"Business Responds"

One of those corporate partners is Target Corporation. The mega-retailer donated $75,000 in cash to the Red Cross and Salvation Army. Its in-kind donations—estimated at more than $40,000—included trash bags, tables, towels, T-shirts, pens, paper, sunscreen, and tarps.

“When the 35W bridge collapsed, I would imagine nearly everyone had the same reactions that we had,” says Garvis, Target’s vice president of government affairs: horror in understanding what had occurred, sadness for those who were immediately affected, “but then very quickly a sense of duty kicked in—the ‘What can I do now?’ question.”

Christenson supplied an answer. He organized a business summit for that Friday, August 3. The agenda and key players had emerged during his calls to company leaders and business organizations.

Garvis had volunteered to manage Target’s truck traffic to minimize congestion in the city’s core, and offered to orchestrate similar efforts by other businesses, including UPS and FedEx.

Kent Larson, an Xcel Energy regional vice president and chairman of the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce, started organizing increased business support for employees to use public transit.

All of the business organizations that Christenson called—the Minnesota Business Partnership, the Minneapolis Downtown Council, the Building Owners and Managers Association Minneapolis chapter, the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce—were quick to volunteer themselves as partners in managing the aftermath of the bridge collapse. And at the chamber, President and CEO Todd Klingel volunteered some of his staff and an Internet home base to the effort—which took on the name Business Responds.

“Initially, we thought there would be about 40 people” at the business summit, Klingel says. “We had planned the meeting for one of the rooms inside City Hall, but the response was so overwhelming that we had to move it down to the rotunda.” About 200 people showed up, including several CEOs who came to “let people know that they were personally interested in helping make things better.”

Along with the 32 companies that have become partners in Business Responds, the mayor’s office, Christenson’s department, the Metropolitan Council, and Metro Transit are all directly involved. By the time their August 3 summit ended, there was a four-pronged strategy mapped out for continuing the partnership and dealing with the consequences and reconstruction of the collapsed bridge.