March 19, 1997 - Mainstreet Radio’s Catherine Winter looks at Challenge Incarceration Program, a Minnesota juvenile boot camp in Willow River. Supporters say strict discipline and hard work will knock some sense into criminals. But research seems to indicate that boot camps don’t work, don’t save money, and they don’t rehabilitate criminals.
January 27, 1997 - Mainstreet Radio's Catherine Winter reports from Embarrass, where several dozen people spend time in sleeping in snow shelters to test everything from sleeping bags to cell phones. Temperatures in northern Minnesota provide perfect weather for camping…if you want to find out how your camping gear performs in the bitter cold.
December 16, 1996 - Mainstreet Radio’s Catherine Winter reports from a Grand Rapids food bank. While some charities around Minnesota are doing well during the holiday season, many food shelves in rural Minnesota and North Dakota are struggling to feed all the hungry people asking for help.
December 9, 1996 - Hour 2 of Midmorning, featuring Voices of Minnesota with Barbara Frey, outgoing executive director of the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights and conversation with Minnesota writer Mary Casanova.
December 2, 1996 - Hour 2 of Midmorning featuring Voices of Minnesota: first, a conversation with Yusef Mgeni, president of the Urban Coalition. The Coalition is an advocacy group for poor people in Minnesota that's based in the Twin Cities.
October 21, 1996 - Less than a century ago, millions of acres of North America were covered with prairie, vast grasslands that were home to bison, wolves, and prairie chickens. Today, less than one tenth of one per cent of that prairie remains. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working on the Tallgrass Prairie Project, a plan to buy and protect some of what little prairie is left.
August 15, 1996 - Mainstreet Radio’s Catherine Winter reports on Camp Knutson, a camp near Brainerd created to help people learn to live with HIV or AIDS within their families. Organizers say they believe it's the first time a summer camp has been set up for whole families affected by HIV and AIDS.
August 6, 1996 - Mainstreet Radio's Catherine Winter visits the last remaining tugboat company in the Duluth Superior harbor. For more than 150 years, big ships have sailed the Great Lakes, from state to state and out to the sea. For nearly as long, little tugboats have helped the great freighters in and out of harbors, broken ice for them in winter, and rescued boats in emergencies.
July 6, 1996 - Every year, half a million people visit Itasca State Park near Bemidji. They go to see the headwaters of the Mississippi and to walk in groves of huge, old pines that have been growing since long before white settlers arrived in Minnesota. But the old growth forests in Itasca State Park are facing a serious threat…an explosion of pine bark beetles threatens to wipe out EVERY old growth pine in the park.
May 15, 1996 - Mainstreet Radio’s Catherine Winter caught up with the Rolling Plains Gallery as it made a stop on Minnesota's Iron Range. The mobile art gallery has paintings bolted to the inside of a semi trailer. The Plains Art Museum in Fargo saw it as a unique solution to the problem of art galleries being few and far between in rural Minnesota, where residents don't often get to see works by professional artists.