“We’re the guys who were fascinated in trains when we were little kids and didn’t get over it.” 

Aaron Isaacs definitely is NOT over trains:  not the cane-backed benches in the car, not the clickety-clack of the wheels over the rails, not the friendly conductor waving riders aboard. 

Princess Titus is not one for barriers:  not racial, not cultural, not economic.

Not even a strong fence separating her from Miss Little Bit’s South Side Chicago garden could keep Princess from doing what she had to do.  On the Fridays of her childhood, that meant nimble climbing to contribute to the neighborhood meal.  

“My mother had me jump that fence to grab green tomatoes,” Princess remembers. “Miss Little Bit said we were always welcome, and she gladly shared her garden. I know why: because with those tomatoes, we got to cook and eat and talk together.”

“When I first ran for public office, re-districting had given Minneapolis’ 8th Ward a new geography.  I heard people talking about 38th Street where it meets Chicago Avenue, saying ‘We want this to be your number one priority,’” former Council Member Elizabeth Glidden says. 

It was a new emphasis from the constituency.   “Having a strong message from the community like that helps you marshal attention, helps you guide a specific push.”

Wing Young Huie is street photographer.

Wing’s images are untitled.  He welcomes ambiguity and says that even if the location of a photograph is identifiable, context is interpretive.  “For me,” Wing says, “the photograph is the way to get to the story.  I don’t have to say what the meaning is, what my process is.  The photograph does the work.  It asks: ‘ What do you see?”

By the age of 17, Monica Hurtado knew she would become a doctor.

Monica’s training and lived experience has taught her that “health” does not equal absence of illness. Social determinants - including income levels, access to housing, food, education, public safety, transit, leisure, and joy - greatly impact health outcomes.  “Advantage or disadvantage makes a difference,” she says.  “I work for overall well-being. Healing is central to the work, and to be effective we must all come together for change.”

For downtown dogs, outside life on a leash is the deal.

For humans in Minneapolis, exercising a downtown dog is a little freer – and friendlier – if owner and pooch can find their way to Loring Park. 

10 years ago, Ray Harris harnessed a growing trend and unleashed a big idea in the public park right outside his door in a small, but impactful way. 

Dan Collison looks a little like a blackjack dealer as he lays his business cards down on the table.

Today, he lays out four cards.  Each denotes a different role and association; each relates to the built environment, economic development, and efforts to encourage “human flourishing” in downtown’s East Town neighborhood.

Some might say Dan is a street preacher for placemaking, and they wouldn’t be half wrong. Three of Dan’s business cards describe him directing partnerships, or developing business, or administering leadership at three distinct downtown organizations. One defines his actual ministering: that card reads, “First Covenant Church, Minneapolis.Lead Pastor.”

For Sook Jin Ong, the future is here.

By day, Sook Jin directs the University of Minnesota’s Future Services Institute, a department at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs that focuses on improving the delivery of human services: social work, population health, housing, food security, employment, public safety and the like, across public and nonprofit sectors. Her clients’ work affects how each of us, and our neighbors, survive or thrive across community in the places we call home.

If you are an early morning riser, and have heard the birds as they begin their singing for the day, you know polyphony.

One voice, than many; a singular melody entwined with others that rises and repeats, falls and swells again; collective strength equaling more than the tally of singular songs. 

Rachel Ries, a singer/songwriter known professionally as Her Crooked Heart, travels the country touting her own clear voice.  As she writes and collaborates, Rachel has also developed a keen ear to the songs of others. 

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.