Privilege Barber Lounge

My name is Brandon, but I go by B. Cole here in the St. Paul, Minneapolis area. My open privilege barber lounge five years ago. Originally from Chicago, I've been in this neighborhood a long time. I've been cutting this neighborhood a total of 13 years now, from Dell to Victoria. And down on Selby for I was the first one who signed, ready to go. I chose to build out. I chose how we wanted it to look and be. The place I was at before, it was in a solar salon. I was on Hague in St. Albans and it was just time to expand. It was me by myself, so I started with just a one person chair. Now with the two locations, I have 16 chairs. Some barber shops in different neighborhoods, people don't do it anymore. People are going to malls, they're going to I feel We have a couple here, but I have the biggest, we have the biggest barber shop around and we want to serve as many people as we possibly can in these neighborhoods without pushing us out and gentifying us so we can't be here. Thinking about Model Cities, they help you. They help you with staying and they help you with whatever you want to do. If you've got your stuff in order, they're here to help. The reason we want to stay in these neighborhoods is to keep neighborhoods afore. We want to keep everyone in our communities. We don't want to keep pushing people out of our communities. I'm from Chicago where we still have neighborhoods. It's a little different here in Minnesota. Well, in St. Paul, rather, they're neighborhoods, but they're not real neighborhoods The reason why I want to stay here and the reason I Demographically, we get people from here to Minneapolis. We also get quite a few NBA players that come in here, baseball players that may come in here, then we're starting to get a bunch of people from Minnesota United starting to find out that were actually a barber shop in here. A lot of those guys go far out to get there, but that's been so close to their stadi They've been coming in here and There's a lot of youth that come to Model Cities. One youth that actually lives next door, he's been with me for five years now, and he'll actually be going to barber school next month. So for me, it's just to see the transition of the youth that go through these programs and that Model Cities has a lot of youth. Right? I'm just excited for the next few years and see how that transitions to a better lifestyle for everyone that's coming through Model Cities. It's been good that Model Cities has been Model Cities have a bunch of different programming for people, kids, and youth in general. We have the opportunity to create a real community neighborhood. As far as everyone getting to know each other, everyone doing the different projects around here, the gardens they have, the few gardens they have around here, and everyone getting to know each other. I mean, we don't have to push each other out the neighborhood to get better or go far out to get better. I mean, we look at the stadi It's Right? So I think it was important Model Cities did put a building here and if they can keep going doing this forever, then this neighborhood should thrive.