to them. Our food banks in our county have done a nice job with trying to get those resources out to people and so that's also an audience we can't forget about. So I don't have anything else unless somebody else has something else to share. It's nice to connect with all of you again. We'll continue to put out resources. So Scott, have you- I was just gonna add, Jody, that the city of Fargo worked with Emerging Prairie, NDSU and some other folks in town to basically make news for short attention spans. So if you want the 32nd version of the governor's daily briefings and any other like proclamations, we basically put those out every day at savesummernow.com and then also on Instagram and Facebook with the same name. So that's a really good one for the young people in your lives. The target for that is like 13 to 24 year olds and so it's very short, high quality video and some funny memes and stuff too. Like we have the couch wear on it meme which went pretty viral there for a while. So we have a lot of fun stuff like that. So we're just trying to encourage those young people especially to continue social distancing but it's also a really great way to get the news. I find myself watching it for a real quick catch up. So definitely check that out and share it. Great, thank you for that. So important. All right, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Stay well. Good to see you. We'll stay in touch. Don't hesitate to reach out if you need something. Thank you. Take care.