Stewardship Spreads Through the Center for Community Stewardship

Two years ago, the Headwaters RDC was challenged to take the stewardship lessons we had learned with Bemidji Leads! and Progress Park Rapids and make them available statewide.  Shortly after, the Blandin Foundation provided a significant financial contribution and the Center for Community Stewardship was born.

The mission of the Center is to build successful communities by empowering their most powerful assets, its leaders.  Leaders are challenged to live as stewards of their communities, committed to their long-term well being.  

Over the past year, three new communities have started stewardship efforts.  The first was Blackduck, MN, which is in the Headwaters Region.  Blackduck 2020’s efforts are discussed in the column entitled Blackduck 20/20 Defines Future; Prepares to Act on It.   In addition, the Stevens County Area (Morris, MN) and Alexandria, MN both initiated stewardship efforts with the help of the Center for Community Stewardship.

Stevens Forward and Advantage Alexandria are in full force and beginning to make clear progress.  In Stevens County, the community has defined their destiny and identified destiny drivers to get them there.  The stewards of Advantage Alexandria received training from the Center for Community Stewardship in April, and have already hit the ground running. 

The staff of the Headwaters RDC and the Center for Community Stewardship welcome Stevens County and Alexandria to our statewide stewardship team.  The Center will add an additional two communities in the fall of 2008, increasing the number of community stewardship efforts in the state to eight communities!

What would happen if every young person were to wake up today and roll out of bed with the thoughts and dreams of building a stronger community? Would the community be ready to support the energy?

An energetic group of Bemidji State University students stormed a recent 7am Bemidji Leads! meeting and asked that very question. The Youth Engagement Project, as it is now referred to, was the answer. The Headwaters RDC, and a team of summer interns, are now gearing up to explore the nearly endless possibilities.

The team is now working hard on creating a flexible model of support for the youth of the community through assessment, integration, and vision.  Nobody fully knows what ground shaking ideas may pop up within the coming months of summer – but we do know that the final outcome will create a national model of community success in empowering and supporting youth!

Bemidji Leads! has been selected for two national awards for its work to move the Bemidji community forward.  The first award is a Regional Stewardship Award from the Alliance for Regional Stewardship.  The award honors the work of innovative regions and exemplary organizations that have made measurable progress towards implementing the principles of regional stewardship.

These stewardship principles include:

• Developing an Innovative Economy
• Building a Livable Community
• Ensuring Social Inclusion
• Creating Collaborative Governance

The Alliance for Regional Stewardship awarded only two Regional Stewardship awards in 2008.  Award recipients will be honored at the national forum in Pittsburgh, PA.

The second award is an Innovation Award for the National Association of Development Organizations (NADO).  Since 1986, the NADO Innovation Awards Program has recognized organizations that have demonstrated innovative approaches to regional economic and community development.  NADO will honor recipients at its annual conference, this year scheduled for Anchorage, AL. 

Governor Praises Bemidji Leads!

Since his visit to Bemidji in January, 2006, Governor Tim Pawlenty has watched the progress in Bemidji and the work of Bemidji Leads!  He has often commented on the power and ability of Bemidji Leads! stewards to build a spirit of cooperation and strategic direction to the community. 

In April, 2008, the Governor returned to Bemidji to hold a ceremonial signing of the bonding bill, which included $20 million for the Bemidji Regional Events Center (one of Bemidji Leads!’ destiny drivers).  He took the opportunity to again praise the stewards:

“It wasn’t that long ago, and I was in the Legislature at the time, when there were some real questions about the future direction of this community,” he said.  “There were some warning signs on the dashboard … about demographic trends, economic concerns, a lot of change in the air in terms of the way the state and country was moving and whether Bemidji was going to be moving in a positive direction or whether Bemidji was going to be a community that was not going to be able to meet that challenge.”

The governor said a visit to Bemidji brought him a “sense of maybe discouragement or a sense of things not going in the right direction, maybe not having the right kind of energy or vision for the future — and it was a worrisome thing.”

“Now when I come here, you get a different feel, you get a different sense,” Pawlenty said.  “There’s a sense of teamwork, there’s a sense of kind of a dynamic and hopeful and optimistic sense of the future.  There’s activities on the ground that back that up and support that feeling.  You can see it as you move around the community.”

“There’s a sense of strategic vision, of forward-looking leadership,” he added.

Monday was an important day for Bemidji as high-ranking state officials proclaimed the Bemidji community as a regional center with vision, one that leads from the bottom up, not the top down.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and state Employment and Economic Development Commissioner Dan McElroy, each in their own way, cited Bemidji as a role model for cooperation and collaboration, for civic engagement and in leadership.

They were in Bemidji to celebrate the city’s designation as Capital for a Day under the Minnesota Sesquicentennial Commission’s recognition of five biomes, or geologic landscape areas that are present in the state.  Bemidji represents the coniferous forest area of the state.  While five cities were elected in online voting to represent each biome, it was clear from the comments Monday that Bemidji’s choice wasn’t happenstance.

“It’s a very forward-looking vision for this city,” Gov. Pawlenty said of efforts framed by “Bemidji Leads!”, the group of local stewards who fashioned 17 “destiny drivers” of what the community should like in 20 or 25 years.  Here earlier to personally acknowledge the city’s success in securing $20 million in state bonding for the Bemidji Regional Events Center, the governor said such amenities are needed if a regional center is to attract and keep quality jobs that don’t depend on place as much as they do quality of place.

McElroy noted the community is a role model for interagency collaboration and cooperation, “breaking down silos” that tend to build vertical barriers rather than a horizontal mode that solves problems by cutting across agency and government jurisdictional boundaries.  An important example of that is the Joint Powers Board for planning among the city and two townships that resulted in an orderly annexation agreement.

The Sesquicentennial Commission later sponsored a town meeting to build a framework to guide the community for the next 20 years.  Local citizens noted the great assets of the community, among them its natural beauty and access to the great outdoors plus being the center of higher education for northern Minnesota, and its detractors - naysayers and those who fear change.

It was noted that critics will always be vocal, but key is to always make forward progress.

Problems must be hurdled, such as ensuring affordable housing, ending hunger and homelessness, finding living-wage jobs and providing access to higher education.  But they can be tackled one by one, not by being overwhelmed in trying to solve them all at once.  Moving forward in solving them is a must, taking change in stride by directing the kind of change we desire.

That also means finding room at the table for as many of us as possible - men and women, whites and American Indians, wealthy and modest, academics and street-learners.

Not so long ago, Bemidji was viewed as a pocket of severe economic depression, the most severe in the state.  We have a long ways to go, but we have proven an ability to move forward with a vision, to stay on path to becoming a vibrant northern regional center.  For that reason, a path was beaten to our doorstep by state officials who came to honor us as Capital for a Day.

Does a community of 800 people just 25 miles from a regional center have a chance for a successful future? Can it define its destiny, or does it need to accept what fate gives them?

A group of Blackduck community leaders (we call them community stewards) thinks the best way to predict its community’s future is to create it.  To do this, for over a year they’ve been listening to community members, talking with each other, and determining the community’s assets.  Just this spring, it decided that the following is the future desired by its community members:

Blackduck will be the model up-north satellite community in rural Minnesota. There will be no better community to nurture a family and its youth, to grow a small business, and to lead a balanced and full life. The community will accomplish this by:

• Building assets that enrich community life, nurture youth and provide opportunities for the future;
• Acting as stewards of our natural resources;
• Developing resources that support existing and start-up businesses;
• Working together towards a common vision while acknowledging and valuing our differences; and
• Encouraging and expecting all community members to contribute to its vitality.

However, a vision is just a dream without an agenda to make it real. To that end, the Blackduck Stewards developed a “baker’s dozen” worth of community goals.

Now the fun, and hard, part begins. The Blackduck Stewards will be challenging the community to “step up” and make the destiny statement real through collective, sustained action.  To learn more about this effort contact Cliff Tweedale.

Bemidji’s success at aligning resources through its community stewardship effort is impressive, but may not be surprising to many. It’s a Regional center, and has significant leadership bench strength. But Park Rapids? Can the stewardship message resonate and, more importantly, work in a community that does not fit the regional center profile? Park Rapids’ community’s experience over the last year proves that the answer is a resounding yes!

The problem with writing about the Park Rapids community right now is that it is hard to select what to talk about among all of the good things going on.  Here are just a few:

• A community group has successfully worked with the City and Mn/DOT to plan and implement landscaping improvements and secure funding for the TH 34 corridor;
• The City has completed a bold Parks Plan that will, when implemented, result in one of the best Park and Trail systems in the state;
• A Community Fund has been established, and work is now underway to grow its endowment fund
• A Drug and Alcohol Task Force has developed and begun implementation on strategies to reduce underage drinking and alcohol use;
• A bold plan for downtown redevelopment is completed and implementation has begun.

More importantly, there is a sense of optimism that Park Rapids’ best days are ahead of it.  For more information on how the Park Rapids community is figuring it out, contact Cliff Tweedale.

~ Glen Chiodo,
Park Rapids Area Schools Superintendent

How do you take one hundred years of history, some of the state’s most challenging economic and social indicators, and instincts to work in an independent way and begin to create an enhanced model for community success? Very slowly, it turns out.

The Seventh Generation Initiative has agreed on a community vision and community goals, and has seen some terrific project-based progress. Here are some of those successes:

• Baked Chips
• Tribal College:  With our help, the White Earth Tribal College is close to getting approval for its Phase I campus construction funding.
• Education Council:  Although area schools compete for the same students, an Education Council has been formed that includes all schools and strategies have been implemented to increase attendance.

Progress on creating a community culture of collaboration has been much more of a challenge.  Due to the complex overlay of governmental structures (Tribal, City and County Governments), complicated by a mix of educational institutions (school districts, charter school and BIA schools), and stirred up on a regular basis by issues that strive to drive the community into opposing camps, the development of a broad-based collaborative leadership model is difficult.

What’s next? We have a cautious sense of optimism. The Headwaters RDC is helping the City with an update of its Comprehensive Plan. As part of this effort, meetings will be held between the City and Tribe to explore where the interests and aspirations of each intersect.

Second, a group of leaders in the area is convening a meeting to explore the potential of a recommitment to find ways to work together to make a more successful community. Stay tuned.

Headwaters RDC staff are excited about the possibilities for community improvement that Shared Vision! presents.  Bemidji Leads! stewards have teamed with the Bemidji Area Race Relations Council (BARRC) to create Shared Vision!, a community approach to addressing one of our area’s greatest challenges: race relations.

Historically, instead of seeing our diversity as a strength, our community has suffered from racial tension, distrust and misunderstanding.  Shared Vision! is committed to creating and implementing a plan of action to ensure that all residents of the area, regardless of race, share in equal opportunities to participate in community life.

To achieve our goal, we will conduct a community survey on racial discrimination in the Bemidji area, engage the community in facilitated discussions, and find shared agreement on strategies (action items) to improve race relations in our communities.  We have contracted with Wilder Research for completion of a valid survey that will include a mailed survey in the Bemidji area and talking circles on the three area reservations.

Three major funders, Blandin Foundation, G.W. Neilson Foundation and Northwest Minnesota Foundation have pledged a total of $55,000 for the project.  Local funding is coming from HRDC Successful Communities Challenge Fund, Bemidji School District, North Country Regional Hospital, Paul Bunyan Telephone, Bemidji Area Chamber of Commerce, BARRC, and Beltrami County.  Three area tribes have given their enthusiastic support for the project and have appointed members to the Shared Vision! committee.

At its annual retreat, the stewards of Bemidji Leads! laid out a new and innovative course for the community’s stewardship work in the coming year.  One of the biggest challenges/opportunities Bemidji Leads! has faced over the years is creating greater opportunities to get involved in building a better Bemidji, as well as challenging the community to get actively engaged in community life.  The new Bemidji Leads! structure, what they are calling Bemidji Leads! 2.0, will provide greater opportunity for community involvement.

Specifically, Bemidji Leads! 2.0 calls for creating five action teams.  The teams will be in the areas of Growing and Attracting Talent, Building a Livable Community, Encouraging Civic Engagement, Promoting Community Wellness and Creating Economic Prosperity.  The teams, made up of interested community members, will have a dual focus.  First, they will monitor Bemidji’s progress in each area.  Secondly, they will serve as a “think tank and do tank”, a group that will identify great ideas and act on them. 

The teams have been meeting for the last three months, and the new structure holds great potential to encourage additional civic involvement.

What started as a distant idea has now become an incredible reality. The Bemidji Regional Event Center (BREC) will soon be serving the Bemidji region as the premier event, conference, and concert facility for Northern Minnesota. The Event Center will also be providing a new home for Bemidji State University’s Division I hockey program.

Partnering with the City of Bemidji as a Project Manager, the Headwaters RDC played a central role in the entire process as it quickly became a local expert on the facility. With the tagline of “Opportunity Now” and an estimated $13 million annual impact on the economy of North-Central Minnesota, the Headwaters RDC recognized that the Event Center presented a bold move for the future of the region.

The Event Center truly brought the community of Bemidji together as a cross-section of business and community leaders signed a Statement of Commitment for the events center and redevelopment of the south shore.

Governor Pawlenty during his visit to Bemidji for a ceremonious signing of the bill commented that “There’s a sense of teamwork, there’s a sense of kind of a dynamic and hopeful and optimistic sense of the future. There’s activities on the ground that back that up and support that feeling. You can see it as you move around the community.”

With a new facility, a new economic driver, and a new vision the future of the Headwaters region is exciting indeed!

The Center for Community Stewardship (CCS) is off to a fast start and already is making an impact on communities throughout the state.  One of the key reasons for our success has been the relationships we have been lucky to have with our partners. 

At the risk of forgetting some, let me thank a few:

• The Blandin Foundation, whose initial support allowed us to take our dream and run with it;
• The Bremer Foundation, who has made substantial contributions to the efforts in Alexandria and Stevens County (Morris, MN) and is open to requests from communities throughout the state served by a Bremer Bank;
• The West Central Initiative, who also has contributed to both Alexandria and Stevens County;
• The Idea Circle, who have complimented our staffing perfectly and allowed us to reach more communities then we ever imagined;
• Jim Bensen, Chair of Bemidji Leads! and outspoken advocate for the power of stewardship in our communities;
• The stewards of Bemidji Leads!, who were the first to accept the risk of steward-leadership, and spurred a movement they could never have imagined; and
• The stewards of Progress Park Rapids, Blackduck 2020, the Seventh Generation Initiative, Stevens Forward and Advantage Alexandria, who show the staff at the Headwaters RDC and the CCS exactly what it means to be a civic entrepreneur, and who have provided hope to their communities.