Made in Ramsey County: Elpis Enterprises

Tell us about your company. How did it get started, and what do you make? 
Elpis Enterprises is a youth workforce development program that works with 16-24 year olds who are experiencing homelessness, exiting foster care, or have other barriers through the justice system preventing them from entering the workforce immediately. Elpis started in the late 90s to provide social enterprises for our youth interns to gain their workforce development skills. These social enterprise programs include woodworking, screen printing, textile work, and our newly introduced photography and videography programs.

What makes your product(s) unique or notable? 
Our birdfeeders have been made with nearly 10,000 fourth graders across the Twin Cities with our Land of 10,000 Birdfeeders program, visiting hundreds of classrooms across the cities over the last four years.  

What do you enjoy most about being located in Ramsey County? 
Our proximity to our business partners helps us to set up tours at their businesses and quarterly networking events that make it easy for us to travel outside the workplace and have our partners come to us for their orders.

How does your company contribute to the local community or workforce? 
The training for our interns helps them create t-shirts or make bird feeders that go to our business partners and get sold in the community.  

What’s something people might be surprised to learn about your company or product? 
We work with over hundreds of businesses in the Twin Cities, printing their merchandise in our screen printing shop. We've printed shirts for numerous schools in the Cities as well as the Sanneh Foundation, and many more.