Lynn Welles is the strong, silent type.

Her physical fitness is hard-earned, and she listens well before she speaks. She is leading conversations with colleagues, clients, and decision-makers about how trees can advance racial equity in urban areas like Minneapolis and St. Paul.

If Mitra Jalali were writing a love letter to St. Paul, it would be effusive, inclusive, and probably written in bold, hot-pink letters.

A Somali proverb: One shares food, not words.

Minnesota is home to many Somali immigrants who are new to the English language, so sharing words with neighbors in their adopted home is not so easy. Food? That is an appetizing cultural and community connector and a form of communication Mariam Mohamed knows by heart.

Leya Hale: Her star is rising.

Hailing from sunny southern California, Leya grew up in the heart of the American television and movie making industry. With an aspiring-actress mother, and a family with a strong cultural identity (Dine, Dakota), Leya was drawn to visual storytelling at an early age. The more this St. Paul documentarian practices her craft and Indigenous heritage, the more she illuminates the “deep pockets of strength” of her people.

In her public persona, Metropolitan State University President Virginia (Ginny) Arthur, gives community a seat at the table. Less “ivory tower” and more “lively luncheonette,” Metro State asks students not only what subjects they want to major in, but what problems they want to solve.

“I like EVERYTHING!”

Sheila Williams Ridge and Alyson Quinn of the Minneapolis Nature Preschool are not surprised.

But outside? This month, Mother Nature played us in a whiplash of weather: an unseasonable eighty-degrees for three days, and this week: barely above freezing, rain, drizzle, raw wind, clouds and “sneet,” a morning that included a revolving snow/sleet mix.

“The House the Buzz Lagos Built” is bigger than a pro soccer stadium that holds 19,400 fans. It’s more crowded, too.

The new stadium’s powder-blue girder on which son Manny commemorated his dad’s enterprise is massive, yet not big enough to contain the names of all the players, student-athletes, coaches, and soccer fans who have benefitted from Buzz’s fervent embrace of the sport.

As a Water Protector, Great Grandmother Mary Lyons (Leech Lake Ojibwe) is never very far from the element she stewards. Mary has been celebrating and protecting water for over 50 years. “Water carries memory,” she says. “Think about it: For nine months you are afloat in water in your mother. We enter the world through water.”

“We don’t want people to shy away from grief,” says Julia Gillis.

As effervescent as she is deferential, Julia spends her work days in an office in a Mausoleum, a distinction that very few others can claim. As Director of Outreach for Minneapolis’ Lakewood Cemetery, Julia’s efforts make death a more normal part of life, and the physical grounds of Lakewood a place not only for reflection, but for human connection, intentionality, curiosity, and even joy.

From her earliest days on the West Side of St. Paul, Monica Bryand has been both a city girl and a naturalist. Her upbringing in a residential neighborhood, in a bend in the Mississippi River – a major flyway for birds of North America - connected her to her surroundings, and to a lifetime of environmental stewardship and friendships up and down her block.

If you could only get around your city on foot or bicycle and you were an urban planner, would you prioritize pedestrians and cyclists over cars? Bobak Razavi, 7th grade social studies teacher, certainly thinks so, and he’s got the plans to prove it.

It’s hard to imagine a more enthusiastic celebrant of snowplowing and street lights than Sean Kershaw. As Director of St. Paul’s Public Works, Sean flexes the job’s big muscles and finesses the fine motor skills required to keep the Capital City safe, connected, and interesting.

Urban planners often find themselves between two worlds: to demolish or preserve; exert patience or expediency; extend established ideas or exert new. For Merritt Clapp-Smith, that fulcrum role, that position of “holding tension” of two or more ideals, feels familiar.

Minneapolis journalist Steve Brandt has been an inveterate observer of community.  He may not have set out to be a placemaker, but Steve’s stories chronicled a particular place – Minneapolis - and highlighted that particular place in time. 

Del Hampton has a wish for University Avenue:  “I want it to be welcoming for people to come outside, to walk along, to be.   With places to sit, art to look at, sounds to listen to:  people talking, birds, children playing.  And the smells – trees, flowers, food – that will invite us to get out of our buildings, to go outside and be with other people.”

There is more than one way to make curry. 

Chef Heather Jansz is noodling another mouthwatering idea:  What if there is more than one way to feed community?

Heather is known as “The Curry Diva.”  She is a native of Sri Lanka and has been cooking for friends, customers, and total strangers in Minneapolis since the 1970’s. Food has always been a focus for Heather, even as a young girl.  At home, “I would cook outside, on three brick stones, like in the olden days.  My mother would give me a little bit of lentils and spices for me to practice with in the backyard. ‘Be careful of the snakes!’ she’d warn.”

If Marlena Myles (Spirit Lake Dakota, Mohegan, Muscogee Creek) were a math symbol, she would be a plus sign.   An artist, illustrator, animator, entrepreneur, teacher, wanderer and mapmaker, Marlena’s work teems with language, metaphor, movement, crisp colors and history to ignite new thinking and build community around stories that are integral to this land and people.

Susan Wilkins runs The Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary, a free garden within expansive public parkland on the western boundary of the City of Minneapolis.  It is not a formal “garden” in the sense of rows of colorful snapdragons or petunias, but a nature-filled, quiet place that nonetheless requires hours and years of planning and pruning and planting to maintain.

Like a second grader, art can sometimes be wiggly, and the path to embracing it can be equally winding.

Two generations of docents, Mary Ritten and Kit Wilson, came to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) along different paths, but with a similar purpose.  Each is a lover of art; one, a practicing artist.  Both women credit the power of art – and their experiences at MIA - for revealing their best selves and connecting them, in powerful ways, to community.

Listen.  Do you hear that? 

Somewhere in Minneapolis someone is talking about development with a policy leader, a real estate broker, or land use expert.There is a good chance that the topic or the conversation is being curated by Caren Dewar or her colleagues at Urban Land Institute, Minnesota (ULI).There is a good chance they are talking about things that matter to you:housing, public open space, or the bustling commercial node where you can get a really good cup of coffee.