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CERTs Seed Grants help Growing Up Healthy’s work branch out

November 2025

Story by Joel Haskard
Southeast, MN

Focusing on families with children in Rice County, nonprofit Growing Up Healthy and its partners assisted manufactured home residents with home repairs that directly improved safety and energy efficiency. The success of this work is leading to even bigger things! The nonprofit Three Rivers Community Action is bringing the mobile home programming under its umbrella and employing the initiative’s coordinator, all crucial steps towards turbocharging this work in the future.

Meaningful results in partnership with residents

The Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs) has been a huge fan of the work that Growing Up Healthy has done over the years within the Healthy Community Initiative (HCI). They are the gold standard in deep engagement with manufactured home park residents in Southeast Minnesota. As expected, they put a CERTs Seed Grant to good use in 2024. The grant supported the labor for repairs to skirting, paneling, roofing, plumbing, electrical, and more in nine households with young children.

Network Impact Coordinator with HCI, Emily Culver, notes, “In addition to improving the safety and energy efficiency of families’ homes, this project increased housing stability, produced better conditions for homework and playtime, reduced families’ financial burden, and showed residents that they are seen, heard, and cared for by their community.”

The project served families living in seven mobile home neighborhoods in Rice County, with the  majority of residents in those neighborhoods self-identifying as Hispanic and/or low-income. Growing Up Healthy focused its financial and coordination support efforts toward repairs on families facing financial barriers to achieving safe, stable, energy efficient housing. This project financed the labor for these repairs.

“This project highlighted the considerable need for continued assistance in mobile home communities,” says Culver. “The majority of homes need updated or mobile-home appropriate water heaters, furnaces, plumbing, and electrical wiring. Additionally, the need for window replacements is especially high. All of these repairs are opportunities for significant energy savings.”

Lessons learned

A completed rubber roof repair on a mobile home in Faribault.HCI enumerated some important takeaways from the work:

  • It is difficult to acquire funding for materials; write funding for materials into grant proposals.
     
  • In general, many repairs are costly due to labor, materials, and licensed contracting requirements for work being completed. We recommend tailoring the specificity of how grant funds can be used based on the project goal.
     
    • For example, specifying coverage to a few smaller ticket repairs can maximize impact of funds while keeping grant funds general allows for flexibility of covering more urgent and expensive repairs.
       
  • The process of repairing mobile homes is often slow. It takes considerable time to coordinate repair work and to find contractors because availability and willingness to work on mobile homes is low. Where possible, seek funding for coordinator time.
     
  • Collaboration with community weatherization partners is essential.
     
  • Leverage CERTs funds to ready homes for other energy efficiency programs.

“The CERTs Seed Grant process is very user friendly and allows us to dedicate important time to the work itself rather than managing the grant. Thank you to the CERTs team for deploying funds effectively to improve energy efficiency and climate readiness for families in low income households.”

Emily Culver, Network Impact Coordinator Healthy Community Initiative

Three River Community Action adopts and expands the work

As was planned from the beginning, as the program proved wildly successful with Growing Up Healthy and HCI, it was time to transition the program into a long-term and sustainable home.

In mid-March 2025, Growing Up Healthy handed the program off to Three Rivers. The Mobile Home Rehabilitation Coordinator at Growing Up Healthy, Jansen Gonzalez, became a Three Rivers employee, and all referrals for mobile home rehabilitation were routed through Three Rivers staff. This was a major victory and benefit for residents in Rice County and offers hope for the work to expand in the additional counties that Three Rivers Community Action serves.

According to the press release:

“Three Rivers Community Action is thrilled to bring Rice County’s Mobile Home Rehab initiative under its umbrella. As a long-standing provider of housing programming in Rice County, we are equipped to provide infrastructure and foundational support that will attract continued resources to sustain the program and serve more families,” said Jenny Larson, executive director of Three Rivers Community Action. “HCI and Growing Up Healthy have done a phenomenal job incubating this vital program, and we are excited to collaborate with our communities to continue to meet the need long into the future.”

Project Snapshot

Clean Energy Focus: Manufactured Homes: Building Upgrades

Southeast CERTs Grant: $10,000

Communities Served: Rice County mobile home neighborhoods

People Reached and Involved: 110 youth and adults

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