 Welcome to INSIGHT, produced in partnership with Lakeland Public Television, serving North Central Minnesota. Today we are chatting with Paul Welley, Chairman of the George W. Nielsen Foundation. Paul has generously agreed to share some of his experience with us. I'd like to thank you, Paul, for joining us today. Thank you. Good to be with you. So you are, the foundation is a big philanthropic investor in the community. Talk about the scope of your investments as an introduction to the foundation, and then let's talk a little bit about the history of the foundation, but what do you invest in in this area? Yeah, we try to keep it basically as simple and as broad at the same time. So we try to reflect the community. Our strategy is to keep our overhead as low as possible. We have a part-time executive director and then five trustees. So we don't have, we're not an operating foundation, so to speak. We don't have staff that operate a particular program, as we feel that Bemidji is very special and that there are so many people that are involved in nonprofits and doing things for the community. We want to support that. Bemidji has also grown quite a bit over the years, and there's a number of nonprofit services that didn't exist when our foundation really got going. And so we've contributed to a number of facilities that have made a difference in our community. This being one of them, building for the public television. These studios, Lakeland Public Television, was one of your investments. How do you make the decision to invest in a particular project like Lakeland Public Television? How do you ensure that your investment actually has the impact that you intend? Yeah, of course, being local people, we're focused on Beltrami County and just a little bit east of here in Cass Lake. So it's a community that we're pretty familiar with and who the people are and who's really invested in our community in terms of long-term goals and knowledge about what the needs are in the community. So it's been, we didn't need a staff person to kind of research who these people are. Typically we know who the board members are and who the staff are, the different nonprofits. And so basically it reflects the needs of the community and we rely on them, so to speak, to come forward because we don't have a particular, I mean right now actually our two of our main strategies are economic development and chemical dependency and jobs. We did a, we contracted with the marketing and research department at Bemidji State University to interview 120 different businesses in our community. And what they found was that the number of businesses can't get people that have the skill set that they're looking for. And so hopefully that information will help us to try to work with local educational institutions. As a result of that we funded a new program at our high school called the Career Academy. So the high school now is going to go back to what we used to call shop classes. And so they're more about the trades and students that aren't necessarily interested in academia or going to a four-year college, you know, they have other interests and so we want to try to emphasize that more. So that would be one example where we hired BSU to do some research for us to see what these businesses actually need. How do you ensure that your various initiatives are having the impact and the interconnected impact that you wish to have? Do you, for example, build metrics into the investments that you make to ensure that the community receives certain impacts? Or do you make investments based on your own personal knowledge? Well, I guess some of both. We asked, you know, at the grant application forum, we asked, you know, what their goals and what the results are that they hope to achieve in our community. So I guess one example was we had, again, related to this chemical dependency thing. We asked a couple of judges to come to our meeting. And one of them ended up setting up this DUI court. And so they try to channel people that have chemical dependency issues to have some ongoing monitoring. So rather than go to prison or jail, whatever, even though they've had their third DUI, whatever, they're willing to go this other route. So an alternative to incarceration, which is less expensive and perhaps more suited to addressing the actual underlying problem that is repeated. Right. And so there we asked the input and while we asked them, like the chief of police and county sheriff to give us some insight into their view of how chemical dependency in this case works with crime. So that's really interesting. You have law enforcement. You have the judiciary involved. You also have mental health professionals, doctors all involved in coming together to address a particular problem. Right. That particular issue is really huge. And there's a lot of, you know, with the opioid crisis and heroin and other things. And, you know, it's really a challenge. So we're trying to make it somewhat of a difference, but it's got a ways to go. Can you talk about the ARDS, the Nielsen Foundation. How did this organization come about with its philosophy that exists today? Well, George Nielsen was an engineer who came up here for work and then owned some different plots of land and his daughter moved up here. Her name was Catherine Nielsen Cram. So she was really her interest in supporting Bemidji looking around and seeing the need, you know, Bemidji's, you know, 40, 50 years ago. There was a lot of poverty. There's still there's some, but it's really grown as a community. And so it was her willingness to focus this George Nielsen set up a trust for her to manage. And so she lived a very frugal life southwest here and saved her money and concentrated on giving it away. So she set up this advisory committee. So there were five of us in 1985 that advised her and a couple of other trustees about what we felt Bemidji needed and kind of screened the applications and then she passed away in the year 2000. And because, you know, we didn't have staff then and we kept the overhead low at the time when she was involved in it. We decided to continue with what basically the way that she operated, even though it had grown from about $2 million to now $33 million. So we still try to keep the same kind of philosophy strategy that she had. And again, partly because the way Bemidji is that we feel there's one of the things that really makes it special is the level of commitment from so many people in our community. Do you ever find that the various needs that a need is infinite? That need is in competition with each other and that really hard decisions. Two very appropriate applications are coming in, but you can't do both. Because we have so many non-profit organizations, we don't do what they call operating expenses, so they have to become viable on a local support or other grants from other foundations or state and federal funding. So you do pump priming to help people get a start. You do capacity building. People who have a start might need to grow and might need some temporary help as they're growing. We've talked about capital projects, such as Lakeland Public Television. Are there any other kind of grants that you do? For example, when an organization might be in crisis, that you view as temporary, would you make a grant under those kinds of circumstances? Or is that also like operating outside of the purview of your grants? The only thing that kind of comes to mind is we help, for instance, build an American Indian Resource Center. Well, they had funding from the state of Minnesota and their bids when they went to bidding the project actually came higher than what the architect had estimated. And so the state of Minnesota, they go through a big bonding issue. And of course, the timing of it, they weren't going to be able to go back to the state of Minnesota for a bonding issue because they do it every two years. And so they had to come back to our foundation and say, we either get the rest of this money to complete the project. Otherwise, it's probably not going to get done. So I guess that kind of crisis, I guess other ones don't really come to mind other than the usual needs to get things done. They have a need to accomplish something that's either going to change the scope of an organization or change a focus or add a service. So the Boys and Girls Club that started a number of years ago, they've had different programs. And so we've helped fund those new programs. What kind of projects do you have planned for the future? Can you give us any insight into those? Well, let's see. Right now, we have a commitment to the Magyri Tennis Association. So they just started trying to raise money for a new facility. So we made a pledge to them that we would fund X amount of dollars based on the fact that they have to raise some money. We're part of this shooting sports association. It's facilities being built north of town. A number of different nonprofit clubs and groups. 4-H and trap shooting and a number of different groups are part of that project. We're working with Bemidji State University with some interns. We started a new intern program. So people that are taking, you know, have their majors, they get a chance to work with the local business. So they get hands-on experience. So we have that program going. Well, Paul Walley, thank you so much for sharing the work of the George W. Nielsen Foundation. And thank you so much for your insights.