Brewed Fresh Daily

Good morning! Three must-reads from around the Midwest region today:

Sara Lee sells its dough business. Downers Grove, Illinois-based Sara Lee Corp. is selling its North American refrigerated dough business to Ralcorp Holdings Inc. for $545 million, the Associated Press reports. The company said in May it wanted to start a process of splitting in two.

New Detroit Bridge to Canada. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration said it would like to have a deal on a new bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario before the end of the year, our partner Michigan Radio reports. An impending deal would force many lawmakers, especially Republicans – who are in control of the Legislature — to take a position on the bridge issue.

Detroiters are mourning the death of Eleanor Josaitis, the co-founder of FOCUS:Hope, an inner city organization that grew from a civil rights organization to a major hub of worker training.

Eleanor Josaitis, co-founder of FOCUS:Hope

Josaitis, 79, died this morning at a hospice in Livonia, Mich. The Detroit Free Press obituary can be found here.

Said Detroit Mayor Dave Bing: “Eleanor was a stalwart of community activism. She has touched the lives of countless Detroiters and built a legacy of hope and help that will last for generations. She will be sorely missed as a friend and community leader.” Read more tributes to Josaitis.

FOCUS:Hope was founded in 1968 by Josaitis and William Cunningham, a Roman Catholic priest, as a civil rights organization. Josaitis, who attended the parish where Cunningham was weekend associate pastor, moved her family from the suburbs into the city the year after the Detroit riots and began working with him.

FOCUS:Hope began with an all-volunteer staff, and no budget, mainly as a food distribution service for needy residents. Its 40-acre campus on Detroit’s Oakman Boulevard now includes a Center for Advanced Technologies, a Machinist Training Institute and an Information Technologies Center.

Its food program, which continues, provides groceries to about 43,000 people monthly in a setting that is meant to resemble a grocery store.

FOCUS:Hope has an operating budget of $23 million, employing about 280 people known as “colleagues” and has 15,000 volunteers.

Josaitis and Cunningham, who died in 1997, worked tirelessly to attract attention to the venture, raising money, lobbying area executives to support it. and enlisting former executives to teach students. Josaitis hosted visiting presidents, testified before Congress and served on numerous non-profit boards.

“Focus: HOPE is such a remarkable charity and will continue well past her death,” said Edsel B. Ford II, a Ford Motor Company board member and Detroit philanthropist.

Did you participate in any FOCUS:Hope programs? Feel free to share your memories of Eleanor Josaitis.

Three stories we think you should know about as you start the week:

Borders a test for Chicago real estate market? With Ulta, Michaels, and Home Goods eyeing 15 Chicago-area spots vacated by Ann Arbor-based Borders Group Inc., currently in liquidation, Crains Chicago Business says it’s a sign of how the retail real estate market is doing in Chicago.

Michigan teachers leaving the state. Hundreds of public school teachers thoughout the state are moving to places where there are jobs, the Associated Press reports. Since its peak in 2004-2005 school year, the state has lost almost 10,000 jobs, or 9 percent, of its public school teachers.

Illinois braces for fallout from S&P downgrade. With stock markets roiling over the Friday night announcement by Standard & Poor’s of its downgrade of U.S. credit rating, Illinois-based business and analysts provide their opinion of what this means in this Chicago Tribune story.

How A 21-Year-Old Design Student’s Sleeping-Bag Coat Could Break The Cycle Of Homelessness in Detroit

Economic historian Margaret Levenstein at the University of Michigan provides a great review of what happened to Cleveland’s innovation networks formed in the 1920’s.

Learn more about the Maggie Levenstein’s work with Naomi Lamoreaux funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Three Midwest economic stories to end your week with:

Manufacturers take aim at policy makers. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI are starting a new initiative aimed at highlighting the potential the manufacturing sector has to create jobs and economic growth. The Chamber, which says it is the world’s largest business federation, says its effort will be aimed at policy makers, and will including sharing research, expert opinions and findings on the state of American manufacturing.

President Obama set to talk job numbers in Midwest next week. The stops on President Obama’s Midwestern jobs tour have yet to be announced, but partner station Michigan Radio reports at least one stop, in west Michigan, looks certain. On his tour, the President is expected to discuss strategy for creating additional jobs. He will also likely talk more about employment numbers, out today, showing the U.S added jobs, but not enough to signal robust economic growth.

General Motor’s earnings up, stock down. The U.S government continues to look for a good time to sell its remaining 26% share in the car giant, and will need to wait a little longer. GM yesterday announced a quarterly earnings report that showed GM has is doing better at any point since declaring bankruptcy, making $2.5 billion in the last three months. As the Detroit Free Press reports, these numbers weren’t enough to counter the larger uncertainty in the stock market over the last few days and GM stocks, at publication time are down almost to year low levels.

Midwest in the midst of a tech hiring boom?  According to Bloomberg Business Week, Cleveland is adding more tech jobs than any other city in the nation.  Detroit and Cincinnati follow Cleveland. A word of warning, though: The ranking measures the percentage increase in tech jobs over last year, meaning these cities aren’t necessarily seeing a big increase in the actual numbers of jobs being added.

Detroit home prices on way to record lows. Home prices in Detroit continue to fall. The average home price is now 80% lower than in 2005, when prices hit their peak. Partner station Michigan Radio reports prices have fallen steadily this year and the outlook is for more of the same. More than half of the available properties in Detroit are foreclosed properties, making a near term rise in the average home price unlikely.

Kraft Foods splits in two: The Northfield, Illinois-based company has announced it will now be running separate companies to focus on domestic and international markets. Crain’s Chicago reports one company, considered to have high growth potential, will focus on bringing American “snack food” like Oreos, chocolate and Tang to emerging markets. The domestic grocery company on the other hand, will focus on North American sales of items like Kraft cheese, Oscar Mayer meats and Maxwell House coffee. The change is expected to take about a one year to complete.

That’s a question we posed to you all through our Public Insight Network last week. We were asking because I just finished a story about the Chicago chapter of the Awesome Foundation, a group of ten people who each month give out $1,000 in cash to people to make their city. (Here’s the story and here’s the question.)

The Little Free Library's debut in Chicago (Niala Boodhoo)

Cleveland’s Tracy Moavero had a simple idea to engage teens and tweens in downtown Cleveland:

“I’d work with a a local nonprofit like City Prowl to have a youth scavenger hunt in downtown Cleveland,” she wrote into our network. “The age-appropriate scavenger hunts would require kids to talk to people at bus stops, behind shop counters and other places to get answers to questions about the city and its people.”

“We need to engage them and help them feel ownership of the city core in order to reverse the worst effects of sprawl in Northeast Ohio,” said Moavero, who added she would focus on kids who live in the outer suburbs specifically because they’re not as likely to have spent time downtown.

Other ideas including piping classical music into parks, planting sunflowers all around the city, or donating money to a homeless shelter (“$1,000 isn’t what it used to be!”, one of our Network contributors wrote).

The Awesome Foundation has funded projects just like this – the whole point really being not to be so serious, but to make people smile, or think about things differently. The Chicago’s chapter’s first grant went to the Little Free Libraries, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit that puts up tiny libraries where people can exchange books for free. In Los Angeles, they recently gave money to a guy who put swings up all over the city. The You Tube video (check it out below) inspired Drew Bradford to join the Chicago chapter.

If you had $1,000, what would you do? Feel free to post in the comments or join our network.