Since we are unaware of our unconscious biases, we need training, meaningful conversations, a surprising experience or some other encounter to help us see what we haven’t seen before.
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Diversity Enriches Our Lives, Interactions, Communities
Fellows' Pursuit of Diversity Enriches Communities
A couple weeks back I met some new neighbors. They were not new to the neighborhood—they moved in more than a year ago—but they were new to me. They are a young couple with two small children. The husband is a chemist and has been working for a company in town for five years. He moved to the states from Syria. His wife is second-generation Syrian, has a college degree in biology, and wears a head scarf.
I note that she wears a head scarf because that makes her the first woman I’ve ever seen in my small Greater Minnesota town to do so. It also makes her kind of conspicuous. I would’ve noticed her if I’d seen her. Yet they’ve been living a few doors down from me and I don’t recall seeing either of them in all that time. It made me wonder if, clearly aware of their uniqueness in this town, they have tried to keep a low profile for fear of how they might be received. I don’t know this to be true—I will ask them sometime—but it would certainly be a reasonable fear where I live. That makes me sad and reminds me that true leadership, as we see it in the Fellowship, mobilizes people and resources to help make our communities more fair, just and inclusive.
In various descriptions of the Initiators Fellowship we’ve described our Fellows as “keystone” leaders, borrowing a concept from the field of ecology. In natural systems, keystone species have a disproportionate effect on their communities.
Thinking of my neighbors, I am reminded of another ecological principle: that the most resilient communities are those with the greatest diversity. Monocultures often are much more vulnerable to decimation by virtue of their members all being so similar. Diverse communities are more resilient because their members add something different to the whole and because each member has unique weaknesses and vulnerabilities, not the same ones as every other member. In the human world, diversity also makes a community more interesting—though sometimes more complicated.
I tend to believe that what’s true for non-human communities is also true for human ones, and that diversity adds more than it complicates. And I am hopeful that our Initiator Fellows, alumni and future Fellows can be a force for helping Greater Minnesota become more fair, just and inclusive so people like my new neighbors don’t have to keep a low profile for fear of how they’ll be received.
Contact, Chris Fastner, Initiators Fellowship program manager, at cfastner@ifound.org or (320) 631-2019.
Leadership: An Ever-Evolving, Transformational Pursuit
Though it’s clear that the far-reaching calls for justice and inclusion should somehow be incorporated into the work of the Initiators Fellowship, it’s less clear to know exactly how.
Continue readingNecessity: The Mother of Social Innovation
Necessity: The Mother of Social Innovation
We have all likely heard the dire predictions of a nationwide shortage of ventilators as the COVID-19 virus spreads across the United States.
On March 26, news came out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that MIT-based teams were working on rapid deployment of open-source, low-cost ventilators. MIT plans to circulate clinical and design considerations online to support rapid production and to alleviate hospital shortages.
MIT has clearly invested a variety of resources into this effort, yet they are providing open-source design specifications to their intellectual property to help, not to monetize.
In times of crisis, social and environmental needs often are in the spotlight. Moments such as these lead entrepreneurs and innovators to look for, or serendipitously discover, new opportunities. For instance, Initiators Fellow Jon Friesner, founder of GroShed, an efficient, self-contained hydroponic growing system, has seen interest in his product rise as people consider the advantage of being more self-sufficient when local food distribution networks are interrupted. Alise Sjostrom of Redhead Creamery, another member of the Initiators Fellowship program, is discovering and creating new ways to sell and deliver her locally produced cheese while demonstrating the importance of sustainable family farms.
Fellows Rachel Stone and Marc Van Herr run nonprofits that provide essential human services. Stones’s youth empowerment program, P’s & Q’s Etiquette, and Van Herr’s mental health care initiative, The Beautiful Mind Project, will undoubtedly see service demands grow as this crisis lengthens. They have new opportunities to meet increasing demand and deliver services in new ways.
Anne O’Keefe-Jackson’s vision for a Dakota Arts Center will, among other things, provide traditional native arts supplies to local artists and will clearly fill a niche, providing source material for productive ways of spending one’s time while sheltering in place. Hamdia Mohamed’s Victory Plus Housing provides supportive sober homes for people whose sobriety could be even more at risk under the stress of uncertainty in their lives. And Erin Schutte Wadzinski’s Kivu Immigration Law office continues to provide legal assistance to immigrants in Southwest Minnesota, many of whom are deemed essential workers in the agriculture industry.
In addition to innovation, times of crisis demand leadership. People need to step forward and help. The Initiators Fellowship focuses not just on enterprise growth but also on leadership development. We believe the two go together in helping build our Greater Minnesota communities and economies. Our current Fellows are proving the wisdom of our program model as they step into new leadership roles.
In times such as these, we are all called to be social innovators. What’s your innovation, and how can we help?
Contact, Chris Fastner, Initiators Fellowship program manager, at cfastner@ifound.org or (320) 631-2019.
Fellows: Growing a Purpose-Driven Economy
The guiding belief of the Initiators Fellowship is that one person with a good idea can make a big difference in their community—and beyond.
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