So far, this year, the community welcomed such events as:

• United Rentals, Inc. 2019 Meeting and Supplier Show
• Midwest Poultry Federation, Inc. 2019 Annual Convention
• 2019 HITEC Conference
• USA Taekwondo 2019 National Taekwondo Championships
• The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod 2019 Youth Gathering
• 2019 Summer X Games
• Knights of Columbus 2019 Supreme Council Annual Meeting

Some of these groups have garnered local and national media attention and helped raise our profile in the marketplace. Our community has also made headlines based on public safety during the summer months.

As a major metropolitan area, issues like homelessness, public safety, and the environment are often front and center. Meet Minneapolis’ volunteer leaders, staff and stakeholders are deeply engaged in helping to address those issues, with a significantly higher level of attention to public safety for both our residents and our visitors. We commend our partner organizations like the Minneapolis Regional Chamber, Minneapolis Downtown Council, and BOMA Minneapolis for their leadership in raising the profile of our public safety discussion.

To further elevate the discussion around public safety, Meet Minneapolis is currently compiling data based on based on the residential zip codes of our local tourism and hospitality workers. There are approximately 36,000 individuals working in the tourism and hospitality industry in our city, and preliminary results indicate that nearly 50% of those workers live in the city of Minneapolis. Public safety is not just a downtown issue – it affects the lives and livelihoods of our hospitality community – and we hope this ward-by-ward information will provide more data points for our elected officials to consider. Our goal is to ensure that we are focused on both the public safety of our visitors and on the safety of our hospitality and tourism professionals who serve those visitors.

Please let us know if your business would like to provide aggregate demographic data on the zip codes in which your team members live. Please send an email to AshleyA@minneapolis.org to participate.

Moving forward, we will continue focus on securing large and small events for the community, in order to keep our hospitality industry professionals gainfully employed. And while Meet Minneapolis is not the subject matter expert on the appropriate blend of strategies to ensure the safety of our residents and visitors, we will continue to work with our civic, corporate and governmental partners to provide the amenities that our residents and visitors need.