Need help finding housing or financial aid? Minnesota’s growing number of hubs support families.

One woman sought help applying for the state’s Medicaid program. Another had an appointment for the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) food program. Kids pretended to chop plastic vegetables and zoomed trucks as their parents talked with service providers.

They came to the Family Resource Center in Shakopee on a recent morning, knowing workers there could help them get what they needed — and find aid that they hadn’t known about.

Different versions of these one-stop hubs are popping up across Minnesota, connecting families and parents-to-be with services that support their health, well-being and economic stability. Some, like the Shakopee center, are backed by philanthropy. Another nine community resource centers, from Hibbing to Worthington, recently received state grants.

But state grants for the centers end in June 2027 and Gov. Tim Walz’s proposed budget doesn’t include money beyond that date, something supporters of the centers had hoped to see.

State and local government officials say improving access to programs and building community connection prevents families struggling with poverty or other challenges from entering the child protection system due to neglect or maltreatment.

Jennifer Compeau, of East Grand Forks, said her life could have been different if she had access to a community resource center in her early 20s when she discovered her son had a rare liver disease. She didn’t have good advice or many people to lean on, and spiraled down, she said.

She stopped work as she sought Medical Assistance, the state’s Medicaid program, and benefits for her son. She started drinking a lot, became increasingly discouraged, entered abusive relationships, lost her father and “leaned into meth.” Child protection got involved and eventually she lost custody of her son.

Compeau ended up homeless, addicted, living out of her vehicle and piecing together aid.

“I had dreamed of a community resource center” at the time, she said. “There needs to be a place where all of this [assistance] and connection is available to someone to help them. Because it is so much work to be … beaten down, just with no hope, nothing, and then to try to survive.”

Compeau, 36, is now a family resource coordinator for a Polk County Family Resource Center in East Grand Forks and serves on the state’s Community Resource Center Advisory Council. The center regularly helps families find child care, food and transportation, she said, but she could be assisting with anything from a lost birth certificate to a scholarship application for a child’s school trip.

Lawmakers devoted more than $7 million to community resource centers in the current state budget. Organizations getting grant dollars include nonprofits, a health care provider, Hennepin County and the White Earth Band of Chippewa. The state dollars don’t necessarily mean new bricks-and-mortar locations. In St. Paul, the Wilder Foundation, for example, is using its grant to add staffing at existing programs to help families navigate resources.

“The point of community resource centers is to provide support for people without sending them necessarily into the system — into the child protection system, into the social welfare system,” said Rebecca St. George, assistant commissioner of child safety and permanency at the Department of Children, Youth and Families. She called the centers “one of the most exciting things we’re doing.”

Offering families a space to get care and assistance from people who understand their culture and won’t be judgmental can stop problems before they start, she said.

Various versions of community resource centers have started across Minnesota in recent years with the help of government and philanthropic dollars. But funding is often temporary, center supporters said.

A decade ago, the state started putting money toward full service community schools, which bring resources for adults and kids into schools. That idea got injections of federal and state dollars in the past few years.

The state also received some federal funding a few years ago to support community resource hubs, similar to community resource centers. The federal dollars ended in 2023.

And in 2021, Scott County opened its first family resource center with backing from the Sauer Family Foundation. That type of resource center follows a certain framework and standards, is guided by a parent advisory council and is part of a national network.

Since then, family resource centers have taken off across Minnesota. Sixteen centers are open across seven counties, said Emma Mogendorff, with the foundation. About 30 other counties are going through the process to potentially open their own family resource centers.

“We had no idea how quickly this was going to grow,” said Sauer Family Foundation Executive Director Colleen O’Keefe.

The foundation has spent almost $5 million so far on centers and has millions more dedicated in the years ahead, she said. While the foundation is slated to close in 2028, O’Keefe said funds were approved to continue supporting centers for about a decade.

Pulling together money from a mix of sources — federal, state and local governments, and businesses — will be key to sustaining the work, said Suzanne Arntson, deputy director of Scott County Health and Human Services.

While they can’t say definitively that family resource centers are improving child protection outcomes, Arnston said Scott County has seen a drop in the number of kids being removed from their homes in recent years. She said money saved through that trend is being put toward prevention efforts like centers.

“Rather than picking people out of the river once they’ve fallen in, how do we go upstream and figure out why they are falling in in the first place?” she said.

At the Family Resource Center in Shakopee on a recent Thursday, Maria Rosas was one of the several moms stopping by for WIC appointments. Her children were measured and got blood tests. She found out about the location through the hospital where she delivered her son and has been coming for months.

Workers at the resource center said it can be intimidating for people to go to Scott County’s main government center, where one of the first things they might see are the courts.

“It’s more accessible,” Rosas said through a translator, as her daughter colored at a nearby table. ”They are very friendly here. … It feels more cozy."