The Birth of BCLP

‘Nothing Is Going to Happen Here without Leadership’ 

There are more than a few parallels found between today’s economic hardship and the economic times in existence when the Blandin Foundation launched its leadership programs.

In the early 1980s, when the Foundation’s Board of Trustees first began to envision ways to help feed rural communities for lifetime, rather than giving them the proverbial fish for the day, the state was in economic crisis.

Southwestern Minnesota was gripped by agricultural crisis ­ foreclosures were at rates not seen since the 1930s, banks were closing and lives were in turmoil.  On Minnesota’s Iron Range, conditions weren’t any better. The mining industry, the region’s lifeblood, was in the midst of a severe downturn.

The Blandin Foundation and its trustees were well aware of the negative impact to rural communities, often already challenged even in the best of economic times. It was in these times during one meeting of the Board of Trustees that trustee Henry Doerr made a statement that changed the course of Foundation history: “You know I’ll just say one thing. Nothing, absolutely nothing is going to happen here without good leadership.”

Kathryn Jensen, former senior vice president of the Blandin Foundation, recalled that with Doerr’s words: “You could see the light bulbs go on around the room ­ everybody paused because we weren’t sure what to do in the middle of this downturn and that statement got us rolling on this idea of leadership.”

Jim Krile, who then worked in sociology at the University of Minnesota, was brought in to consult then later help design this new programming. The Greensboro, North Carolina, Center for Creative Leadership became the model for the new leadership initiative when it launched in 1985.

As with any new endeavor, there were numerous challenges. Jensen remembered that some trustees believed that leaders were born and not made ­ the old nature versus nurture argument.  And, there was soon the realization that the Center for Creative Leadership model would need some transformation from its corporate origins to fit rural leadership participants.

In those early days program designers hoped to rise to those challenges by placing emphasis on communities, not individuals.

Focusing on “together” yielded early dividends for the upstart program. One example was an early cohort from Bigfork, which collectively realized they couldn’t do it alone. Reaching out to neighboring communities, they started the “Edge of the Wilderness” golf course.  Twenty-plus years later, this collaborative concept lives on and has branched into a number of other endeavors.

It’s those kind of transformations, which have occurred in communities throughout the state that convince early founders of leadership programming that the decision to journey into community leadership more than two decades ago was on the mark.

There also is a strong sense among those who had deep connection to leadership’s early days that recognizing the opportunity that existed from hardship some 20-plus years ago has created networks of rural leaders who are better equipped to deal with the challenges of both today and tomorrow.

“I had the privilege of working in a place where we were invited to create a world-class program ­ to provide experiences for people who would get that no place else in their lives,” said Jim, who worked as the Foundation’s leadership director from 1986 to 2007. “They (BCLP participants) didn’t work for corporations that were going to send them to Harvard or the Center for Creative Leadership. These are the folks who ran barbershops and farmed and were managers at the elevator and school superintendents. They came and our job was to provide them with the best possible learning experience we were capable of.”