Success of Bemidji Leads! Spurs New Center for Community Stewardship

What makes communities successful has changed dramatically over the past decade.  Evidence shows that now, more than ever before, successful communities can be built.  In fact, it has become clear that those assets that lead to community success are, indeed, not inherited.  Great communities are not born; they are built.  In other words, the characteristic assets of a successful community can be created, developed and encouraged.

The trick, it would seem, is knowing where to start.

The Headwaters Regional Development Commission has created the Center for Community Stewardship to address just this issue.  The Center for Community Stewardship helps to jump-start the success of a community by empowering its most powerful asset – its leaders.

Case Study:  Bemidji Leads!

The best way to explain the Center for Community Stewardship is to see it in action.  In 2003, Bemidji was a community without direction.  There was little cooperation, and though it was growing, it seemed as though opportunities were slipping away.  It was a community without a rudder.

The staff at the Center for Community Stewardship helped put out a call to action, challenging leaders to come together as stewards of Bemidji’s future.  The leaders were encouraged, trained and inspired.  With the guidance of the Center for Community Stewardship, these stewards helped the community agree upon a “shared destiny”, and with it an action plan of seventeen destiny drivers to get there.  Bemidji Leads! was born.

A movement, not a project.

The Center for Community Stewardship believes success is about real change and real action, and Bemidji Leads! has done just that.  The results of Bemidji Leads! have been incredible:

• After nearly 15 years of struggle, Bemidji Leads! breathed new life into a regional event center effort, and today the community is moving forward to make the $50 million center a reality.
• There are new clusters of economic innovation in Bemidji spurred by Bemidji Leads! creating jobs for Bemidji in the knowledge economy.
• Bemidji Leads! gave rise to a concentrated development and marketing effort that has positioned the regional airport as a major economic engine.
• With the Bemidji Leads!’ dream of becoming a regional center that looks and feels like Itasca State Park, more than 10,000 trees were planted in Bemidji last year to reforest the community, and 10,000 more will be planted every year for the next ten years.
• Challenged by Bemidji Leads!, North Country Regional Hospital has focused its efforts in an attempt to become one of the nation’s top 100 hospitals.

These are but a few examples of the tangible success stories that this movement has been responsible for.  The results have been dramatic enough for Governor Tim Pawlenty to call Bemidji Leads!, “spot on”, and Senator Norm Coleman has said Bemidji is a national model for building success.

Today, more than 300 community members are working with Bemidji Leads!  By working together to place the community first, these everyday residents became something more – a force for positive change in the lives of their neighbors and their community.

Bemidji is not alone.  Center for Community Stewardship staff also helped to initiate Progress Park Rapids, then the Seventh Generation Initiative and Blackduck 20/20, each of which are beginning to see the same culture-changing results.

Building Successful Communities

Experience shows successful communities share two common traits: they’ve found a way to harness their community’s energy and passion, and they’ve come to realize that the only way to community success is for the entire community to work together.

With support from the Blandin Foundation, the Center for Community Stewardship is now ready to replicate the stewardship experience in communities throughout the upper Midwest.  Successful communities can be built, and every community has the leadership it needs to get there.  It just requires the right coaching.  The Center for Community Stewardship can guide the way.

For more information about the Center for Community Stewardship, contact Dave Hengel at dhengel@hrdc.org; or (218) 444-4732.  Information is also available online at the Center for Community Stewardship website.