Weighing in at a modest 4.2 acres, Minneapolis’ Commons Park is small compared to downtown parks in other cities, but aims to fight above its weight.

Amanda Wigen, Director of Programming and Events at The Commons, is similarly scrappy and her work shapes the park through programming that packs a punch.

Her approach is important since the nascent park and its conservancy model are in start-up mode in their first full year of operation (2018), and “lean” is the name of the game. 

How to capture the essence of a man who has lived many lives in his 57 years?

Robert Lilligren is the executive director of NACDI, Minneapolis’ Native American Community Development Institute in the heart of the densest concentration of Native urban dwellers in the country. 

In his daily interactions and vision setting, Robert wears many hats, relying his broad professional experiences across sectors.  Part arts advocate, part number cruncher, part policy wonk, part cheerleader, he instigates, nurtures, and celebrates the success of stakeholders:  “This is the community’s vision.  This is about building capacity.” 

“It was meant to be,” says Deb Loch, Head Brewer and Co-Founder of Urban Growler.  Her partner, Co-Head Honcho, Jill Pavlak, nods. 

And it was meant to be beer, said the universe. 

Or maybe that pronouncement came from Wonder Woman who appears, on repeat, in cardboard cutout behind the bar.  The Wonder Woman of those kickass red boots and lasso of truth, the Lynda Carter version, circa 1975.  She presides as patron saint of this taproom, and this twosome.

“She’s a force,” smiles Jill. 

As words in the English language go, kindergarten serves as both metaphor and opportunity.

Images of growing upward, gaining fullness and blossoming is explicit in the German word (which Americans borrowed) meaning “child garden.”  For any garden to bear fruit, the soil must be prepared, sunshine abundant, and the plants nourished.  In other words:  environment matters. 

Dianne Haulcy carefully crafts environments where children thrive.

Neal Baxter’s pedestrianism runs deep. 

His mother, who was “short on attention” but long on neighborliness, walked everywhere in the 1960’s and 70’s in the south Minneapolis neighborhood where Neal and his siblings grew up.   “I have always loved walking,” he says.  Thrift and purpose drive him: “That comes from my Scotch-Irish ancestry.  Walking is cheap as hell!” he laughs.  “You get outside, you get to know people, you get where you are going.”

And go, Neal does. 

Martha Archer has a flair for marketing.  Her love of kohlrabi helps, too, as she manages Minneapolis’ Mill City Farmer’s Market.

Buoyant and responsive, and aspirational by nature, Martha understands that the pageantry of a street fair is the perfect venue to elevate even humble root vegetables. 

“Stories bring about change,” says storyteller, writer and urban placemaker, Jay Walljasper. 

Walljasper’s story began in suburban Illinois, in a neighborhood housing development he calls “cool in a way, with empty fields behind my house that we kids thought would be that way forever.  It was kind of walkable, but not out where I lived.”  Eventually, suburban sub-divisions filled in, erasing those open spaces for active, imaginative play. 

What imprinted on Waljasper’s imagination instead, in terms of place, was his grandparent’s town of Ford Madison, Iowa.  “Fort Madison was a river town, on the Mississippi, and there were corner groceries, corner taverns, it was kind of a historical town,” Walljasper recalls.  “What I loved was I would walk into one of the local stores and hear ‘You must be one of those Walljaspers.  You all look alike.’  I really loved that sense of belonging, that familiarity.”

A cab ride changed his life.

Content to remain in Texas, Mark Addicks came to Minneapolis to interview for a job he never thought he’d accept.  Seeing Minneapolis only from the backseat of a cab, he thought it looked like most other cities:  lots of freeways, lots of cars, nothing noteworthy.

Then, with a bit of time to kill before his return flight home, his cab driver took a right turn into Wirth Park:  Trees.  Pathways.  And most importantly, people everywhere.  “It was a nice day at the end of March, people were out running, walking their dogs.  The driver took me around the Chain of Lakes.  The parks drew me in.  I accepted that job.  Parks are what kept me here.”

Next to the bees, the most active attendant of the Kenwood School vegetable and stone poem rain garden is Angie Erdrich.

A pediatrician by trade, Angie is skilled at both problem solving and care giving.  And she has an abiding affinity for tree frogs. 

On a quiet residential street in the Kenwood Neighborhood, the public space surrounding the garden erupts with kids, neighbors and parents hurrying by multiple times each day.   A popular bookstore, art gallery and studio, a restaurant, and a veterinarian’s office front the urban schoolyard across 22nd Street.