Our staff and partners highlight acts of courageous leadership, and opportunities for you and your community to engage in creating a vital shared future.
In mid-July, 20 staff and friends of the Foundation embarked on a 14-hour odyssey through North Dakota oil patch country. As we sat down to lunch at the 4 Bears Casino near New Town, Marilyn Hudson from the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation shared with us written copies of a song recorded in 1918 by Wounded Face called maakĕ tĕhaᶇ makoṡ (Earth Always Endures). ... more
There’s something about a Chautauqua tent that twists your mind just enough to let in new perspectives and create inspiring connections. That’s what happened last week on the beautiful campus of the University of Minnesota-Morris for the first-ever (we think) Leadership Chautauqua. ... more
We ask ourselves this question every day at the Bush Foundation as communities find themselves facing increasingly complex problems with fewer apparent resources, including people willing to step up together to envision, plan and carry out strategies that might ultimately improve community vitality.
The short answer (still evolving) is: leadership development is becoming less about individual “leaders” and more about “leadership” residing across sets of people in teams and networks, especially as the Internet and social networking flatten hierarchies and decentralize control. ... more
The Advancing Solutions Team of the Bush Foundation recently hosted 20 community change researchers and evaluators from across the country, many of them colleagues I’ve met through the Community Development Society, a professional association. They came together to help us learn more about the difficult work of measuring progress in complex community change initiatives that seek to improve community vitality. ... more
Joyful exhaustion describes my reflection on completing the recent Minnesota Community Pride Showcase with InCommons event at the Minnesota State Fair earlier this month. We arrived at 6 a.m. to set up Carousel Park (thanks to my colleagues Amy Anderson, Catherine McGuire, and Catherine Jordan for being the early bird crew, too!) and stayed till 6 p.m. to clean up. ... more
