Creating Futures We Won’t See

Marilyn Frauenkron Bayer, Houston, BCLP 1995
Retired Director, Community Educational Services

Planting, Shaping a Legacy
One of the last things Marilyn Frauenkron Bayer said to her father as he lay dying was, “We will take care of the land, Dad.” That testimony to place speaks volumes about Marilyn’s commitment to community leadership. A lifelong resident of Houston County, she is eloquent in describing the natural beauty of southeastern Minnesota. So it comes as no surprise that Marilyn is a passionate landscape gardener. In her plantings, she practices skills learned growing up on a farm and expresses her enduring love of the land. Gardening is also a metaphor for her commitment to community leadership for Marilyn is ready, as she says, “to plant things we won’t see.”

As director of community educational services for nearly two decades, Marilyn served the learning needs of everyone in the area where, at any one time, less than 20 percent of the people had children in the K-12 school system. Her role was to provide continuity and connectivity in programming. The success of her efforts depended on forming relationships and communicating in ways that built trust. This mirrors Marilyn’s approach to community leadership — not as something that a select few possess, but rather part of belonging to a community. “The power of community is having people step forward to share the load. BCLP has helped build this power as four different cohorts from the county completed leadership training.”

Encouraging a Community to Dream
A long-standing project that reflects this “spirit of community-wide leadership” in Houston County is the involvement of the city of Houston with the Minnesota Design Team (MDT). Founded by volunteers from the American Institute of Architects, this group of architects and landscape design professionals helps towns plan and design a viable, appropriate future. Its goal is to engage an entire community in generating the dreams of how it will look over time. In 1995, MDT conducted such a visit in Houston and presented the community with 20 goals for the next decade; by 2005, the community had met 17 of them.

Community leaders recently submitted a new grant to bring back MDT to help set new goals. The MDT process starts with the invitation, “We want your eyes.” Everyone has a chance to share what they like best or least about how the community looks. There are even cameras available for people to snap a picture to “show” what they mean. A special effort to engage young people and young families encourages them to help shape the legacy of the community as it moves into its future. The process culminates with a potluck town meeting at which MDT presents design goals for the next ten years based on what it has learned from as many community members as possible.

Marilyn uses the MDT Project to illustrate how Houston tries to do its business of being a community. “I’ve noticed when you invite people to get involved with something like the design team project, bike trail development or the native wildflowers on the levee project, people will often say, ‘But, I am not a community leader.’ My response to that — influenced by my participation in BCLP — is if you can help get things done, make things happen, change things for the better, you are a community leader. I want to say to people who are reluctant to be part of community action, ‘If not you, then who?’”

“Seeing” the Vision
People in Houston and the county respond to the leadership call more often than not. How else to account for a list of notable achievements over the years? Houston was among the first ten communities in Minnesota to receive a Fit City Award from the Governor’s Office reflecting decades of cooperative efforts. Eight years of patience and persistence resulted in the completion of the bike trail from Houston to Rushford. Community members have re-established a community newspaper, upgraded the elementary school, and completed the levee project along the Root River. Related to the levee is a new 40-acre park, the majority of which are native wildflowers and grasses. Today, there is a nature center in the new Trail Head Park, and over 13 acres of native wild flowers have been planted to bloom from spring through fall along the highway between Houston and Money Creek.

Each of these accomplishments didn’t happen just because they were inherently compelling or because there were BCLP alums available. Marilyn doesn’t discount the significance of having people whose skills for leadership have been sharpened, enhanced and deepened by BCLP. At the same time, she credits efforts to make use of everyone’s contributions; no one person single-handedly gets the work done. That we have an area chamber of commerce reflects our sense that people in the surrounding countryside are part of our community, not just those who live in the city. The ability to see wider than one’s plot of ground is something a community leader develops as she or he articulates a vision. One of my favorite quotes from an unknown source says it best: ‘The only difference between a vision and a hallucination, is the number of people who can see it.’”

“Seeing the vision” is not a secret Houston County keeps to itself. Marilyn and other district staff have contributed to “Extraordinary Results in Ordinary Communities” conferences held in Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi to help communities improve by sharing success stories from around the U.S. In a similar vein, Marilyn and her colleagues have taken Houston’s healthy community-building story to the West Virginia Community Collaborative (part of the Brushy Fork Leadership Institute at Berea College in Kentucky). “We presented there as part of their multi-month leadership development institute. It is very gratifying to help other communities by sharing what has been done in our area and in the process share Blandin community leadership concepts across the country.” Sharing the vision of Houston County and its communities is more than telling a good story. It is, as Marilyn observes, part of the process of “planting what we will not see” and contributing to futures that bear the mark of community leadership well done.