This is a transcript from Cassie Holmes’s testimony at a Minnesota House committee hearing on March 1, 2023.

My name is Cassie Holmes. My spirit name is Niiwin Muck-Wa Ikwe, Four Bears Woman, she/her. Most importantly, I want to just jump right in, we’re coming to the committee with facts that are from the Department of Transportation, the Department of Health.

And all those dots that you see that accumulated in the East Phillips neighborhood and the North Side, and excuse me, because I'm emotional, but those dots are faces. They’re not just dots on that map. One of those dots was my son. His name was Trinidad Flores, and he died from environmental injustice and racism. He had a heart condition at 14 he wasn't born with and died at 16 years old.

My best friend, who I grew up with, her daughter, early twenties, just had her second child, went into the hospital because she thought she had congestion and never came home. She died from a heart condition she wasn’t born with. Also raised in Little Earth and East Phillips. So we’re not just coming to you guys with all these facts, because they’re important, and believe me, they are. But because we are burying our children, we're burying our loved ones from environmental racism and injustice. And you guys know that. And you see it daily.

I wanted to share that because we need opportunities, we need jobs. We need to do better for for our kids. We need to do better for our community. And this committee, when they gave the $319,000 to EPNI, I want to let you know what Little Earth did with that funding. We got $30,000 of that funding and every penny of it went to the Little Earth farm, our little farm in the back.

And we were able to hire children. Our children who are missing school because of asthma. Our children who are missing school because they didn't have the funds or their parents didn't have the funds to buy them nice school clothes. So they skipped school. So what we did was we took those kids and we hired them from ages 5 to 17.

They came in and they asked for a job application. They filled it out. They had met with our executive director Jolene Jones at the time, and they were hired on the spot to work our farm. And to see them kids so happy to come out, they were able at the end of that summer to buy their own school clothes.

They had $300 to buy their own school clothes and I, along with other community members, took them shopping and to see them kids catching that very first school bus during the very first day they were in the garden waiting for the bus with their new clothes, talking about all the stuff they learned while they were growing food in the in the garden. All the stories that they learned from the elders and about the medicine, and to see them so successful and excited to go to school.

And every year since then, we’ve had more kids apply for that job. Up to 70 kids now, and they get $500 each. They get 300 for school clothes, 100 to do whatever they want to do with it, and 100 to take their family out on a family night.

These are the kind of opportunities that this would create in our community, but on a much larger scale, if we are successful. And we can be successful, we've proven that.