 Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for North Central Minnesota, produced by Lakeland Public Television with host Ray Gildow. Production funding for Lakeland Currents is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airports, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport for information available at BemidjiAirport.org. Closed captioning for Lakeland Currents is sponsored by Niswatak Service, tax preparation for businesses and individuals online at Niswataks.com. Hello again everyone and welcome to Lakeland Currents where tonight we're going to talk about the Brainerd Lakes Area Community Foundation, something that's pretty unique and Brainerd in the sense that it's a standalone operation. And my guest this evening are Carl Samp, who is the executive director. And Tom Olson, who is a board, or Tom Anderson, rather, sorry Tom, who is a board member of this and many other boards. Well, keep busy. And they're both gentlemen that I have known for quite a while. Welcome to Lakeland Currents. It's good to have you both here. Thanks for having us Ray. How do you want to start, Carl? Well, you know what to say. Sure. You can just tell people what the Brainerd Community Area Foundation is. I'll start with a little history of the foundation. So I was back in 1998, a gentleman named John Sullivan, who's since passed away, but John O'Navillus, land company. Much of the land that's in Baxter, that's the big box stores now. John was the owner of that area. And so as that developed, John, of course, came upon more and more wealth. And he really wanted to do some good with that. And so he stopped into the St. Cloud Office of Central Minnesota Community Foundation and talked to our president, Steve Jewel, and said, you know, I'd really like to set up some funds and do some good work with some of my wealth. And so they started that conversation. And then he was joined in by his realtors, Rod Converse and Kevin Close, from Close Converse Realty. And we're roughly what period of time would this be? This was 1998. 1998, you said? Yep. Okay. And then Bernie Roberts from Edward Jones Investments were involved. So those were the four founders of our foundation. So they joined in conversation with Central Minnesota Community Foundation, which is the community foundation around the Greater St. Cloud Area, and started having conversations about what that might look like in Brainerd. And rather than form its own independent community foundation, which there are over 750 in America right now, they decided to partner with Central Minnesota Community Foundation. We did form their own board of directors up here in the Brainerd Lakes area, and started the program. And John's funds were the first funds in the program, and they started doing good work back then. So that was the formation, and those folks were the founders, and deserve a ton of credit for their foresight. So let's just maybe share with our viewers what a little bit of your background is, and we can do the same with Tom, because you both have pretty diverse backgrounds. Well, I grew up in a small town rural Southern Minnesota, and went to college at Mankato State. Was an environmental educator, a naturalist by education, and did some work. I worked for the State Park System for a summer, and I spent two seasons up here at the Gull Lake Campground for the Corps of Engineers. Became a park ranger for the National Forest Service out in Idaho. Couldn't convince my now-wife, beautiful wife, Gail, to move out there with me into the middle of nowhere. So I came back to the Twin Cities, and I kind of switched fields from outdoor recreation to therapeutic recreation. Worked with adults with disabilities for a total of 16 years. For three years, I was working on kind of traditional DAC activities, and then we converted to community-based employment services for adults with disabilities, which was really the beginning of my experience with what's called asset-based community development, of really looking at the gifts of people, and how do we mobilize those into our community work. And that played into my future too. So I took one year off from that work and led foreigners on cross-continental camping tours for a company called Trek America, and then came back to that company, and we converted to totally community-based employment services for adults with disabilities. And within six years, we totally integrated those workers. We went from 65 workers to 110 workers. Total cumulative wages of $3,500 to $350,000. And the lesson there I learned was the power of asset-based thinking, what are people's gifts, rather than what are their needs and deficiencies, and the power of community to do that. So then my wife's from Brainerd here, and her dad passed away on New Year's Day of 1990 unexpectedly, and we made the decision to move up to Brainerd, and she had to twist my arm to come back up here to the Brainerd Lakes area, where I love to hunt and fish and golf, and all the great outdoor activities that we have up here. And so I got a job with Central Lakes, while I was in Brainerd Technical College, working with the OSP, your Occupational Skills Program. So as students with developmental, borderline developmental disabilities, and we helped make the transition from school to work, and independent or home living to independent living. And then of course I brought that whole idea that I'd worked with in the Twin Cities and started putting those students out in non-profits in our community to gain work skills, but also to serve the community. I always felt that volunteering shouldn't be just for able-bodied people, it should be for everybody. We all get a great feeling from doing that, so why shouldn't it be something available to everyone? Well then I found out that was called service learning, of combining volunteerism with learning. And so I started writing service learning grants at the college, and got 13 grants in a row that we wrote, and we kept expanding from into different programs at the college, and eventually when the two colleges, the Technical and Community College, and Merge with Staples all came together, we wrote a Bremer grant to do this service learning project, and basically we started doing neighborhood organizing, and we created a class called Community Awareness and Activism in the Sociology Department, and started doing neighborhood organizing in Southeast Brainerd, and using that asset-based model. So got citizens engaged, in fact there was some efforts to kind of keep a group home out of the neighborhood. And when we used this model and showed how we're going to look at the gifts of people and utilize them, within six months the people who are trying to keep the group home out of the neighborhood, and the people who actually were in the group who did move into the neighborhood, were working side by side together in the efforts to make Southeast a better neighborhood to build. So I was in a program of the Initiative Foundation at that time, called Healthy Community Partnership Program. We were in the first round of that, and they heard our story of what we did in Southeast, and they said you know that's a pretty cool model. We think that might work well in small rural communities in our 14-county region, and so they hired me to work alongside Carol Spearman in the Healthy Community Partnership Program. Well within a week Carol left for the Blandman Foundation, and I moved into her vice presidency position, and spent nine years using that asset-based community model in developing small rural communities, neighborhoods in St. Cloud, all kinds of different groups, and then we expanded that whole model, working with nonprofits, lake and river associations, methamphetamine coalitions, early childhood coalitions. So it was really the whole idea of bringing together diverse groups of people, creating shared vision and a plan of action, and then giving them a few resources to implement that, but at the same time map their own local assets to put them into, but to put them to work to make things happen in a positive manner. So you have a pretty broad background. I do, yeah, which is awesome for foundation work, because you encounter a lot of different things when you're in a foundation. So I've worked in outdoor environmental education, I've worked in people with disabilities, I've worked in community development, economic development, workforce issues, neighborhood organizing, yeah it's a broad background. I was an ADHD kid, so I just got to keep moving from one thing to another. Tom, you're a board member, and give us a little bit about your background, because you too have a pretty interesting background. Well, it's a little bit diverse too. I'm actually a brainer native, and went to high school here, and went on to Bemidji State University of Minnesota, and became a CPA once I was out of college, and worked for Arthur Anderson and Jostin's, and a few organizations like that down in Minneapolis in the St. Cloud area. Then I kind of migrated back up here, got connected with Ironing Johnson up here, and found my way back to the Brainerd area, and worked with the universal pensions in the early years, and until it was sold, and stayed on for a while, and then went on to work up at Hunt Technologies, and then also got involved with the organization down in Minneapolis, Minnesota Thermal Science for a while, and we built that organization up, and then came back here, and working at Integrated Retirement again. So again, different companies. I've been fortunate that very successful companies, most of them, I think seven out of the ten, or whatever it was that have been leaders in their respective industries over the years, so in different businesses, in different product lines, and that too. So it's been interesting, and I've been involved in a number of board, nonprofit boards in the area, and still involved in those, and really enjoy the type of work, and giving back to the community whenever I can, and I think I probably picked up some of that from my father. He was on this Brainerd City Council for 12 years, and I think he gave me some insight as a public service or something. That's good for you, and it's good for the community. Good for you. So there are a number of organizations and communities, the foundations. Your foundation is different. We have the Central Minnesota Initiative Fund in Central Minnesota, and there are other initiative funds in the state. You're different from that, though. Why don't you explain a little bit the difference between the two? Sure. We're both legally community foundations, but, and as I said, I spent nine years at the Initiative Foundation. It's a tremendous organization, does great work in the 14 counties in Central Minnesota, but the real focus is programmatic. So they work on community and economic development, mostly economic development issues, and we are much more of a donor services-oriented community foundation. So our primary focus is really to provide a venue or a vehicle for people who want to do philanthropic giving. So we help them set up their own little mini foundations, if you will, donor-advised funds, and from that, they can make recommendations for grants on an annual basis or... So the people who actually make the donation have some input into where that money's going to go? Right, they make a recommendation. When they make that gift, it's a completed gift in the IRSIs. So we are legally holders of those funds, but they make recommendations to us. And if they're eligible organizations they're recommending to, meaning 501c3 charitable organizations, school districts, or local units of government, it's eligible. We will fulfill their wishes. We wouldn't exist if we didn't do that. So that's how we go about doing that work. So we just try and make philanthropy easy. So really, they're not gifting to us. They're gifting to the community. That's right. So when you operate, your operation is totally coming from donations. You don't get state money. You don't get money from a parent organization. I guess that's true. I mean, in some ways, we're a bit different than, again, the initiative foundation where they get a lot of their funds coming from the Bush Foundation and that. McKnight Foundation. And again, we get more from the donors themselves. And again, the focus is a little bit different too, Ray, as you can see that we're Brainerd Lakes Area Foundation. So again, we're focused on that. As Carl mentioned, initiative foundation is a broader purview of maybe 14 counties where we tend to be more focused more locally, I would say. So talk a little bit about some of the projects that you are involved with. What are you doing? Well, so we have the funds that we hold. And the combinations of how they do that are... I've been in foundation work for 20 years, but this is my first go-around at the donor services side. So I'm pretty amazed at the flexibility and the combinations that can be done, whether it's an endowed fund or a flexible fund or they do annual payouts or pass-through money. So there's a lot of different things that donors can do. We can fulfill almost any wish of a donor. But we also do work in... We do grant-making. So we have a certain amount of unrestricted... What's called unrestricted funds of which we make grants to our community for. And we've chosen... There's really a foundation can kind of do two approaches to grant-making. They can do the peanut butter approach or the laser approach. And peanut butter approach means you try and spread your funds out kind of all over the place and give a little here, give a little there. We have chosen the laser approach. Back in 2014, Blandin Foundation pulled the cohorts of Blandin Community Leadership Program together. There's six different groups that have went through in Blandin. About 60 of them got together at the Arrowwood Lodge. And we identified really the workforce shortage as our biggest challenge to economic vitality here in our community back in 2014. And so I was working pretty closely on that with Don Hickman from the Initiative Foundation and we've kind of kept that ball rolling and kept that in the forefront here because you can talk to any employer and it is still... And you guys did a great special on workforce shortages through the news three-part show in the news channel here. But it's a huge challenge for any regional center in for sure rural Minnesota and many other states in the union right now. So it's just a combination of demographics, there's just less people in the working age right now. We have an out migration of young adults in Minnesota and most of those come out of greater Minnesota. Basically any regional center like Brainerd that doesn't have a four-year institution, we lose pretty much 50% of each graduating class. Wow. Heads off to a four-year college or the military or see the world or whatever it is. Some of them trickle back, that's great, but many of them don't. And so we're presented with a real challenge here. So we are really concentrating on three things. How do we develop, attract and retain a quality workforce? So all our grant making the last couple years... So that is probably your biggest priority from the organization. Definitely. Yeah, I mean that's our focus for our grant making. Okay. So you know and we're really looking at those kids, that group that sticks around here after graduation that doesn't go off to a four-year college. And so how are they becoming the best that they can be to become productive members of our community, be our future workforce, et cetera. So our funding projects like Kinship Partners, the shop that works with that rescue, after-school programs in Crosby and Pine River. Junior Achievement is setting up a new program to teach kids how to set up their own business. And so those are all grants we've made. We've supported the key recruiter program at BLADEIT that is recruiting kind of key, high level, especially IT professional positions into our community. We also fund projects that help retain people in our community once they get here. So we helped start the Brainard Newcomers Club back up recently with a grant to community action. So that you know the research shows there's three things that make people love where they live and stay there. And that's gathering places and open welcoming community and the aesthetic factor or cool factor. So things like the Riverwalk. We funded a major grant to the Brainard Riverfront development. We helped support Lakes Area Music Festival. But the Newcomers Club, once again, when people get here we want them to feel welcome. We want them connected to a group of friends. If you lock them in here, if you will. Because we want them to say it's hard getting people, enough people to come. Once they come, we want them to stay in here too. So those are the kind of projects we're looking to fund here in the community. I think Ray, that's where you can kind of see the community foundation aspect of us that right now one of the bigger needs in the community is this workforce development. And so that's where our focus is now. Again, that can change over a period of time and we can see some other needs. And that's where we're looked at the community-based needs and trying to connect resources to help the community solve some issues or again make it look at the well-being of the community. You get certain other organizations like Carl, like you mentioned, that might be kinship, might be teen challenge. And they're kind of singly focused on an objective there. Whereas you look at the community foundation, we try to take a broader approach. Right now, as Carl mentioned last year, to workforce development is a major issue. So we're focusing attention on that. Boy, that really is a huge issue. I don't think we can overstate that enough. And I think with the immigration changes that we've been seeing, I know the resorted industry here this spring was really hit. They used to get a lot of Europeans that worked in some of the bigger resorts in the area. And that was slowed down or maybe not even available. But I have gone to Florida the last couple of years driving down and those want ads are everywhere. I mean, it's in the machine trades. It's in the restaurant. Although the restaurant business is slowing down a little bit. But a lot of these other areas and it's skilled labor. It's not just taking people off the street. So it's encouraging to hear that you're kind of identified three areas here of developing their skills and then finding ways to keep them here because it costs a lot to get people here. That's right. So it's worth spending some money to get them to stay, isn't it? Absolutely. It sure is. And we partnered with the Chamber and Bladek on this topic and Central Lakes College and the school district. Kind of the unique position we're in. The Chamber and Bladek, they're pretty concerned with right now and with their membership. We have the unique opportunity to look into the future, 10, 15 years. Who's going to be the future workforce then? So that's these younger kids that are in our community that are going to stick around. And we can look beyond the needs of our membership to the broader community. So I think part of that is educating people. I'm not sure all businesses stop and think about that future workforce and where they're going to come from. And the value that places like Kinship Partner and the shop play in our community. Early childhood education. What is the shop, I'm not sure. The shop is a youth center that works with at-risk kids, age 14 to 20 years old. And here in Brainerd. Right. And it's right on the corner at 8th in Washington Street. Yeah. And so they do a tremendous job. They actually have a computer refurbishing center there. So we just made a pretty significant grant for us to them for general operations this year. They teach kids computer repair skills and recycling. They have a bicycle recycle program, which teaches kids to, they take in bicycles, they refurbish them, fix them up, and either sell them or get them back out into the community for kids. So that's a program that helps build skills with those kids in our community. So do you have other employees in your organization that actually serve as lia's on to some of these projects you're funding? No, no, it's me. You're kind of a one-person operation. Yeah, we have a half-time admin assistant that we're actually just taking a little change in direction. I've been doing interviews the last two days now for a little higher level position called Donor Services Coordinator that's going to be part-time to start with that will really help. But you're kind of in a growth mode. You're seeing yourself growing because, Tom, you were saying that you're seeing some real changes. Yeah, I think really look at our history, Ray, and we've been around for 19 years now and for until the past about a year and a half or so, we just had a part-time director. Whether it be Mike Burton, Bill Brecken, we had a number of individuals that served that role very well. But a couple, about a year and a half or two years ago, the board decided that for us to really be successful and to do the right thing for the community, we needed to bring on a full-time executive director. And we made the commitment to do that and brought in Carl. And he's done just a tremendous job. And we've seen things elevate already. And like he said, we're looking at taking the next step now. Can we provide additional support for Carl to continue to have him be more effective and to make more of an impact on the community? I'd say that we've seen the organization grow. We now have about $10 million in assets that we have about 90 or so funds, different donor funds or agency funds as we call them. And we've granted over $6 million back into the community. And we are part, I would say that to give a full understanding here, we are part of community giving, which is located in St. Cloud. And they're kind of an umbrella organization over the different community colleges in, I mean the community foundations in central Minnesota. There, we've got community foundations in St. Cloud. Alexandria, Wilmer, Brainerd are the four main ones. And then we have some community funds like Recory and Painesville and some others like that. And St. Cloud provides kind of the umbrella over that, making sure that we are pooling assets so that we get a better return and more professionally managed on the asset side of it, that we share common practices and policies that we're accredited with the National Community Foundation, that we get audited financial statements, that we have, if Carl needs additional assistance, whether it be staffing for a short term, or whether it be some expertise that we don't particularly have ourselves or the issue that he's not familiar with, we've got a resource also to go to. And so they do provide that umbrella, which is helpful and makes us more efficient and allows us to operate with a relatively small staff here. So you also said you had a program for women. Right. Could you talk just a little bit about that? Sure. We have Brainerd Lakes Area Women's Fund. And so that's called a Field of Interest Fund for us. So we also have the Brainerd Public School Foundation under as a Field of Interest Fund flow. But the Women's Fund has, it's an endowed fund. And so the earnings off of that can be granted out to the community to support projects that assist women in our community. And it's not just women. They made a grant to the We Are New, the new clinic in town here for reproductive education and support. And they've supported the Sexual Assault Services Program and the Women's Center. And they run a great program at the college called Presenting Yourself that helps women, maybe low income women generally, to learn how to put a resume together, how to interview, how to dress, how to eat when you're out in a business situation. Just all aspects of that and really help them get ready for the workforce to enter that workforce. It's really a cool program. And our Women's Fund has a new campaign now called the 365 Campaign. So really we're asking people who want to just donate a dollar a day ideally in one check for $365 to support the work of the Women's Fund. And what happens is half that money goes into their endowment that continues to build over time and grants are made from that. But a half of that will also go into this year's grant making funds for the Women's Fund. And those people who join that club, that Giving Circle, 365 Giving Circle, also get to be part of the grant making decision then with the Women's Fund Committee that year. So it's really a great way to engage the broader community in this effort to support our women and our community. So we're really excited. In fact, I'm going right from this interview to meet with our committee chair, Jill Carlson of that committee, to talk about this campaign and how we can promote it. And if it's okay, one of the things we're looking at with the Women's Fund is having a special event just for women, female professional advisors in our community. So as state attorneys, CPAs, financial advisors, bankers, et cetera. And we want to invite them all in to learn about this initiative, encourage them all to join, but encourage their clients as well to consider joining this effort with us alongside of us. So really the biggest part of my job too is working with the professional advisors of our community. Doing that networking. Yeah, yeah, because you know, 80 to 85 percent of gifts nationally from community foundations come as referrals from professional advisors. So it's just imperative that I spend time with them, educating them about the opportunity in our community. You know, the work that we're doing to strengthen our community, how we can capture wealth, keep doing good here. But at the same time, meet a special need that people have of wanting to give back to their community. So research shows that people, that when professional advisors talk to their clients about charitable giving, it strengthens that relationship between them. And so we want to help with that. We're down to the last minute. But maybe we could, you could tell people how to get a hold of you if they want to become involved as a donor, or if they want to become an applicant for a grant. How do they get in touch with you? Well, we have a website. It's communitygiving.org, communitygiving.org. And just click on the Brainerd, Brainerd Lakes Area Community Foundation link there. And my phone number is two on eight, eight, two, one, five, six, one, nine. Anybody can get a hold of me. My email address is ksamp at communitygiving.org. And I'd be happy to assist anybody with making philanthropy easy for them and helping them feel better about what they're doing for the community. Carl Samp, Executive Director and Tom Anderson, a board member. Thank you very much for taking the time to come on and tell us about this program. It sounds like a really good program. Thanks for having us. And thanks for the work that Lakeland PBS does. You bet. Thank you. You've been watching Lakeland Currents, where we're talking about what you're talking about. I'm Ray Gildoff. So long. Until next time.