Training rural politicians in Minnesota, without the partisanship

FERGUS FALLS, MINN. – A dozen people gathered in a staid conference room on a recent afternoon here, each of them curious about running for office in this mostly rural region of west-central Minnesota.

A small-business owner from Detroit Lakes sat next to an accountant from Hancock who also farms. A development director for a regional Habitat for Humanity chapter chatted with a local middle school music teacher. A Moorhead English-language-learner teacher, an Iraqi Kurd who used to be an interpreter for U.S. troops in Iraq, shared a meal with an organic farmer from Felton who was thinking about running for Congress.

They came to the nonpartisan training from all corners of the political spectrum, left, right and center, something organizers stressed. Politics, they said, shouldn’t be about red vs. blue but instead about how we care for each other.

“A lot of our counties are classified as leadership-distressed, meaning we have the same amount of government offices as urban areas but way fewer people to run,” began Celeste Koppe, rural initiatives strategist for West Central Initiative. “So a lot of times we see city clerks calling around, looking for people to run for office, wondering if they’re going to find a mayor this year. Fun fact: Millerville did not find a mayor last election season.”

This program, a two-day intensive how-to-run-for-office seminar culminating with participants giving stump speeches, intends to combat that rural leadership crisis in Minnesota.

A 2022 study by Ben Winchester, a rural sociologist for University of Minnesota Extension, showed that one in 241 people in Minnesota need to serve as some sort of government leader for the 3,643 government agencies around the state that require leadership: from counties to school districts, fire protection to soil and water conservation.

But in Minnesota’s most rural counties, the demand is much higher. Winchester calculated that Minnesota’s least populated counties need one in 37 people to serve as government leaders. (Include the demand for leaders of nonprofits and the numbers are more dire: one in 21 statewide and one in nine in rural areas.)

Winchester speaks of the importance of “leadership succession” as vital in rural communities, where three-fourths of homeowners are Baby Boomers or older: “How do we open the door to people becoming leaders in your community the next 20 years?” he said.

“There’s just not enough people to go around,” said Anna Wasescha, president and CEO of West Central Initiative, a regional community foundation that serves nine counties and White Earth Nation in West Central Minnesota. “It’s a crisis in rural areas. The traditional ways that communities can be knit together were things like the service clubs, and they’ve waned in their popularity.”

A few years back, Wasescha was confronted with stark data from her area: 410 units of government across nine counties with a combined population of a quarter million, and half that region classified as “leadership-distressed.” The problem seemed to only be getting worse because increasingly polarized politics meant potential leaders saw running for unpaid or poorly paid offices as just not worth the headache.

“There’s gotta be a pipeline for elected officials,” Wasescha said. “We’re lifting up a positive vision for citizenship and democracy.”

So began West Central Initiative’s Run4Rural public leadership training as part of its more broad Rural Democracy program. Wasescha got in touch with Erik Peterson, a community organizer who worked for a decade at Wellstone Action, a grassroots progressive campaign training organization now known as re:power. Back in 2006, Peterson was working at Camp Wellstone, putting on three-day seminars to foster a new generation of progressives, when a middle-aged Mankato high school teacher joined a training session, planning a run for Congress.

A couple weeks ago, just a few hours after that former Mankato high school teacher, Tim Walz, was named the Democratic vice-presidential pick, Peterson sat before this fresh group of aspiring rural Minnesota leaders. He wasn’t preaching his own politics. Instead, he was showing these prospective rural office-holders how to run a successful campaign.

“Ultimately, running for office is about telling your story,” Peterson said. “A message. What is a message? A message is not your 10-point plan. It’s not your manifesto, not your talking points. It’s not even your slogan. The message is that idea, that impression that you want people to have of you. People are going to remember very little about you. But if they remember, hey, he seemed like a really solid, sound guy, he seemed like he knows what he’s doing — wow, that’s huge.”

The group talked about myths about rural communities: That rural America is dying, that it’s a monoculture of farmers and cows, that it’s disconnected and isolated from the rest of the country. They talked about countering those myths with facts: rural population growth since COVID, increasing diversity in small towns, the way broadband internet and remote work has transformed rural areas. They talked about their values (family and faith, authenticity and empathy) and what they love about their communities (service, neighborliness, resiliency). They defined what small-town neighborliness means; one told about a neighbor getting a dead squirrel off her roof and asking her to bake him a cake in return.

They talked about finding their why: Why do you want to run for office? One spoke about bringing more transparency to local government; another talked about her skill for diplomacy that she displayed in smoothing over a heated planning commission meeting.

And why now? They counseled aspiring office-holders on taking out their ego and entitlement and focusing on their communities. One spoke about their community’s need for an outdoor water park. Another spoke about the agricultural community needing a law that guaranteed them the right to repair their own equipment instead of being forced to rely on manufacturers to fix issues.

“Putting your name on a ballot, it’s a big thing,” said Ben Schierer, mayor of Fergus Falls and the foundation’s director of civic partnerships. “It’s something I hope you take seriously. Is there a particular issue you’re running on? Is there a set of experiences you believe you bring to that office? It takes a broad set of experiences to run this big thing we call life, and government is the same thing, and we can benefit from having that broad range of experiences. Is anyone running on sour grapes? That’s a real thing. But I don’t know how far you’ll get on sour grapes.”

On the second day of the training, participants gave a stump speech.

Laurel Kilde, who lives in Fergus Falls and owns boutique gift shops in Detroit Lakes and Ottertail, is running for Fergus Falls City Council, her first campaign for public office. She’s disappointed that she’ll be running unopposed in her ward; she wants to earn it. She was born and raised there and loves her hometown. But she wants more people to know about it, and more people to be able to afford to live there.

Her stump speech focused on common-sense politics to help her community.

“We need to focus on economic development so we can fix our streets and improve our infrastructure without being an increased tax burden to our citizens,” Kilde said. “If we can work to get more jobs that pay living wages here, we can increase our tax base and accomplish more for our city and its residents.”

Kilde came out of the training focusing even more on listening to people in her ward.

“One of the main things I took from the training was how each of us has an opportunity to be involved in our community on various levels,” she said. “The genuine need for more people making the commitment and taking the time to do so. Being open to different viewpoints, and above all being respectful to everybody.”