Digital scholarship helps colleges build a more diverse curriculum

Written for Macalester Today, Summer 2021

 

In today’s Germany, nearly one in four German residents is an immigrant, a foreign-born population that rivals that of the United States. Germany appointed its first female chancellor more than 15 years ago, and today women make up at least 30 percent of the governing boards of large corporations. More than seven percent of residents identify as LGBTQ, the highest percentage in all of Europe. The average German creates an annual carbon footprint of 9.4 tons of CO2—about 40 percent less than the average American.

As the data points show, modern German society is progressive and diverse. But until recently, the best available textbook for first-year German students depicted little of the diversity or daily life of the German-speaking world—a fact that associate professor Britt Abel and her students at Macalester were finding increasingly frustrating. While the publisher updated the books regularly, the stock characters depicted as German speakers remained unchanged and out of step with the times. “I found myself constantly apologizing to my students for the material,” Abel says. “That’s when I realized it didn’t have to be this way.”

Working with a team from Macalester’s DeWitt Wallace Library led by the late librarian Ron Joslin and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Abel decided in 2016 it was time to build a better textbook—one that was both more dynamic than a traditional textbook, and also more up to date in terms of content. Along with her colleague Amy Young, a professor at Iowa’s Central College, and a team of coauthors, Abel spent a month in Vienna, where the group recorded conversations with native and proficient non-native speakers, captured photos, and took videos of everyday life. Abel and her coauthors came up with a diverse set of characters to build a lesson plan around, then envisioned a choose-your-own-adventure learning format to steer first-year German learners toward real-world conversations.

Back in the U.S., they assembled all the pieces into Grenzenlos Deutsch—Limitless German—an online, open education resource for introductory German. Built on a WordPress platform with illustrations drawn by Macalester students, Grenzenlos Deutsch is changing the way German is taught at Macalester and many other institutions. It includes embedded audio files and videos featuring actual German speakers, as well as interactive exercises that allow students to check their progress in real time. “It’s actually seven different websites that all work together,” Abel says. “There’s a lot going on there.”

Unlike other language e-textbooks, with access codes that can cost $300 or more, Grenzenlos is free to every user and can be accessed from any device. And unlike traditional, physical college textbooks, which can be out of date as soon as they’re printed, Grenzenlos can be updated, enriched, and expanded on a continual basis, creating a curriculum that evolves with the times.

Creating a digital product as complex as Grenzenlos Deutsch without a coding degree would have been nearly impossible a decade ago. But today, the proliferation of digital tools such as DIY website interfaces and story-mapping software allows even nontechnical users to build interactive educational experiences. Collectively, the use of these tools is known as the digital liberal arts (DLA), and it allows today’s faculty, staff, and students to present scholarship, collaborate with colleagues, and represent research findings in dynamic new ways. While computer-assisted tools have obvious applications in STEM courses, the technology is now making its way into humanities classrooms.

“It’s about using these tools not just because digital is cool, but because the technology has a way of enabling projects that couldn’t otherwise be done,” says Andrea Kaston Tange, professor and chair of Macalester’s English Department for the last four years, and director of Mac’s Digital Liberal Arts program from 2019 until this past spring. “I define DLA as the methods, tools, and approaches for using digital technology to illuminate research or add to pedagogy in fields where people might not normally expect to see computer- or data-driven technologies used.”

With the help of recent grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Macalester has been rapidly expanding its capacity in this digital realm. Over the past several years, it has assembled a cross-disciplinary team from the DeWitt Wallace Library, the Digital Resource Center, and academic information associates to connect big ideas to the information technology it will take to build them. Macalester’s DLA program is helping faculty members deploy new digital platforms to create more meaningful assignments for students, share scholarship with new communities, and collaborate across disciplines.

While the digital liberal arts, also referred to as the digital humanities, have been buzzwords on college campuses for the past decade, Tange says the movement may have gotten a boost during the pandemic, as the constraints imposed by physical distancing and virtual learning prompted many faculty members to revise their course plans. As the campus shut down last spring, the DLA team took the lead in hosting a series of workshops to help faculty adapt to teaching virtual classes quickly. When classes moved to Zoom and Google Meet, many Mac professors began looking at digital projects as a way to build camaraderie and connections during a time when dynamic classroom discussions were elusive. For instance, assistant professor of history Katrina Phillips’s students researched and built an interactive chronology of Indigenous history with brief Wikipedia-style posts, many featuring maps and historic images. “I wanted it to be a project students could do anywhere, and I wanted to use it to build a sense of community, and get them to connect with each other by seeing what everyone else is doing and learning,” Phillips says.

To build the timeline, Phillips got help from academic information associates Brad Belbas ’88 and Ben Voigt ’10, part of a six-member team of tech-savvy specialists who support each of the school’s core departments while keeping faculty members up to date on what’s possible with new teaching technologies. While Macalester’s academic information associates will often drop into a classroom to help students learn new tools and software to support their digital projects, the extra training isn’t always necessary. “We’re actually meeting students where they already are,” says Aisling Quigley, a postdoctoral fellow who took over as the DLA program’s director in June. With the ubiquity of digital technology, students are comfortable engaging with these tools on a daily basis. But they’re increasingly curious about ways they can organize and apply those skills, says Quigley, who also teaches a popular DLA course called “Introduction to Data Storytelling.”

“I’ve been surprised to find that they want to know more about project management and how to scaffold a project and collaborate with teams—skills that some people might think are mundane, but that are new muscles that many students haven’t had a chance to flex before,” she says. “Students spend a lot of time on the internet and social media already, so the idea that their academic work can have a more public audience is very engaging to them.” While digital initiatives are coming out of every discipline at Macalester, the Geography Department has been an early adopter of DLA.

Classes have used geographic information systems— technology that analyzes spatial locations, patterns, and relationships—to research and explore the feasibility of launching an early childhood education program in St. Paul. They’ve also incorporated student-made infographics into online books and used story-mapping software, which combines narrative texts, location maps, video, and other interactive content, to track how and where Mac alums have made use of a geography degree.

“There’s definitely a certain coolness factor when you’re working with technology and tools that are relevant and that may even have an impact on your employability later on,” says geography professor Dan Trudeau. While he still sees a place for research papers and other more traditional assignments alongside digital projects, Trudeau says the potential audience for work that’s published online tends to raise the stakes for many students. “They do their best work when the products they’re creating are for an audience that is not their teacher,” he says. “That accountability creates an environment that motivates people to do great work.”

In fact, some of Macalester’s most successful digital initiatives have been designed specifically through collaborations with community organizations. A prime example is Remembering Rondo—a 2016 project with community leaders from the Rondo neighborhood, which was divided in the 1950s and 1960s when the I-94 freeway was constructed through the heart of St. Paul’s historic African American community, displacing businesses and families. Macalester history students set up headquarters at the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center, where they digitally archived objects and photographs, and collected stories and reminiscences from residents who remembered the old neighborhood. The information Macalester students collected is still available as a searchable online database, one that continues to inform visitors about the history and family connections in St. Paul’s Black community.

“Digital, community-based projects can help deepen the connections between the campus and community partners, and can help make knowledge more public, rather than the academy creating knowledge only for itself,” says Paul Schadewald, the senior program director for Community-Based Learning and Scholarship and another key part of the college’s DLA team. Research that previously might have been handed in to the professor now has a public presence long after the course is over, he says, “and the use of digital tools can help students realize the significance of their work. That project was very impactful because our relationship with the Rondo community has continued.”

The collaborative possibilities of DLA are an important part of its draw, says John Kim, associate professor and chair of Macalester’s Media and Cultural Studies Department. As a contributor to Mississippi. An Anthropocene River, a multilayered, multidisciplinary exploration of human activity and impact on the Mississippi River, Kim and three students in 2019 traveled more than 800 miles of the river by canoe, working with a diverse set of collaborators including the National Park Service, New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, and the Max Planck Institute. Macalester’s canoers carried along a data-sensing robot that Kim built himself and programmed to collect information about the journey, everything from GPS coordinates and water temperature, to concentrations of atmospheric volatile organic compounds. The data they collected continues to contribute to public research and be analyzed through data visualizations, but Kim says those outcomes may not be as important as the new webs of connections that he and his students helped to build on the way down the Mississippi.

“The Anthropocene River project was a new way of thinking about research for me. Rather than thinking of a paper or a monograph, it was about building relationships and a community of researchers and activists that spanned the entirety of the Mississippi so that we can continue to collaborate on projects into the future,” he says. As participants continue to share findings and writings on an evolving project website, “the fact that it is ongoing and seemingly continuous is a benefit.”

The growing complexity and academic quality of digital projects is also prompting many colleges and universities, Macalester included, to explore whether digitally produced projects and published research should eventually count toward tenure. Right now, most institutions consider only traditional scholarly publications such as books and journal articles; pedagogy-oriented and digital-first projects don’t count. “For me, the payoff of creating a project like Grenzenlos Deutsch has been about working with students, using better materials in my classes, and having been part of an incredible collaboration to make this project possible,” Abel says. “That said, this is a digital project, openly published, that relates to pedagogy—three strikes against doing digital liberal arts projects for faculty members trying to get this to count for tenure.”

Another debate in higher education is whether digital initiatives, tools, and algorithms could eventually drain away the magic of diving deep into the humanities. If students can build online projects, the argument goes, will diving into books and debating and discussing with classmates have less value? In Tange’s experience, it’s quite the opposite. “The magic of a deep dive is actually enhanced by DLA projects, which have made digitized versions of archives available for much wider study, and provided students with expanded ways to present their own deep research work,” she says. “We see students’ engagement in debate and discussion increase as they access more primary sources and analyze them in new ways. We aren’t replacing humanities with technology—we’re using new tools to demonstrate even more the value of the humanities to create connections across time and populations of learners.”

While today’s digital multimedia projects may look almost nothing like the homework that Macalester alums remember, at their core, says Kim, they still teach students how to make sense of the world. “I will continue to assign written papers because I believe there’s a kind of critical thinking and inquiry that’s only developed through the discipline it takes to form a thesis and support an argument,” he says. But the digital realm and traditional ways of learning about the humanities can complement one another: “It’s not about one at the exclusion of the other—now it’s important to be fluent in both.”

Laura Billings Coleman is a frequent contributor to Macalester Today.

 

 

Infodesigner Arlene Birt ‘02, inspires action by humanizing hard data

Written for MCAD’s CUT/PASTE, Spring 2023

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a sobering report this spring, compiling the available knowledge about human-caused greenhouse gas emissions with predictions about our warming planet. Though it’s written for high-level scientists and global policy-makers, there’s a page that’s instantly comprehensible to any reader. With a chart designed by MCAD associate professor Arlene Birt ‘02, it depicts the steady rise of global temperature since 1900, with an overlay of human timelines that illustrate how those impacts are already being felt by people born in 1950, 1980, and 2020. 

“That chart gets at some of my objectives as a designer, which is to communicate clearly and also to put the data into context,” Birt says. “When I think about my daughter’s future looking completely different than my mom’s and my grandparents’, I think that’s the emotional pull that could potentially help us to shift our behavior.” 

Making hard data connect to our human experience has become a specialty for Birt, a founding faculty member in MCAD’s MASD Program, who’s building a global reputation for her ability to translate complex information about environmental sustainability into memorable visual stories. The founder of Background Stories, an infodesign consulting firm, Birt recently talked with CUT/PASTE about why creatives need to be involved in solving humankind’s greatest crisis. 

It’s not often that graphic designers get called out for their great work, but  both the Washington Post and the Financial Times have published stories about the impact of the infographics you created for the UN IPCC’s report. What’s that been like? 

For the past year and a half, I’ve been working with more than 60 climate scientists from around the world to develop and collaboratively design these figures for the U.N. synthesis report that had to be approved, line by line, by 195 governments. There were so many different rounds of approval the report had to pass that at some point, there were more than 30,000 government comments, about 6,000 of them focused on the figures. It’s been exciting to see my name out there, but it’s also been such an intensive process, it’s going to take some time to recover. 

What’s it like being an artist in a world of scientists? 

When I first started working with the team, I would be on Zoom calls with twelve different climate scientists all throwing ideas at me, the visual person, and even though I knew they were speaking English, I could not follow the conversation. There was so much specific scientific language that learning how to understand it was a steep learning curve. There’s a moment with any project where I think, “Oh my gosh, I am so lost”—but it’s also exciting, because I know that through the process, I can help these groups find a way to translate this complex material in a way that non-specialists will understand. 

Why do we need artists at the table? What do you think visual storytelling can help move the needle on climate change? 

There’s more space for artists and creative people in this work as the world realizes that it’s not enough just to throw words and data at people–we need creativity, we need the humanities, not just to make things pretty, but to make it engaging. Our world today is more  focused on visual interfaces, and people are becoming more and more accustomed to consuming information that comes to them through visuals. Connecting pieces of information in a visual way creates a story that can then connect to people more personally. The more you help people see themselves within the data, the more likely you’ll be able to nudge them toward behavior change, and toward a better world for all of us. 

This report has been billed as a “final warning,” the last IPCC report to be released while the world still has a chance to keep temperature rise below the tipping point.  Where do you find hope? 

About the U.N. synthesis report itself, I am really impressed by how much science knows about where we’re headed. Scientists are notorious for adding caveats around their phrasing, but the science on climate change has been evolving so rapidly over the last seven years, since the last IPCC report, that what we know, what we can track, and what we can prove is actually quite impressive. We have the technology, and we know what needs to be done, so in my mind it’s now about how do we motivate us humans to take actions and to advocate for our policy makers to do what needs to be done. I believe that humans have a lot of potential to shift and make change happen when we want to, and when we’re motivated to do so. I tend to be an optimist. 

Creativity and new community partnership are taking shape to solve Central Minnesota’s child care crisis

 

Written for the Initiative Foundation’s I.Q. Magazine, Spring 2023

Like any new business owner, Morgan Dabill had a lot on her mind in the lead-up to launching a new child care center in Pine River. After finding the perfect plot of land on the route between Pequot Lakes and Backus, Dabill spent months meeting with bank officers, fine-tuning her business plan, applying for grants, supervising the construction, and hiring and training staff certified to handle everything from infant care to after-school programs.

The one thing she didn’t have to worry about was attracting customers.

“As soon as word got out that we were even thinking about starting this up, I had people messaging me about finding a spot for their kids,” says Dabill. “Since the pandemic, I know of so many parents who’ve had to cut their hours or quit working completely because there’s no place for their kids to go. I’ve had families calling from 45 minutes away. You can feel how desperate they are.”

Since opening its doors in October 2022, the Wild Roots Early Learning Center is already in the black with more than 40 children in full-time care, a staff of nine caregivers, and more than a year-long waiting list for infant care. When fully enrolled, Dabill’s nature-focused operation will be able to accommodate nearly 70 kids from 6 weeks to 12 years old, dramatically improving child care options in an area hard hit by the recent closure of several family-based providers. But across much of Greater Minnesota, finding available child care slots remains an uphill battle for working families—and a growing headache for employers.

“What was already a deeply entrenched problem prior to the pandemic has, in fact, gotten worse—particularly in Central Minnesota, where there’s a forecasted shortfall of up to 17,000 child care slots to meet demand,” said Don Hickman, Initiative Foundation’s vice president for community and workforce development. Family-based providers have long been the backbone of the rural child care system. For the past 20 years, though, providers have been leaving the field at a far faster rate than they’ve been replaced. It’s happened for a host of reasons: from a predictable wave of Baby Boom retirements to the unexpected challenges of operating through the pandemic. While profit margins have always been low—providers need to make their rates affordable for working parents—Minnesota’s strong post-pandemic jobs recovery has added additional pressure as child care workers leave the field for richer opportunities.

“Many providers now have to wonder why they’re working 14-hour days and wearing down their homes while running a home child care when they could be making several dollars an hour more, with benefits, working at a gas station or a grocery store,” Hickman said. While expanding capacity in child care centers has helped to offset the closure of home-based options in higher-density areas, that’s not an option in most of Minnesota’s rural communities. “You typically need a mass of 80 children to make a child care center cash flow,” he said. “Smaller communities don’t have those numbers, so families are a hundred percent dependent on home-based providers.”

Quality, affordable child care can no longer be viewed as a short-term problem families need to solve. “This is an economic development challenge,” Hickman said. “The free market isn’t going to fix it on its own.

Communities Commit

Fortunately, a growing number of communities across the Initiative Foundation region are making inroads as they explore more sustainable solutions to the persistent shortage. “Several years ago, if you mentioned child care to a room full of employers, you’d hear crickets,” said Marnie Werner, vice president for research and operations at the Center for Rural Policy and Development. Werner is the author of a new report, Rural Child Care Solutions: From the Ground Up. “The child care issue is now converging with the retirement of Baby Boomers, and if there’s not enough child care in a community, you’ve got an increasingly smaller pool of workers to fight over.”

That trend is what motivated Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures to take the lead on creating a new child care center to serve young families in 30 new workforce housing units at Red Willow Estates in Onamia. “As we thought about how to tackle the child care problem in our region, we looked at the ways we could utilize our available buildings,” said Beth Gruber, director of planning and community engagement at Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures (MLCV). Working with Kidz Zone, a provider with centers in Garrison and Aitkin, MLCV recently earned a major grant from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) to fast-track the development of a 63-slot child care center set to open in the fall of 2023. Partners at Mille Lacs Health System, eager to expand child care options for their growing workforce, will cater the food for the center, eliminating the need to install a commercial kitchen. “The Mille Lacs Band is the largest employer in this region, so this partnership will really help our workforce. At the same time, it will serve everyone in our community,” Gruber said.

That all-hands approach also is on display in Brainerd, where the YMCA recently earned $600,0000 in federal funding to help convert a former funeral home into a child care center for up to 140 kids. Even before the pandemic, Crow Wing County had a child care deficit of about 1,300 spots. It’s a shortage that has galvanized multiple partners to help fill the gap with grants from DEED, the Brainerd Lakes Area Community Foundation, Minnesota Main Street Economic Revitalization funds, and American Rescue Plan Act funding from Crow Wing County. Seeing business, government and philanthropy working together to solve the child care gap in Brainerd is an encouraging sign, says Werner. “Over the last 20 years I’ve been studying this, it’s clear that real community cooperation, getting everyone on board, is what contributes to long-term success,” she says. “This is too big a problem to expect just one sector to solve everything.”

The Initiative Foundation provided grants to support the Pine River, Onamia and Brainerd projects. It also has supported a host of other projects across the region as part of its long-standing commitment to improving and expanding early childhood options. The Foundation has also brokered a partnership with First Children’s Finance and Chisago, Pine, Mille Lacs and Isanti counties by offering each county a $10,000 challenge match to implement their best ideas for overcoming the child care gap.

Investing in the Profession

While increasing child care capacity across the region is critical, Hickman said, Central Minnesota will also need to activate a new generation of child care providers, especially those who can fill the growing gaps in family-based child care. “Lifting up home-based providers is critical to rural areas that don’t have big employers that can take the lead,” he said. “Home-based care is typically one-third cheaper than center-based care, and for these rural communities, having room for eight to 10 kids is right-sized.”

To encourage more people to enter the profession, or expand the capacity of their current child care businesses, the Initiative Foundation has contracted with St. Cloud Technical and Community College, Central Lakes College in Brainerd, and Pine Technical and Community College to make it possible for students to graduate debt-free while earning certifications and degrees in early child development and education. The Foundation also is exploring partnerships to expand the offering to the Leech Lake Tribal College, and to build credentialing pathways in both Spanish- and Somali-language programs.

“If students still need help after [they’ve been] awarded financial aid, the Initiative Foundation covers the rest,” said Annette Weaver, Pine Tech’s education coordinator. Weaver also leads the region’s professional development delivery initiative for Child Care Aware.

With virtual night-time classes, many early childhood education offerings have been retooled to fast-track workers sidelined by the pandemic into new jobs in child care, and to make continued certification simpler for working providers in rural areas. Since launching, the program has made it possible to graduate nearly 200 child care providers per semester, and to support continued certification paths for fledgling providers like Cora Collins, 28, who just launched a home-based child care in Brainerd after leaving a third-shift manufacturing job.

“This first year has been more of a challenge than I’d expected,” said Collins, who notes that making required safety updates to her home, and setting prices that are affordable for working families while remaining profitable, has been a challenge. “I love working with children, but financially, it doesn’t always make sense.”

That’s why experts believe a final piece of the child care puzzle will depend on finding new ways to ensure providers can improve upon the current average: $11 an hour and a 65-hour work week. “Even if they’re providing care because it’s something they value doing in their communities, we still need to think about family providers as small businesses that need support,” says Elizabeth Davis, professor of applied economics at the University of Minnesota. In Swift County, for instance, a child care grant program helps family providers cover ancillary expenses, up to $150 per enrolled child. Brown County dropped all licensing fees for family child care providers. Cook County has a child care assistance program that helps qualifying families pay for a portion of their child care costs, making care more accessible to families and rates more sustainable for providers.

Werner, for her part, also sees promise in the so-called “pod model,” which would allow multiple licensed family providers to use a single location, like a church, for serving small groups of kids outside of their home. Multiple studies show that the stress, isolation and wear and tear of having a business in the home is a serious pain point for potential family providers. “Pods are a way to get those businesses out of the home,” Werner said. “Women have so many more career options that the days when a young mother will decide to take in a few more kids while they’re home are coming to an end. The more we can do to help family providers run their day cares as profitable businesses, the more it’s going to have an effect.”

The first Black president of the Minnesota Senate, Bobby Joe Champion ‘87 wants people of color to see themselves in politics

 

By Laura Billings Coleman

North Minneapolis and Macalester College are about ten miles apart, but when Bobby Joe Champion ’87 was a student, the distance felt much greater.

The fifth of six kids, and the first in his family to go to college, Champion spent his first year at Macalester rising at dawn to board three different buses on his way to campus, setting himself up at the old student union’s piano as classmates streamed out of the cafeteria after breakfast. “I did not have enough money to live on campus and I didn’t want other students to know,” Champion remembers. “Coming to this elite kind of school, with white folks who’d traveled all over the world, there were times when I wondered, ‘What am I doing here?’ But the silver lining was that that ride gave me time to read the books I heard people talking about in class, and to get mentally prepared to make that transition between North Minneapolis and Macalester. I knew I had to figure out a way to get from where I was to where I wanted to be.”

Champion has been reflecting on that journey since becoming president of the Minnesota Senate, one of the most visible leadership positions at the state Capitol. When he first won elected office in 2008, he was one of only two Black lawmakers in the House of Representatives. Today, as a senator serving the 59th district, which includes North Minneapolis, Champion has become one of the body’s elder statesmen, presiding over the most diverse cohort of lawmakers Minnesota voters have ever elected. “I’m very excited about the diversity in both the House and the Senate,” Champion says. Gaveling the most important debates in the state, and leading fellow lawmakers in the Pledge of Allegiance “is really surreal. Not only because there’s never been a person of color who has presided over a legislative body in this state, but also because I’m someone who never, ever thought I would run for office.”

In fact, when he enrolled at Mac at the urging of Mahmoud El-Kati, a legendary Macalester history professor and activist, Champion was leaning toward working in the music industry. The leader of an award-winning gospel choir he co-founded at the age of thirteen, and a serious Perry Mason fan, Champion grew up “hearing those horrendous stories about Black artists who were in the music industry but poor because they didn’t understand the business, so I thought I would combine those two things that I loved—law and music.” After graduating from Mitchell Hamline School of Law, Champion served as a staff lawyer at Flyte Tyme, the recording studio run by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. A talented musician with a church-trained tenor voice, he even earned a Grammy nomination in 2003 as the director of the Excelsior Ensemble Choir.

But after starting a family with his wife, Angela, a pharmacist; serving in the attorney general’s office; and helping his friend Keith Ellison get elected to Congress in 2006, Champion decided it was time to be part of solving Minnesota’s growing racial disparities. In 2008, the first-time candidate lined up the delegates he needed to unseat an incumbent by hosting “Breakfast with Bobby” events where he served up eggs, bacon, and grits and developed one of his signature talking points: “If you’re not at the table, then you’re on the menu.”

“Minnesota is really a progressive place, but it’s like a tale of two states based on your socioeconomic background as well as your race,” Champion says. He thinks the problem stems from having too few people of color in public service, which leads to policies that are well-intentioned but often wrong-headed. “You can’t tell me you care about me, and you want to make decisions for me, but you don’t include me in the decision-making,” he says.

With the state’s Democrats holding power in the House, Senate, and the Governor’s office, Champion began the session as the chief author on a bill to make Juneteenth a state holiday. He took the lead on allowing undocumented residents to apply for driver’s licenses, restoring voting rights for the roughly 50,000 Minnesotans on parole or probation, and passing the CROWN Act, which prohibits discrimination based on hairstyle and texture. He also earned high marks from both sides of the aisle for managing a respectful fourteen-hour floor debate on abortion access. “I’m motivated by the Scripture that says, ‘I don’t do things in order to get the rewards of men—I must do what is pleasing to God,’” he says. “I see that as my ability to see other people’s humanity, so when I’m presiding, I’m always looking for ways to create space for you to speak on behalf of your constituents with a sound and respectful argument.”

Still an early riser, Champion gets up every day at 3:30 a.m. to fit in a workout, manage his own part-time law practice as a contract public defender for Ramsey County, and take on new assignments, like his post on the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Advisory Board. The board helps guide the economic growth of northeastern Minnesota, and Champion is its first Black member. “I know about our workforce, and I look at it as an opportunity to listen and to learn and grow,” he says, before adding that he expects to bring his own ideas to the table. “When you’ve been dealing with the same issues for a long time, it helps to have a set of fresh eyes.”

St. Paul writer Laura Billings Coleman is a frequent contributor to Macalester Today.

 

For actor, dramaturg, and arts leader Faye Price ’77, theater can play a leading role in promoting social justice.

When George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in May 2020 just blocks from the Pillsbury House + Theatre, longtime co-artistic producing director Faye Price ’77 prepared herself for the worst. As store windows were smashed, restaurants and businesses were boarded shut, and the nearest police precinct was burned to the ground, the theater and community center she’s helped lead for more than two decades transformed into a triage site for a city in turmoil.

“There were so many people hurting that we were able to use our corner of Chicago and 35th as a kind of exchange for the public,” Price says. As the murder site three blocks south became the focal point for mourning and demonstrations, Pillsbury House + Theatre became a de facto clearinghouse for community donations of food, water, and other necessities for neighbors displaced by night after night of protests, vigils, and confrontations. “If you needed cereal, if you needed diapers for your baby, people were bringing us donations, and we were putting them out for the public to get what they needed,” Price says. “It was a hard time, and I was worried about so many things, including that our building would be destroyed. But as time went on, I began to realize that wouldn’t happen—people were leaving us alone. I think there’s a respect for this place that comes from how many people have been touched by it.”

With programs that range from early drop-off day care to experimental late-night theater, the Pillsbury House + Theatre is respected not only by its neighbors and nearly thirty thousand annual clients, but also as a national model for what’s possible when an arts organization embeds itself deeply into a neighborhood in need. Located in the heart of one of Minneapolis’s most diverse communities, Pillsbury was founded in 1992 in the tradition of the nineteenth-century settlement house, urban community service centers like Chicago’s famous Hull House, which often featured their own community-focused theaters for citizen artists. In the wake of the 2008 recession, Pillsbury’s professional theater merged with Pillsbury United Communities as a one-stop shop for everything from truancy prevention programs to tax and legal services. Now the holding place for hundreds of offerings brought to the George Floyd memorial over the last year, Pillsbury House + Theatre has also become a case study for how the arts can help communities heal, says Price’s Macalester classmate Jack Reuler ’75, founder of Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theatre. “At Pillsbury, Faye has found a way to make the arts, social service, and most importantly social justice all one conversation in ways that others have only talked about.”

Minnesota’s arts community has had a lot to say about Price herself this season since she was named the McKnight Foundation’s Distinguished Artist of 2021, an award that also comes with a $50,000 cash prize. As the first Black female artist ever to win the award, she has been the subject of headlines that have highlighted her success bringing seminal Black voices to the stage and originating new pieces that have entered the canon of African American theater literature. She has also been applauded for playing a critical supporting role as chair of Minnesota Citizens for the Arts during the 2008 passage of the Minnesota Legacy Amendment, a law that’s infused millions into arts organizations across the state. But Price admits she’s been uncomfortable in the spotlight: “I’ve been joking with my African American female friends that this is a reward for being the only one in the room for so many years.”

Price grew up in Chicago’s South Side, an only child who says she “entertained myself by entertaining the invisible audience in my backyard.” She got her first break in third grade, when her classmates chose her for the role of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the first of many experiences on stage and behind the scenes while she was a student at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. But when she came to Macalester, she found far fewer opportunities for actors of color.

“I would have thought about majoring in theater, but I didn’t see any role for Black people in the theater department at that time, on stage or off,” says Price, who majored in psychology instead. During her four years at Mac, she saw no Black faculty members in the theater department, no plays or productions focused on people of color, and little notion of the color-blind casting that’s become increasingly common over the last generation. She had a small role in Member of the Wedding that she remembers came about only because someone else got sick. “Now there are a lot of alumni of color who are here making a living in theater and making the arts such a wonderful part of the culture of this state. But I have to say it was despite the theater department, not because of it. I have to say it like that.”

Instead, Price turned her focus off campus, auditioning for a new play at St. Paul’s Hallie Q. Brown Center and becoming a founding member of the Penumbra Theatre, Minnesota’s first and only African American theater. The same year, she also became a founding player in the Mixed Blood Theatre, originally a summer project that’s since gone on to stage forty-five seasons of performances. In spite of her success, Price wasn’t convinced it was possible to make a living in the arts. “I remember sitting in Dayton Hall with graduate school catalogs all over my bed, trying to decide: psychology or theater? And I opted to go with what I thought at the time was the safest bet, psychology.”

After graduating from Mac in 1977, Price studied for a master’s degree in counseling and student personnel psychology, and tried to balance full-time work with after-hours acting, first in Minneapolis and then in New York City. “Like any good Macalester student, I thought I could do both,” she says. “But when I lost a role in for colored girls [who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf] because I had a full-time job as a therapist in a domestic abuse program, it really stung. I think that’s when I realized this theater stuff was really important to me.”

When she learned that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, also a Penumbra veteran, was endowing a new dramaturgy fellowship at the University of Minnesota focused on African American theater literature, she applied and won the prestigious award. She left New York City for internships at Penumbra and the Guthrie Theater, where she eventually joined the artistic staff as a full-time dramaturg. The utility players of the theater world, dramaturgs act as editors and fact-checkers of theater texts, Price says, collaborating with directors and producers and advocating for a play’s artistic vision.

After several years at the Guthrie, Price joined the Pillsbury House + Theater in 2000 as co-artistic producing director. “She recognized talent when it was young and undiscovered, and she was really good at nurturing it,” Reuler says. “She found voices in people who didn’t know they had voices.” Coartistic director Noël Raymond also credits her with making PHT an artistic home for a host of acclaimed artists, including director Marion McClinton, actor Laurie Carlos, and playwright Tracey Scott Wilson. “Her leadership style wasn’t about being the assertive, charismatic, out front, ‘I’m doing this’ person,” Raymond says. “Instead, she’s all about identifying, supporting, highlighting, and rallying around other artists. She herself made a way for herself in the arts where there was no way, and one of the brilliant things she always did was to open a way for others.”

When the recession hit in 2008, Price and Raymond also presided over the merger of the ninety-six-seat theater with Pillsbury House Neighborhood Center, a move that made it possible to infuse the arts into everything from theater programs for youth who are incarcerated to Full Cycle, a social enterprise bike repair garage that supports youth experiencing homelessness. While the scope of the work extends far beyond the stage, Price says that’s part of the settlement house theater tradition. “I think the mission was always there; we just embraced it fully,” she says.

After more than twenty years at PHT, Price was planning to step down in 2020 to pursue more personal projects. But as the pandemic surged, she stayed on to help steer the organization through the crisis, announcing her retirement only after vaccines began to promise the possibility of gathering in theaters once again. This past fall, she returned to Macalester’s campus to direct Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Part One, a title she picked in part to honor several Macalester classmates who died of AIDS. With a multicultural cast that better reflects the full spectrum of talent at the college, the production made Price consider how much has changed since she was a student.

“Just thinking about me being in a department that didn’t have any Black people in it, and now look at what I’m doing,” she says before breaking into the Hamilton lyric “how lucky we are to be alive right now.” Angels in America marked the first full indoor staging of a play at Macalester since the pandemic started, and she reflected on the moment as theaters everywhere began raising their curtains again. “When you’re in a darkened theater with people you don’t know, and something powerful is expressed and it hits you, or it hits the room, there’s just no feeling like that,” Price says. “The humanity that is expressed and absorbed by a bunch of people at the same time … that’s what I love about theater. We’ve all been missing that.”

St. Paul writer Laura Billings Coleman is a frequent contributor to Macalester Today.

The artist known as HOTTEA, ‘07, looks for new ways to build on the beauty of impermanence

Since graduating from MCAD with a degree in graphic design, HOTTEA (a.k.a. Eric Rieger, ‘07) has built an impressive body of work designed to disintegrate. Whether it’s stringing miles of yarn into sky bridges of color across Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Bridge, applying oversized magnets to the facade of the Guthrie Theater, or casting light and color across Minneapolis’s flour mills, very little of the artist’s meticulous, multicolored work is ever meant to last. 

“But I do want to make a lasting impact on the viewer, so you have an epiphany about the space and materials being used,” he says. “My goal isn’t to get into permanent collections or the most prestigious walls of whatever gallery, but to make the viewer think differently.” 

 Inspired in part by his late grandmother, who taught him to knit, HOTTEA began experimenting with yarn and fencing to create typefaces that started popping up around the Twin Cities more than a decade ago. Since then, the scale and ambition of his yarn installations have transcended the simple materials, with private and corporate commissions that have taken him from the Sydney Opera House to Sao Paolo’s MADE festival, and multi-storey installations like “hot lunch”, a piece built in 2017 over the course or two months at the Mall of America with more than 13,000 strands of color unraveled from more than 700 pounds of yarn. Though his recent work has expanded to include installations of wood, magnets, and other media, one common denominator is a delight in bringing art to where it’s least expected–on a cyclone fence, over a weed-cracked tennis court, in the fissures of a crumbling stone facade, or on the underbelly of a bridge. 

A former graffiti writer who got arrested and tazed for adding typeface to public property, HOTTEA has learned to be careful about the words he applies to his work.  “I used to try to describe what I’m doing with words like ‘non-destructive,’ but then other graffiti artists might take offense to that,” he says. “Let’s just say I’m trying to adhere or build or install art without what the police would consider damage to property. I think if I didn’t know what it was like to see my family in such pain over the consequences of me doing graffiti, I might not be so passionate about installing things temporarily and not altering the surface in any way. That’s kind of how my graffiti roots are impacting my current work.”

Last spring, HOTTEA was about to unveil a large-scale, color-field work made of magnets when Minneapolis erupted in protests over police violence. Instead, he put the project on hold, and created a large-scale pixelated portrait of George Floyd, which he got permission to apply to the facade of the Guthrie Theater–a first for both the artist and the institution. “I’d been out scouting for locations, looking for metal surfaces or large metal warehouses when I passed by the Guthrie and realized, ‘Wait a minute, this whole building is metal. The entire facade could be a canvas for me.’” 

Epiphanies like that are what keep him inspired, and convinced he’s found the right platform for his vision. “It’s important to have an original idea, or something no one’s thought of before, but consistency also matters, and continuing to find innovation within that same idea,” he says, as he considers the advice he’d offer current MCAD students. “I do believe that not everyone is meant to be a full-time artist. But if you’re obsessed, it’s possible.”

Written for MCAD cut/paste 2021

In the wake of the coronavirus crisis, communities across central Minnesota faced new challenges and found new strengths.

By Laura Billings Coleman

 

Surrounded by thousands of surface miles of lakes, boreal forests and natural beauty, the community of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe (LLBO) also lies in the middle of a food desert, with few options for doorstep deliveries or quick trips to the grocery store.

“With the lay of the land up here, and no major metropolitan areas around, most folks have to drive upwards of 50 miles just to get the basics,” said Mike Auger, LLBO’s director of gaming operations. “As the COVID-19 pandemic started up, we decided we needed to tackle the problem of food insecurity in our community, because it was also one of the ways we thought we could keep our elders safe at home.”

In March, the Leech Lake Band Emergency Management Team launched the COVID-19 Food Initiative, distributing 700 boxes of pantry staples around the region. “The only qualification for getting the food box was needing it,” said Auger, who oversaw the distribution operation. “We didn’t care if you were a band member, or if you were white, or what your income was. We just got the food out where we thought people could use it.”

As the statewide shutdown continued, and organizers learned more about the community’s needs, LLBO’s COVID-19 Food Initiative grew more ambitious, activating nearly 100 volunteers and working with a nutritionist to ensure that every box contained a healthy range of shelf-stable foods and personal products to nourish families at home. Working with CARES Act funding from the state of Minnesota, supply chain support from Teal’s Market, the local grocery store, and grant funding from the Initiative Foundation and other partners, LLBO has continued its commitment for a full year, delivering nearly 16,000 boxes of food around the region since the start of the pandemic.

“Our goals at the start were just getting through the immediate future,” said Auger. “Like everyone last March, we never anticipated that we’d still be doing this the following March.” He credits collaborations with Second Harvest Heartland, the state of Minnesota and a host of other partners for helping the band “cut through red tape and make a huge difference to people during a tough time. Food security was an issue before the pandemic, but now that the problem’s been brought to the surface, I think we’ve seen there are solutions that can help solve it. I hope that’s the lesson we’ll take from this after the pandemic ends.”

ESSENTIAL NEEDS
The Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe’s COVID-19  Food Initiative is one of more than 1,400 nonprofits and businesses the Initiative Foundation helped to fund in 2020, the biggest and the busiest year in the organization’s 35-year history. “We were founded in the wake of the farm crisis, so we pride ourselves on being prepared for challenges, but it would be an understatement to say this is not the year we had planned,” said Don Hickman, Initiative Foundation vice president of community and workforce development. While the Foundation stepped up its grantmaking, nearly quintupling the dollars it awards in a typical year, the needs across the region were even greater.

“We have a long history of funding capacity building and strategic planning and things that will set communities up for longterm success, but this year, for the first time, we decided we had to directly fund the service of essential needs,” said Hickman. “With grant requests outstripping available resources by more than a 10:1 ratio, we had to make some tough choices and focus on the needs that were most acute.”

For instance, as communities with meat processing plants emerged as COVID-19 hot zones, the Initiative Foundation reached out to underserved communities in Cold Spring, Long Prairie and Melrose by hiring two bilingual disaster response specialists to ensure that employees, often from Latino and Somali communities, had the information they needed to stay safe in the workplace and to access other essential services during the pandemic. The effort resulted in the delivery of nearly $1.2 million in support to the designated communities. (See the story Serving the Underserved).

With hundreds of small businesses forced to close during the shutdown or to find new ways of meeting customers, the Foundation also administered $7.66 million in small business relief grants in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), which helped to provide $10,000 grants to 766 small businesses in the region. The effort, funded by federal CARES Act dollars, also included a special allocation of $110,000 for a St. Cloud cultural mall and its tenants. (See the story A Place for Community).

With a serious child care shortage already in place, and essential service workers pressed for solutions, the Initiative Foundation also helped to fund a new accelerated early childhood certification program at Pine Technical & Community College, one of several “one year to a new career” programs that have surfaced to help reactivate workers laid off during the shutdown. These programs also solve labor shortages that were a problem before the pandemic.

All totaled, the Initiative Foundation infused more than $14.2 million in relief efforts throughout Central Minnesota.

“It’s remarkable that the economy is doing as well as it is in spite of a global pandemic, and for that I think we can thank lots of diligent entrepreneurs, and the fact that governments and the philanthropic community are stepping up. It’s taken everyone working together to take on this challenge,” said Initiative Foundation President Matt Varilek.

 

FUTURE SOLUTIONS
The last year of shut-downs, school closures and supply chain challenges have also revealed trouble spots in Central Minnesota’s economy. “Even though the economy is strong in aggregate, it also reflects some pretty vast disparities,” Varilek said, noting that while hospitality and personal service businesses have been devastated by the pandemic, other sectors like construction, outdoor recreation and some manufacturing have seen big gains. “Some businesses in the region have had their best year ever, while others are in danger of going away for good.”

Jeff Wig, the Initiative Foundation’s vice president for entrepreneurship, agrees. “When the shutdown started there was a shock and awe phase last spring and summer that has given way to an adjustment phase as people found new ways of doing business.” For instance, favorite local restaurants revved up websites and offered deliveries and curbside pick-ups, while other operations  make quick pivots, like Brainerd’s The Teehive, a custom T-shirt shop that quickly began producing face masks and other personal protective garments. While the Paycheck Protection Program and other small business loan programs have offered a lifeline to many small businesses in the region, “giving people additional loans for emergency use is not always what they want,” Wig said. “There are many other businesses that have decided it’s not worth it to stay open and lose money, but they’re looking for a way to grow forward as we start to emerge from the COVID-19 tunnel.”

BACKING BUSINESS: From Gustaf’s Up North Gallery in Lindstrom (upper left) to Jordie’s Trailside Cafe in Bowlus (upper right) to Lupulin Brewery in Big Lake (lower left) and GroShed located in Emily (lower right), grants distributed by the Initiative Foundation helped bring relief to regional small businesses.

Child care surfaced as another major challenge, as homes or centers closed or reduced class sizes and parents took on teaching duties at home. “Problems with finding or hanging onto child care is the single biggest factor affecting an employee’s productivity and the single biggest reason for absenteeism. The pandemic made that painfully clear,” said Marnie Werner, vice president for research and operations at the Center for Rural Policy and Development. “If you were having problems with child care, particularly in rural communities, you might be able to fall back on grandma or an aunt in a pinch, but with COVID, you can’t rely on your older relatives, which cut off that avenue for patching the problem.”

In a tight job market, employers could replace a child-care challenged employee with a new hire. But there are more unfilled jobs than skilled workers in the region, a trend that’s continued through the pandemic. “Businesses are starting to realize and understand that they do have to get involved in solving this problem,” said Werner. “And for policy makers and the public in general, I think this year has really clarified how much child care is part of the infrastructure that supports economic growth.”

With widespread vaccine distribution now within view, Varilek says a strong recovery for the region will also depend on following the public health lessons we’ve learned over the last year. “The health of Central Minnesota’s economy and the coronavirus are closely connected,” he said. “Fortunately, this virus is beatable and we’ve learned how to operate our economy more openly than we did in the early days. But getting to the next stage of the new normal is going to depend on as many of us as possible getting vaccinated just as soon as we can.

“We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves in terms of our expectations about immediately getting together in large groups, traveling for work and leisure and other things we’ve missed during the pandemic, but the fact we’ve been able to maintain the economic strength we’ve seen during this year gives me great optimism,” he said. “If we’re doing as well as we are with all of these pandemic constraints in place, just imagine where we can be in the future.”

 

 

 

 

FAMILY TRIES TO MAKE DEATHS MEANINGFUL
MINE ENER’S RELATIVES CAMPAIGN TO MAKE POSTPARTUM EDUCATION ROUTINE FOR MOTHERS AND DOCTORS

 

BYLINE: Laura Billings, Pioneer Press

 

SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. C1

 

LENGTH: 1095 words

 

In the anxious world of modern medicine, expectant mothers are instructed about their statistical odds of having a child with Down syndrome, Trisomy 13 or other genetic problems. They are given tests to detect their child’s risk of having cystic fibrosis, spina bifida and other diseases. They are asked to weigh the odds of miscarriage against the possible benefits of early amniocentesis.

Yet, in the nine months leading up to the birth of a new child, there is one statistic a woman may never learn about: After childbirth, from 15 percent to 20 percent of new mothers will experience some form of postpartum depression — a risk that far outweighs the genetic problems.

In the best cases, it can be a bad bout of the blues that dissipates in days or weeks. In the worst, it can descend into the kind of psychosis that swamped Mine Ener, the Macalester College graduate and St. Paul native who killed her 6-month-old daughter, Raya, in the summer of 2003 and suffocated herself while in police custody.

“Even when I was a maternity nurse, postpartum depression was something that was never really talked about,” recalls Ruth Ener, Mine’s sister-in-law, and one of the many family members who rallied around her when she came to St. Paul days before the killing, admitting that she was “at the bottom of the barrel.”

“We really had just a week to save her,” Ruth says. “But the answers didn’t come until later, after everything happened.”

Now, the Ener family is behind a bill waiting to be heard in the state House and the Senate that might help families find those answers more easily. Modeled on a law passed in Maryland last year, and a similar one proposed in New Jersey this year, the bill calls for postpartum depression education to become a standard of care among expectant Minnesota mothers and their families.

The hope is to keep the estimated 13,000 new Minnesota mothers who will suffer some form of postpartum depression, or PPD, each year from falling through the cracks.

“I’d never really heard of it until this happened,” says Toran Ener, one of Mine’s four siblings. But now he and his sister-in-law are well versed in all the forms PPD can take.

“One to three out of every thousand new mothers will have what Mine had — post-partum psychosis,” says Ruth. “And of that number, 5 percent will commit suicide and 4 percent will commit infanticide. It happens enough that these numbers exist. And, for our family, it happens too much.”

Some of the research the Ener family cites comes from the Postpartum Stress Center in Philadelphia, just blocks from where Mine worked as a Middle Eastern studies professor at Villanova University. And yet, the fact Ener didn’t seek help there herself underlines problems in understanding and diagnosing postpartum depression, says Linda Jones, a professor of social work at the University of Minnesota, who is helping with the Ener family’s push for the bill.

Sleep deprivation and anxiety about whether a new baby is thriving are early symptoms that also are common to most new moms. A culture that tells mothers they’re supposed to be blissfully happy can make it harder for them to ask for help when they’re not. And high-achieving women like Mine Ener, who spoke four languages fluently, who had just received tenure at Villanova, and whose family teasingly referred to her as “Power Woman,” may be especially adept at masking the signs of trouble.

When her daughter, Raya, was first diagnosed with Down syndrome, friends and family often said that “if anyone could handle the challenge of a child with special needs, it was Mine.” In her college entrance essay, her niece Maraia chose Mine as the person who had done the most to influence her personal development and wrote about her charisma, energy and ability to use such phrases as “rock on” and “totally rad” without sounding silly.

Even during that terrible week, her behavior vacillated between despairing comments about suicide and outbursts of “I can’t do it,” to moments of thoughtful self-awareness when she told her family, “I must have sounded pretty wacko before.”

“It was kind of the perfect storm,” says Jones of the confluence of factors that contributed to Mine’s steep descent. Though Ener’s family took her twice to a psychologist and started her on medication, Mine’s own efforts to minimize her struggle may have worked against her. A health care system set up to closely follow the health of a new baby, but not always the mental health of a new mother, also may have contributed.

The medical reasons for postpartum depression are unclear, but doctors note that during pregnancy, estrogen and progesterone levels increase about 10 times. In the first 24 hours after childbirth, hormone production falls dramatically — a wide swing that may profoundly unsettle some new mothers.

The lack of public understanding of postpartum depression was evident from the moment Mine Ener was arrested.

Prosecutors claimed that a woman like Ener had too many resources to have done what she did and even suggested harsher penalties for mothers who kill their children. Student protesters at Villanova University forced the removal of a memorial in her honor, a cause taken up by Philadelphia shock jocks and even Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

“These are people who didn’t know Mine,” says her brother Toran. “If they did, they would understand what really happened.”

After Raya and Mine’s death, an acquaintance of Toran Ener’s confessed that he couldn’t understand how Ener’s sister could do something so devastating. When that acquaintance experienced anxiety attacks and a difficult adjustment to medication, he apologized for his earlier comments.

“He said, ‘I didn’t get it before, and now I do,’ ” Toran recalls. “Until you’ve experienced something like this, you really can’t understand it.”

Mine Ener, who was a professor of Middle East history, was particularly interested in the people who had “fallen through the cracks” of a culture — the poor, orphaned children and homeless women whose stories she uncovered in archives from Ann Arbor, Mich., to Tel Aviv.

After her death, the Ener family is fighting to make sure her own story helps other new mothers from falling through the cracks in a more tragic way.

If she is called to testify this session, her sister-in-law has one thing she wants Minnesota legislators to hear: “I want to say that if this can happen to someone like Mine, it really could happen to anyone.”

Laura Billings can be reached at lbillings@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5584.

 

LOAD-DATE: September 8, 2005

 

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

 

GRAPHIC: 2 PHOTOS
1)JEAN PIERI, PIONEER PRESS
Above: “I’d never really heard of (postpartum depression) until this happened,” says Toran Ener, brother of Mine Ener, the Villanova professor and St. Paul native who killed her child and herself during a struggle with postpartum psychosis in 2003. In the background at the home of Mine Ener’s parents is a poster about postpartum depression that her family wants to place in clinic offices.
2)Left: Mine Ener was a Villanova professor who spoke four languages. Friends and family had thought “if anyone could handle the challenge of a child with special needs, it was Mine” when her daughter, Raya, was diagnosed with Down syndrome.

 

Macalester covers fewer than a dozen city blocks—but how big is its carbon footprint?

Ten years ago, a team of senior seminar students set out to find what it takes to keep the college fueled for a year, adding up the carbon cost of classroom heating and lighting, overseas travel, and feeding 2,000 students three squares a day. They discovered that the campus is responsible for an estimated 19,531 annual metric tons of carbon dioxide—greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to heating more than 2,106 houses, putting 4,176 passenger cars on the road, or burning 106 rail cars full of coal.

“Compared to a lot of other colleges, Macalester already was much farther along in thinking about how to reduce that impact,” says sustainability manager Suzanne Savanick Hansen, adding that the student-led CO2 calculation since has become the benchmark for doing better by the environment. Starting in 2007, when President Brian Rosenberg signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, Macalester has been on a mission to make its campus carbon neutral by 2025. This is an ambitious pledge, one that calls for reducing carbon consumption by half, and using carbon offsets to cover the rest.

As the college’s sustainability program ends its first decade, Macalester Today asked five energy sector alums to talk about trends in sustainability and to share their own tips for a cleaner energy future.

Start at Home

   “The economics have changed so that fossil fuels just aren’t competitive against renewable energy and energy efficiency. Federal energy policy could slow progress down, but a cleaner energy supply is still coming.”  —Chris Duffrin ’93

With climate-change data fast disappearing from the websites of the Environmental Protection Agency and other governmental entities, it’s been a challenging period for the sustainable energy sector. But Chris Duffrin ’93, president of the Center for Energy and Environment, an energy efficiency-focused nonprofit in the Twin Cities, still sees a silver lining. “It’s frustrating that we’re seeing a lack of federal action on these issues, but what that has done is driven more of the action to a local level than ever before, and cities and local governments are much more engaged in making better policies,” says Duffrin. “The economics have changed so that fossil fuels just aren’t competitive against renewable energy and energy efficiency. Federal energy policy could slow progress down, but a cleaner energy supply is still coming.”

Duffrin got his start in the energy sector advocating for low-income utility customers at the Energy CENTS Coalition, and then spent many years at the Neighborhood Energy Connection (NEC), the St. Paul-based nonprofit behind the HOURCAR car-sharing program, In 2016, he helped merge NEC with the Minneapolis-based Center for Energy and Environment, a move that has allowed both groups to expand the reach of their expertise in home energy audits, providing $10 million in home improvement loans each year.

With residential energy accounting for 22 percent of global energy consumption, taking the following steps in your own home can make a difference for the environment, says Duffrin, no matter what’s happening in Washington:

    • Get an energy audit, and start tightening up old windows, door frames, attic bypasses, and other places where air is escaping.

    • Add insulation, a home improvement with a great rate of return, cutting your carbon load by an average of 5,692 pounds every year.

    • Swap incandescent bulbs for LEDs, which are coming down in price and can last for up to 25 years.

    • Replace old appliances with efficient Energy Star models—and recycle that old fridge in the basement, which produces nearly 2,000 pounds of CO2 every year.

Electrify Your Ride

“I’ve become evangelical on the subject of electric cars because we’ve reached the point where making a sustainable choice isn’t a sacrifice—it’s actually saving me money.”  —Sarah Clark ’86

If Sarah Clark ’86 has anything to say about it, your next car will run on electricity.

The director of program advancement at Fresh Energy, a Minnesota-based nonprofit that advocates for clean-energy alternatives, Clark is also the proud owner of a 2013 Nissan Leaf that saved her $1,700 in fuel and maintenance over the last year: “I’ve become evangelical on the subject of electric cars because we’ve reached the point where making a sustainable choice isn’t a sacrifice—it’s actually saving me money.”

Although transportation just overtook energy generation as the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions, plug-in vehicles like Clark’s—which make up just one percent of car sales—could help reverse the trend. Not only do plug-ins produce at least 30 percent (and as much as 80 percent, depending on your region) less greenhouse gases than their fossil-fueled counterparts, they can run even cleaner when fueled by renewable energy, such as the Xcel Windsource program that powers Macalester’s electric car plug-in station. As the cost of solar and wind energy continues to come down, the financial benefit for consumers will only improve—one reason why carmakers like GM, Ford, and Volvo are speeding up their production of electric-powered cars.

“We used to talk about how sustainability meant using less electricity, but with new technology and fuel sources, the message is now about how we can use clean energy intelligently to power the economy,” says Clark. “When GM announces that the future is electric, there’s no stopping the momentum.”

If you’re in the market for a new ride, you could get in line for the new mass market Tesla Model 3, or take advantage of the wave of first-generation electrics just off lease and ready to sell. “They’re such a great deal right now,” Clark says. “I got mine for $9,000, and it’s the best car I’ve ever driven.”

Seed a Solar Garden

“If renewable energy is seen as something that only a few people can afford, it won’t go very far.” 
—Timothy Den-Herder Thomas ’09

The cost of solar panels has come way down over the past decade—but paying for them upfront still creates sticker shock for most families who could use a break on their energy bills. “It appears expensive because we’ve expected individuals to pay for the full cost of solar up front—kind of like building your own power plant,” says Timothy Den-Herder Thomas ’09. “The whole system is really upside down.”

Den-Herder Thomas is doing what he can to put renewable energy right-side up as the general manager of Cooperative Energy Futures. The South Minneapolis-based clean energy co-op is developing eight community solar gardens around the state aimed at making solar accessible to low-income households. Using a community subscription model that allows users to immediately reduce their electric bills without an upfront cost, his startup has community solar gardens underway on the roofs of a North Minneapolis temple, the Edina public works building, and a Catholic church in Eden Prairie, with a half-dozen more Minnesota projects in the pipeline. Utilities have been using the model of passing on the cost of new plants and infrastructure to thousands of customers for more than a century, he says. “There’s really no reason we shouldn’t be using the same business model for community-based clean energy.”

Former Udall scholar Den-Herder Thomas also serves on the board of Community Power, an advocacy group that has been a major player in pushing the City of Minneapolis, Xcel Energy, and CenterPoint Energy to come together around a climate action plan. “Growing up in the New York metro area, where the divide between rich and poor is in your face, I’ve always been interested in the disconnect between the way our society works and what we need to change for it to be fair and livable and ‘sustainable,’” he says. Making renewable energy accessible to people of all income levels is a critical first step, Den-Herder Thomas believes. “If renewable energy is seen as something that only a few people can afford, it won’t go very far. But if it helps ease the burden on low-income people, it can be the start of something that works long term.”

Catch the Wind

“The energy sector has such a large impact on the environment, so I’m passionate about bringing in new voices and improving diversity in this sector.”  —Julia Eagles ’06

Julia Eagles ’06 got a ground-level glimpse of the energy industry by going to door to door in Minneapolis’s Phillips neighborhood, encouraging residents to replace old air conditioners and refrigerators through a utility-subsidized efficiency program. “I was basically a glorified appliance salesperson,” Eagles says of the gig she started fresh out of Macalester that introduced her to some of the challenges of making energy efficiency services widely accessible. “For renters, there are questions around who owns the appliances, who pays for the improvements, and who benefits from the energy savings,” making it challenging to incentivize people to make an investment that may take time to pay off, she says. “It’s one reason that renters and low-income communities are underserved by energy-efficiency efforts.”

As public policy and strategy manager for Xcel Energy, figuring out how state policies, energy rates, and public utilities regulation can work together to make sustainable energy more accessible is now her full-time job. “As a student, I would not have pictured myself working for a big utility, but it’s a fascinating time to be in the industry,” says Eagles, who has a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. “It’s an impactful place to be in terms of carbon emissions reduction.”

Already the country’s top wind utility provider for more than a decade, Xcel Energy just accelerated its investment in renewable energy, announcing plans to add 1,850 megawatts of wind energy in the Midwest over the next four years—enough power for nearly one million homes. In Minnesota alone, the utility aims to get 60 percent of its energy from renewables by 2030—a shift that many consumers are encouraging by installing rooftop solar panels, subscribing to community solar gardens, or adding wind turbines to farms. “The biggest change now, and what makes it a really interesting time in the industry, is the shift to a more distributed system where there’s more options for customers to choose their generation sources and control their energy use with advanced technologies,” Eagles says. The challenge as more customers “grow their own” energy, she says, is that utilities must “figure out ways to make that work on a system that’s been set up to deliver power one way while keeping rates fair for all customers.”

A founding board member of the Twin Cities chapter of Young Professionals in Energy, Eagles actively encourages the next generation of Macalester grads to join the industry to work toward decarbonizing the economy. “The energy sector has such a large impact on the environment, so I’m passionate about bringing in new voices and improving diversity in this sector,” she says. “We need people who can think outside their silos, and come up with better solutions for everyone.”

Prepare for Turbulence

The unpredictability of the energy market always appealed to Zach Axelrod ’06, who decided he would make it his career even before he arrived at Macalester to study economics: “As the cost of traditional fossil fuel was going up and the cost of renewable energy was coming down, I could see that at some point in my lifetime they would intersect, and it would be a lot of fun.”

But even he was surprised by the sudden turn his business took at Arcadia Power—a national company that offers clean energy services alongside traditional utility options in one bill for customers—the day President Donald Trump announced the U.S. wouldn’t live up to its 2015 pledge at the Paris Climate Accord. “We signed up more people for clean energy in the six days after that announcement than we have in any period before or since,” says Axelrod, Arcadia Power’s VP of Energy Services. “Our business jumped massively because of his policy in the other direction. People just decided, ‘Well, if our government isn’t going to do what every other government in the world has done, we’ll have to do something ourselves.’”

Over the last decade, Axelrod has seen his share of boom and bust cycles in the renewable energy sector—from working for a failed start-up to seeing the solar hot water company he started in 2009 run into roadblocks. “The way we’ve set up our grid and paid for it has operated the same way for roughly 100 years and that’s all breaking down right now,” says Axelrod. “It’s very exciting for consumers, and it’s good for the world that this is happening.”

Though he doesn’t own a car, Axelrod offsets his frequent air travel by investing in community solar. The success of the renewable economy, he says, relies on making it “ridiculously easy for people to do the right thing.” For instance, Arcadia Power allows customers around the country—renters included—to switch to renewable energy with a few clicks on its website: And ease is important, says Axelrod. “If it takes just a few minutes to make the world slightly better, more people will do it.”

Sustainability Successes

Ten years after it launched, Macalester’s Sustainability Office has plenty of successes to report, from getting more students to take public transit to having a quarter of Markim Hall’s energy needs supplied by its rooftop solar panels. Here are some other highlights:

Recycled Rec Center: When the Leonard Center was built, more than 14,000 tons of demolition waste from the old rec center was recycled or reused, keeping more than 93 percent of the debris out of landfills.

Bottle Ban: The average American consumes 167 bottles of water a year and recycles only 38 of them. Since 2011, Macalester has helped keep that plastic out of the waste stream by banning water-bottle sales and encouraging students to fill up at campus water fountains instead.

Clean Machines: Since 2013, the Mac community has been fueling electric vehicles at two dedicated charging stations powered by wind energy from Xcel’s Windsource program.

In the LEED: Macalester’s Markim Hall—the first higher ed building in the state to receive the top Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design distinction—uses 80 percent less energy than does a typical Minnesota building.

Saving Leftovers: Once a week, volunteers from Cafe Mac’s Food Recovery Network collect leftover dining hall food and send it to the local meal program Loaves and Fishes. Food waste also gets a second life: it’s collected as feed for pigs.

Efficiency Mode: Facilities Services has retrofitted many buildings, outdoor walkways, and parking lot lights with LED lighting, already saving  $92,000 to date. By 2022, the college is projected to save more than $1 million from energy efficiency projects put in place since 2015.

Trees for Travel: The average study-abroad airline flight emits about a metric ton of CO2. Returning students are encouraged to look for ways to reduce that impact by participating in events such as tree planting. (Macalester College Student Government, the Center for Study Away, and the Sustainability Office are seeking more opportunities in this area.)

Zero Waste: To reach its goal of Zero Waste by 2020, Mac added recycling and composting bins alongside its trash barrels in 2013. To prevent a big garbage pile-up on move-out days, trash bins are made scarce, forcing students to recycle, donate, or trade what they no longer need.

Smart Landscaping: Native plants and porous pavers around Markim Hall and the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center aren’t just pretty—they’re also designed to prevent storm-water runoff.

Laura Billings Coleman is a regular contributor to Macalester Today.