St. Paul-based media company OMG Media Solutions is giving a microphone to local residents with a new creative lab focused on uplifting underserved voices.
Founder Monique Linder set out a decade ago to celebrate cultural storytelling through education and youth empowerment. She has since helped numerous communities across the country develop from her small production studios. Now, she’s bringing back it back to St. Paul with a new community-focused production space called OMG Studios. The space, which she describes as a “labor of love,” will open on Thursday.
“It’s revolutionary in respect to cultural sustainability and business sustainability,” Linder said in an interview with TCB. “That’s the promise and commitment we made to ourselves to build that in the community.”
Located on Vandalia Street, the creative lab will host OMG Studios, which produces original cultural broadcast content, as well as KZMO HD, a digital music and arts platform.
Additionally, the space will have an “Innovation Lab,” which will be a youth arts and entertainment development project where kids participate in paid internships and receive mentoring from artists and education on media networking, according to Linder.
OMG Studios was made possible after Linder unexpectedly received a $200,000 grant from St. Paul’s Neighborhood Sales Tax Revitalization Program. While the studio is for-profit with its clients and supported by several community organizations, the content artists produce are free to access. Interns also receive $25 per hour and a $1,500 toolkit with a refurbished computer and drum kit to jumpstart their creativity.
“I set out years ago to innovate our industry — we’re not there yet,” Linder said. “This is a start. It needs overhauling, it needs a reinvention, and this is the way I felt I could be most impactful doing it.”
Linder has been working to uplift silenced voices is for a long time, according to Black Collective Foundation MN president Lulete Mola. The foundation focuses on Black-led social change and is one of the Innovation Lab’s community partners.
“We gave [Linder] a grant in 2023 just to make sure community leaders like herself, who have been doing work centered on Black culture, were seen and supported,” Mola said. “We have so much respect for her and are so inspired by her most recent endeavor.”
Although the studio will amplify previously underserved new voices, Mola said Black culture has always had a spotlight through different storytelling movements like jazz and hip-hop.
“Monique’s work speaks to Black culture,” Mola said. “It makes accessible something that is already within us.”
OMG Media Solutions was previously known for its Juneteenth films, along with its Celebrate Culture and Community partnership with the Minnesota State Fair.
More importantly, according to Mola, having a space like OMG Studios gives St. Paul youth an opportunity to imagine themselves as the artists they hope to be, and gives them control over the stories they create.
“There is a line of connection between storytelling, voice, and power … but also joy,” Mola said. “Any time there’s an opportunity to double down on culture, cultivate culture and use it as a pathway for other ways of creating change, that’s already a winning strategy.”