Episode 3: Tuleah Palmer & R.T. Rybak explore the importance of rural-urban interdependence in Minnesota
Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money. Maybe we're ragged and funny, but we'll travel along singing a song side by side.
R.T. Rybak:Right now, we have a moment where we're wrestling with things that are very new to us. And the idea of the easiest geographic other is this urban rural divide, blame them or not.
Tuleah Palmer:We have to challenge ourselves across the urban rural leadership space to go, I do need to learn this better. I do need to understand it better.
Ellen Wolter:That's R.T. Ryback, president of the Minneapolis Foundation, and Tuleah Palmer, president of the Blandin Foundation, talking about the need to think differently about the rural urban divide. The Minneapolis Foundation funds primarily urban areas, and the Blandin Foundation is a rural serving organization. Both wrote editorials in 2023 in the Star Tribune about rural and urban interdependence, This idea that rural and urban spaces need each other to thrive and to prosper. R.T. and Tuleah join me for a conversation about what rural and urban interdependence looks like in Minnesota. Historically, and where we are today, and in terms of how we're connected or disconnected.
Ellen Wolter:And why it's so important for leaders to be working across rural and urban spaces.
Music (Jim Griswold):And when they've all had their quarrels and parted, we'll be the same as we started just traveling along singing a song side by side.
Ellen Wolter:I'm Ellen Wolter with the University of Minnesota Extension. This is the Side by Side podcast.
Ellen Wolter:Tuleah, where where is home for you?
Tuleah Palmer:I live in Cass Lake. I'm from Northern Minnesota. I moved around a lot as a child. And I went to 17 different schools in Northern Minnesota. I graduated from high school from the Duluth.
Tuleah Palmer:And so I work in Grand Rapids. I was born in, outside the Du River and Ball Club. So kind of all of this Northern Minnesota is home to me, but I do live in Cass Lake.
Ellen Wolter:What do people get wrong about rural spaces or rural Minnesota?
Tuleah Palmer:I think that just like in general right now, we're not managing our polarities real well. And so thinking about how people think about rural I mean, I just think in general, we're othering a lot of spaces, and so I wanna be careful about how to answer that. You know, girl isn't a monolith. We're all very different. I just having a conversation with RT before we started recording.
Tuleah Palmer:We're both gardening. We're both got wounds from rakes. And, you know, we're both becoming grandparents and, way more in common than we have different.
Ellen Wolter:R.T., where is home for you?
R.T. Rybak:One word, Minneapolis. Born here, grew up here, lived here every year of my life except for college, and I'm gonna die here and hopefully not too soon. That's a little simplistic because I never thought I lived in Minneapolis. I always said I live in Minneapolis, Saint Paul. It's one city.
R.T. Rybak:It's one place, and it's not exactly begins and ends at the border of it. I never got this Minneapolis versus Saint Paul Jean thing. But my family, my mom's in San Francisco. My dad's family was multigenerational from New Prague. So they were really grounded there, and they ran the general store.
R.T. Rybak:So the a general store. So they were really, urban rural bridges. And, I carry that because I don't see myself as just a big city guy, but I do live here. What do we get wrong about Minneapolis? A lot, especially right now.
R.T. Rybak:But having door knocked the entire city many times, it's quite clear to me it is a series of villages that are very, very similar to the villages and towns throughout the state of Minnesota. There's connective tissue. The life I live with neighbors and places I can walk to and knowing each other's kids and all of these things that people talk about the quote, unquote small town experience, many flash most people in Minneapolis have that experience. And I think there's this soullessness that it's described as that's really upsetting to me because it's a welcoming place that also I quietly think there's a lot of racism in the way people look at the city when they should be saying this is our Statue of Liberty. We welcome everyone.
R.T. Rybak:We've been a humanitarian center for decades. It's created a culture that allows our kids to grow up better understanding other cultures, produce more globally fluent workers. I could go on and on about it, but it is not the dystopian, sort of place that I I see played back to me way too often. It's a series of villages.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. That was you know, I lived in Minneapolis, RT, and that was my experience coming from a rural place is This feels like a small town. I started to see the same people at the grocery store. You know, my neighbors started to feel like a small town. And I think folks from rural spaces don't always understand that.
Ellen Wolter:So, Tuleah, what do you love about about living in in Northern Minnesota?
Tuleah Palmer:I love the land. I mean, I just, I love Willow Beach. I love Mountain Lake. I really love, like, the water and the proximity to water. And I grew up far deep out into the bush.
Tuleah Palmer:I mean, we kind of had even paths, not so much driveways into our home. And that was my choice. And, I love the trees. I love the the the red pine. I love the white pine.
Tuleah Palmer:I love, the smells. I love the seasons and the distinction of those season. I really enjoy being an observer of a small town, where I live there and I'm part of it. But I also observe it and sort of watch the character script roll out. So it's really intimate in a way.
Tuleah Palmer:And I love the county road. And I love the history. I love the mystery of what's happened here. How did this come to be? So I I feel like every day is in discovery and an adventure living in the country or, in these really wide open spaces.
Tuleah Palmer:The trees, the topography always really moved me.
Ellen Wolter:Thanks, Tuleah. R.T., what do you you love about Minneapolis?
R.T. Rybak:Well, first, I loved everything Tuleah loves about where she lives. And I think one of the cool things about being here is, rightfully, we talked about urban rural divide, but I get that too. And she gets the villages too whenever they choose. And I mean, one of the things I love about this state is it's a often talk about it's where the woods meet the prairie and water flows in four directions and that meant different indigenous peoples were here and it means that we also have different landscapes. And so I mentioned I'm a gardener, but I'm also both my wife and I are really into local food, local agriculture.
R.T. Rybak:And so we have a lot of nature in our yard. We have a lot of nature we can walk through. We have a bird sanctuary near us. We Eloise Butler. I swim in the lakes multiple times a week and paddleboard.
R.T. Rybak:And my life here has you know, I drive to an office or however I get here in the middle of downtown in the tallest building in the state. And I'm very, very connected to the natural part of the place that I really need. Like, in the morning, I love just taking a walk in the garden or out in the snow or something and getting grounded in in the place and then going into this, like, you know, the most urban spot in the state probably. So I like the combination.
Ellen Wolter:RT, in what ways does does Minneapolis, Saint Paul rely on greater Minnesota?
R.T. Rybak:Oh, well, like, completely. Well, no. Not as completely. It's here because of greater Minnesota. And it was created as a city.
R.T. Rybak:There was not this divide before we got into the idea of monetizing agriculture. And that's, you know, where General Mills came in Pillsbury and all this kind of stuff came. But the interdependence, you know, the bounty of the land comes to the urban center, which figures out how to get it to market and creates wealth. Once that got global, the interdependence began tearing apart. And so we have a food system that brought us together that then severed us apart.
R.T. Rybak:And, you know, like, one of the things in my editorial I talked about is I can really see a new food independence for Minnesota reconnecting all of us. And Tuleah in her editorial talked about doing the same with energy. The connections between urban, rural, we used to depend very much for our survival on each other. Global markets have made that tougher. We're now dependent on other markets when, certainly on food and energy, we could control our destiny.
Ellen Wolter:Tuleah, in what ways does does Minneapolis Saint Paul rely on greater Minnesota?
Tuleah Palmer:Yeah. When I, accepted the role at the Blandin Foundation, I was immediately, kind of put into the, economic council, the governor's economic council. It was during the shutdown. I started 4 years ago in July. We jumped into the surplus, and that was an extraordinary experience for me.
Tuleah Palmer:It prompted so much of my curiosity and my creative thinking. And there were things that I was asked when I first started that I really didn't know the answer, and I didn't want to have opinions about it without doing a lot of research on things. So I became really consumed with understanding the history of energy, energy transition. And through that process, came to really learn about the history of the state, very much rooted in access to the top of the Mississippi River, creating the Winnie Dam system, the Pakegama dam system, and setting up Saint Anthony falls. And what prompted Sibley to establish the state and the treaties that were established in Northern Minnesota was to have access to the water and the woods and the minerals to establish the economic vitality of the state of Minnesota.
Tuleah Palmer:And that's also really important for philanthropy in this moment, I think, because there's a change in philanthropy that's happening. We're we're working to reconcile our work and think about impact. There's an evolution to philanthropy that's part of a story of the gilded era that coincides with the natural resource production economy and how the economy has evolved through all of this. And that's part of this change is that now we have a consumerism economy in a globalization market rather than a localized market and a national market and domestic labor that went through, you know, right up until, like, the seventies eighties. And we start seeing that globalization of our economy and the shift in our commodities.
Tuleah Palmer:And that all starts to really affect, like, the labor of rural places. Labor places are deeply connected historically to natural resources, commodities, and labor culture. It's like, I wanna understand mining better. How come mining has such a controversial kind of stereotyping around it? And, also, I was really curious because my mother was a miner.
Tuleah Palmer:My mother was one of the first four women hired on the iron range in Key Tech. She had been a student in Minneapolis and said, I want a good job, and she came up to the iron range, left the cities for a good job. When you think about how that has shifted in 45 years, that's a radical shift in economics. It's a radical shift in culture. Like, what is going on?
Tuleah Palmer:So much of the economic mobilization, logistics, and infrastructure of the state of Minnesota, which also impacts the Midwest and part of, like, the rail system that connects us between, the west and east coasts that is going through and how the timber barons were coming up too and what was happening with timber and mills. And, of course, the Blandin Foundation is a lumber company historically that was like a sawmill. And that history is also really fascinating because, it's that timber that builds these railroads. There was like this need to during that gilded age, you know, the Carnegie Rockefeller era where they're gonna establish, like, America. So I I think that that context is really important, just that history and how that works.
Tuleah Palmer:And then we start writing in the op ed about energy transition and thinking about all the other cultural changes that have happened since the early eighties when the macroeconomy start shifting and affecting, like, local economies. And so I think Minneapolis, Saint Paul, or the 7 county metro area depends on the rest of Minnesota for water, energy, commodities, minerals. We can't do energy transition without responsible mining. Those are real issues that we have to wrestle to the ground. Do we want to be displacing mining into other countries?
Tuleah Palmer:Do we want to continue to, like, exploit these other countries? How do we reconcile all of this? And they're really hard questions. So I'm was really excited to hear that you're doing this podcast because I think the the polarities that are being poorly managed right now, they have always existed. I mean, you go back to Aesop's fables talking about the town mouse and the country mouse.
Tuleah Palmer:So we've always had, like, a different interest as a species. But this is this moment where we're othering each other and we're blaming each other and we're fault finding in this work, and that's really dangerous. I would say forward looking, there's also issues of, like, carbon credit. And looking at how our natural resource conservation land, land that is preserved, understanding the financing behind that, understanding how subsidies work with that, how important it is for urban folks to understand, like, we don't get to develop, what is in the conservation. And that means that there's payment in lieu of taxes that come into county revenue streams, and the equalization of those formulas hasn't been updated with time.
Tuleah Palmer:Similar to payment in lieu of taxes I'm sorry, mobile government aid for small communities. You know, we want our family members coming home visiting and camping and hanging out at Hill City during the 4th July parade and enjoying the bounty and the beauty of Minnesota. It's part of the cultural identity of our state in the Midwest. But we also need to think about how does this get Like Sub how does the subsidies work? And I think in many conversations that I have with folks that are in key stakeholder positions, we're talking about, like, the rural hunger games.
Tuleah Palmer:We're now we're starting to fight amongst ourselves instead of coordinate and act together because of the scarcity scenario that's playing out around things like payment and move taxes, local government aid, and how to retain, like, logistics and infrastructure in that kind of recreational space that happens with our beautiful forests and timberline that we have.
Ellen Wolter:One of the reasons I wanted to start this podcast was to have a dialogue about policy. Right? We often address challenges as rural and urban spaces as if they're separate places. You know, it's kinda separate and distinct entities. But we don't factor in the ways in which these spaces are interdependent into the ways in which we develop policy.
Ellen Wolter:So what you just described to me is a perfect example of that.
R.T. Rybak:One of the many things I love about the answer you just gave , it's a matter of playing offense and defense. And I think we spend a lot of time on defense right now when you talked about the othering, for instance. And I think as you were talking about that whole issue about how much land is basically after tax rolls. You know, I go to the Friends of the Boundary Waters Fundraiser. I love all of that sort of thing.
R.T. Rybak:But when you get into other parts of Minnesota and you really look at how counties and schools are funded and everything else, should huge parts of the potential tax base to fund the education of the children be taken off the tax rolls to be a playground for those of us who wanna come up there a couple times a year. So there's there's that defense, but the energy thing gives us a huge offensive potential as well as this work we're doing right now, the Minneapolis Foundation with the NDN Collective and Midwest Environmental Justice Network and REAMP got this wonderful grant from the EPA to do 40,000,000 of grant making in environmental justice across 6 states. So what we can do is to be able to figure out what are those connective tissues on how we work on climate, how we work on energy, how we look on protecting the resources, and none of those are uniquely urban or rural. None of them. And I guess one final point on that is this one, you know, one of the things about Minnesota that's pretty unique is that it has this really, really broad talent shed, you know, like a watershed.
R.T. Rybak:If you grew up in Wisconsin, in a small town, you may go to Milwaukee, you may go to Madison, you may go to Minneapolis, you may go to Chicago. But if you grow up anywhere west of Minneapolis, state after state, you may very well come here. We've attracted, sucked so much talent out that now is a moment where more of that talent is starting to go back into with remote work and everything else. And that means that a lot of the people who've been exposed to an urban lifestyle will hopefully help us craft a more positive narrative about our interdependent.
Ellen Wolter:So we've talked a lot about how Minneapolis, Saint Paul, the Twin Cities Metro, relies on Greater Minnesota. How does Greater Minnesota rely on the metro area?
Tuleah Palmer:That's a really great question, and it's something I think that we we should be talking about more in rural spaces as leaders who identify through rural geography. When I was in the governor's economic council, it was such an insightful process. And we had different speakers and different topics that was sort of like a avalanche of learning. And I just have been working so hard my adult life. Have not really had time to critically think about the economic, load that the cities bring for the entire state of Minnesota.
Tuleah Palmer:And that if Minneapolis Saint Paul is not successful, that will have unintended consequences for the rest of Minnesota. And one thing that happened in particular is during the uprising of the the murder of George Floyd. I was privy to some of the insurance claims that were happening in downtown Minneapolis. And because of the nature of my career, paying attention to wealth and disposable income and tax basis and understanding the economic collapse that was at risk of that uprising, and what the ripple effects of that would be. That was very eye opening for me.
Tuleah Palmer:Like, oh, I need to here's a check myself. And I need to be more curious. I think that as a leader right now, it's really critical, in my opinion, to step out and admit when I'm not the greatest leader in the world. I mean, I think I was showing up in those spaces like you don't get it. Urban people have access to all these things.
Tuleah Palmer:I was kind of edgy in it. And as I, like, ease into this space where I'm learning more and my curiosity is is digging into this realizing, like, this extraordinary international airport and and what that creates for the Midwest and Minnesota's role in the Midwest and Minneapolis Saint Paul's role in the Midwest. And there's health care and there's the social entertainment, and economic, and, communication, and technology, and all those things. They're hugely important. And so I think understanding some of that and how that works is really important for us, folks that are in spaces that are identifying world to understand the interconnectedness of that.
Tuleah Palmer:And I also think that as an individual, I'm traveling to the cities. We're doing our state tournaments. We are doing our school shopping. We're going to the state fair. Our favorite concerts are there.
Tuleah Palmer:Taking my kids to museums. Understanding all of that also is an incredible part of, like, the cultural experience that we get to have in Minnesota. And I can do that without having to travel to Los Angeles or New York City. Other states that are vast in size do not have the kind of headquarter urban metro hub that we have been fortunate enough to have in Minneapolis, Saint Paul. And so I would say that those are great things that we we benefit from outstate.
Ellen Wolter:What about you, RT? In what ways does greater Minnesota rely on the metro area?
R.T. Rybak:Well, I'll I'll start with where where Tuleah started on this whole issue of just economically. The 6 blocks that I can walk within a couple minutes of my office have been wildly disproportionately carrying much of the state for decades. And as work moves more remote, many more people are back in downtown Minneapolis than used to be. But the fact of the matter is the value of an office building, which was astonishingly high for many, many years, has shifted. And when the building I'm in is worth a whole lot less, that means a whole lot less for the tax base.
R.T. Rybak:And this year, you'll see the city having to make huge cutbacks, but that's gonna ripple throughout the state for a long time. So the work the Minneapolis Foundation and I and a few other a number of others are doing in downtown revitalization is critical if people never came here because it's that. But it's also the opportunity that when you have a lot of people together, you can attract sports teams, major arts organization, researchers at the University of Minnesota who can produce the next companies, who can figure out how you can do forward thinking mining with Kakinite, I think came out of the university and, you know, all of that aggregation of talent and resource in one place allows that to get to the rest of the state in some ways. Also, you know, for better or worse, the reputation of a place is often tied to the urban center. It's not fair, but it's true.
R.T. Rybak:Michigan is an extraordinary state. Detroit, by the way, has come a long, long way. But the really lousy reputation of Detroit for a long, long time really dragged down Michigan, you know, for a long time. And, I was getting on a plane in DC coming back home and ran into this guy who recognized me and he's from, White Bear Lake. And he said, where are you living now?
R.T. Rybak:And I said, well, Minneapolis. And, well, why would you live in Minneapolis? So I get out of there as soon as I was done being married. He's going on and on trashing the city. And I said, when was the last time you were there?
R.T. Rybak:And he said, I never go there. I you know, so he obviously doesn't know what the heck's going on with it. But what he doesn't realize is that I'm flying back to Minneapolis to work on downtown revitalization that's gonna help this guy's every single service that guy gets. And by the way, he's a snowplow driver for the state, and guess how much this city disproportionately supports state services. So there are a lot of people who cheer against Minneapolis who happen to be deeply economically tied to it.
Ellen Wolter:So both of you wrote an editorial about rural and urban interdependence last year for the Star Tribune. And so, Tuleah's, yours was titled Minnesota's future, urban and rural Minnesota need each other more than ever, especially on energy transitions. RT, yours was titled, we should remember the role that interdependence played in our state's past as we work to create a stronger future, and listeners will be sure to link to those editorials so you have a chance to read those. And I'm curious to know if if either of you knew that you were writing about interdependence. Was was it kind of just a coincidence?
Ellen Wolter:Had you been talking about it?
R.T. Rybak:I didn't know you were writing. I don't think you well, I was writing. We have been in we sit at a table with community foundation heads around the state, and so we've had this topic out there, but I don't think I told you I was writing. I don't know if you told me. Yeah.
R.T. Rybak:It's not a unique topic for us, but it's really fun to see these 2 different perspectives next to each other.
Ellen Wolter:So, R.T., you wrote in your piece, and I'm just gonna quote, Minnesota became what it is today because so many of us eventually realized no one no one of us could do it alone. And so we've talked a lot already about how we're connected and how we rely on each other across rural and urban spaces. And I'm curious, and this is a question for both of you, why do you think we've forgotten that rural and urban spaces need each other? It's not a part of our our common narrative today.
Tuleah Palmer:We wrestle with these questions because our foundation had always done, a focus on rural communities and rural people. And what's been happening with an intensified polarization has really caused us to think about how do we be a partner in moving forward the democracy we're seeking to be a part of and be able to acknowledge the differences that are necessary for us to be curious about without it being on the defense. How do we bring people together? I mean, we're really struggling forward into democracy of the future right now in general, and there are polarities everywhere. We're just as a nation, we're not managing our polarities that have always existed very well.
Tuleah Palmer:So we're spending a lot of time thinking about that. That prompts us to think about being solution driven, not being crisis centered, being long term thinkers, and having intentional discussions around that kind of collected approach or collected interest and being curious. So for us, I mean, that's the major pump. And it's difficult. I mean, I will say it's difficult to, even the architecture of our question are divisive and depolarizing.
Tuleah Palmer:So I think we're really challenged right now to force ourselves to have paradigm shifts that are about how do we work together? What do I need to understand? And also, I think to have really thick skin in certain situations to dig in and continue to be, very curious about what it looks like to move forward. It is very easy to be angry, and it is very easy to be a knee jerk reaction to everything. There are significant cultural changes that have happened in society with the advent of high speed Internet, smartphones, and like the technology shifts that have happened.
Tuleah Palmer:And so I just want to say part of these differences have to do with how communication systems have changed for the citizens of the United States and the globe. And and we're only beginning to really look at what are the implications of that, and how are we showing up with training our eye to the future, not being really upset about what's going on today.
R.T. Rybak:I think that is a really great way of looking at it because we are getting to be dramatically more complex. The world is shifting. The world is changing. This is this pivot point. And the more complicated things get, the more compelling it is to go for a simple answer.
R.T. Rybak:And if somebody gives you a simple answer to an extremely complex question, it's very compelling. The simplest answer to any problem is to blame someone else and othering something. And right now, we have a moment where we're wrestling with things that are very new to us. And the idea of the easiest geographic other is this urban rural divide, blame them or not. It's especially important because we are in a short time in the span of our history trying to unpack some of the history that was deeply wrong about our country with race, with stealing land from native people, with gender.
R.T. Rybak:These are big issues that are being taken apart all at once. I am thrilled we are doing it because they have lasted too long. It does make it more complex. It does make it more threatening. Fear motivates people to, again, blame the other.
R.T. Rybak:And so this is playing out ideologically, but it's playing out geographically too. And those two things are starting to get inner first.
Ellen Wolter:Tuleah, anything you wanted to add? I see you you thinking a little bit.
Tuleah Palmer:Yeah. I well, I really appreciate that because I think addressing our past, reconciling, repairing the harm of that, really critical. And having the layers of scramblers that we have right now. Media, you know, small town media is gone in Minnesota. Research shows that when people in small towns No small town, I mean, like 10,000 or less.
Tuleah Palmer:Right? Read a national paper. You read it as, a voter. You read it politically. When you read a small town local paper, you read it as a community member.
Tuleah Palmer:It changes being neuroplasty of human beings. And so there's a complexity to this moment that there's really challenging us should think. In a multi pronged approach about backward, how did they get here? And how are we gonna move forward? And what does it look great in the future?
Tuleah Palmer:And how do we do that? I also think that what has happened with the media, social media, and politics has also changed what is visible and visceral in out state places in rural America has challenges. I mean, we have things that we have to address, but it's also not a monolith. And do we study the, like, elections to understand what's happening culturally. So it's not about playing politics.
Tuleah Palmer:It's about understanding the culture behind the politics. And so we've had counties in Minnesota, the long term blue counties become red counties. And we're really analyzing data knowing that these are kind of 5050 counties. These are not predominantly red, but you put up a map that shows all of Minnesota is red except for its urban hubs. And it looks like all of rural is red, and people make the assumption that means all in rural Minnesota is racist.
Tuleah Palmer:I mean, we're jumping to major conclusions simply by looking at these split seconds infographics and not understanding the dynamics of what's happening behind them. So we're, you know, you see, I spend a lot of time going, what are your real culture? What is the history of labor in these places? What is happening when you have 2 generations of downward mobility happening from blue collar identity? What happens intergenerationally when you have boom, bust culture?
Tuleah Palmer:What happens to a community when the, the mining company will just shut down and close 700 good paying jobs in a day? Or what does boom bus culture do to individuals? What are political elections telling us? And digging deeper into this because it's not surface level. And I don't wanna get a toxic positivity as somebody who works in philanthropy.
Tuleah Palmer:Right? Like I've lived here all my life. I grew up in working poor family, blue collar people, educators, people who were brilliant, a musician, really diverse background moving all over. So I don't wanna paint the sort of, you know, what is the show called? Andy Griffith.
Tuleah Palmer:It's not Mayberry. Right? Like, there's really rich deep stories of of hard work and labor. And I didn't know your family was from the Czech Republic, but that was a huge part of the immigration, influx that happened in Northeastern Minnesota at the turn of the 1900 for mining. Knowing that history helps us understand how we get to where we are today.
Tuleah Palmer:There's such a complexity to all of this. And to look at it at a service level is really challenging us as a society to think about who is it that we want to become? What is it that we need to understand better? And how are we showing up as leaders challenging ourselves to ask questions, be curious, and really take action into these issues.
R.T. Rybak:I wonder if part of what we're dealing with too is this idea about what type of work we have valued. We've come through, and I think we're at the end of it now, this moment where culturally, the jobs of the people who are, you know, in these office towers, I mean, and all of that were seen at the top. And, hey. You know, and my family was like, we never got to go to college. You've gotta go to college and get this white collar job and all of that sort of thing.
R.T. Rybak:I haven't thought much about this, but I'm just wondering as we now, I think, are coming to a moment where people are reassessing what, quote, unquote, valuable work is or what's moving up the food chain. I wonder if that may help us a little bit in this dialogue and especially in that whole idea about the boom and bust part that you were talking about. If there was a boom and bust in, let's say, computer programmers or, let me think of something different, financial service companies. You know? Thousands of people march out of the IDS one day out of work.
R.T. Rybak:Wow. Would we have huge stories about that? When that happens to a mine, it's perceived very, very differently as if we'll just go get another job. And I hope we're at a moment, and I I think we are seeing where the trends are going and how people are looking at education and training and trades and all that kind of thing that we're coming to a new appreciation.
Tuleah Palmer:I really, appreciate the comments that you're providing on that. And there's plenty of research from Aspen Institute to talk about urban structuralism and how it kind of perpetuates impossible ways for rural practitioners to address transformative change in their communities. And and that's logical. You don't have proximity to how the infrastructure and logistics work in a small town. You know, I mean, I've I've been a planner.
Tuleah Palmer:I've done this work and looked at how urban structuralism kind of manifests through access to public funding, access to philanthropic dollars, and making assumptions from a worldview that is not the same with a sparse population, dense population, sparse population. Do you have differences when it comes to infrastructure, logistics, And infrastructure and logistics is fundamentally what affects culture. Because I think that when we're seeing things at this time, this slight warp speed, knee jerk reaction is we're seeing visceral things that sell and get attention. There was a recent article in a in a large paper about some stuff that was going on up in Northern Minnesota around anti pride work. There was a petition to not have a pride event.
Tuleah Palmer:Well, the paper didn't follow-up that there was 100 and 100 of more people supporting that pride event. And now it looks like it's this homophobic dangerous place to be. It doesn't show this other space of, like, welcoming and support in human rights reality. And that perpetuates the stereotyping that I think people in rural places are challenged with and don't wanna succumb to the resentment of those stereotypes. And simultaneously, you know, we have to challenge ourselves across the urban rural leadership space to go.
Tuleah Palmer:I do need to learn this better. I do need to understand it better. When a when a company shuts down, there is no other place to get a job. Right. So you have to leave.
Tuleah Palmer:And when we had the mines, you know, shut down or the the mills shut down in the eighties, people who left were the people who could leave. Right. And now we have, like, generations of people who could not leave for whatever reason. A disabled relative, a sick parents who couldn't afford it. And so you have cultural implications that are unintended consequences of, I think, late stage capitalism that's showing up in in affecting culture.
Tuleah Palmer:But it's also being weaponized and to be sold to sell, you know, Internet media, social media work. And we're really challenged to think about what are the policies around communication that we need to think about that are deliberately dividing us.
R.T. Rybak:You know, one thing to layer on top of this first of, that's that's really interesting about that idea of leaving and who's left and all of that. Layering on top of this, there's a certain extractive quality to, urbanization, meaning I painted this sort of rosy picture of interdependence of the city and but there also was tremendous resentment as wealth began to accumulate in in Minneapolis. You know, why does North Dakota have a state bank? Isn't that odd? North Dakota has a state bank as I understand it because they're the, populists who came out of the farm movement who didn't like the people in Minneapolis at the Grain Exchange setting prices didn't trust the bankers in Minneapolis, so they set up their own state bank.
R.T. Rybak:That's part of I I think I have that history. Right? Somebody better check it. But there was this huge populist wave that was very much centered on the fact that Minneapolis was extracting wealth from other places. And that is no longer as much the case, but it is culturally something that happened.
R.T. Rybak:It's not like everybody was like, oh, we're so excited that this one of the great American cities is freeing up by that waterfall. Yeah. But it has meant that we're getting not enough for our food, not enough for capital, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Some of that was true. Some of that was very true.
R.T. Rybak:And there's a certain legacy to that that we have to unpack as part of this history too.
Tuleah Palmer:I agree, and I think in this sort of obsessive reading that I was doing about the history of the state, that gilded era is a fascinating moment in the country's history.
R.T. Rybak:Yeah. Yeah.
Tuleah Palmer:So there's this influx of exploited labor that's happening. That's a story we don't really tell well in the United States. And the reason I'm bringing it up is because talking about what exploited capitalism is doing and late stage capitalism is doing reminds me of the George Wallace legacy of race baiting and dog whistling. And, like, how much of what is happening right now about the divide of the working class is about deliberate baiting, whether it's place baiting or race baiting. Because there's a there's we're all voters.
Tuleah Palmer:We're all a part of this constituency, and we're all consumers. And so what what of that can we learn from what is the history of the labor class in the United States, which, I mean, is partly about philanthropy and the history of charitable law in the United States. And and do we understand, like, the history of philanthropy for tax evasion of wealthy folks in the 1900? Right. It's a fascinating history and relationship between banking and charity that we're all wrestling with right now.
Tuleah Palmer:Like, as a collective sector, figuring out our role as a catalyst and a systems adjuster in in the work. And then, you know, I kind of chuckled driving in, thinking about, well, who cares what 2 philanthropic presidents have to say?
R.T. Rybak:You know, I think you play a really important role because you're the most significant non metro foundation in the state, I think by a lot. So, you know, there's a different mantle that falls on your shoulders than on mine. I I do think part of the mantle that should fall on mine running the Minneapolis foundations, you put all this stuff together and that all of that extracted wealth, geographic, natural resource, all that kind of stuff, you know, there are people who made a lot out of that who helped start this foundation. Our work now is very much, I would say, reparative on some level on that and it's very much about equity. But I do think we have some natural ways that can, help us lead others out of this, I hope.
Tuleah Palmer:The point you're making, Arati, is absolutely right. For us looking at that at the blended foundation and realizing the energy opportunities that are in front of us. Realizing we have trees and water and minerals, and this opportunity to come together to re reset the trajectory we are on. I mean, our rural corridors, our rural cultural corridors in Minnesota, whether it's timber, mining, manufacturing, or agriculture have been challenged with the death by a 1,000 cuts since 1980. So this opportunity with energy transition and what props this op ed is that Minnesota could lead the country with examples of rural and urban cooperation, interdependence that are forward looking, training our eye to the horizon, and figuring out something complicated because I think that your editorial is very right.
Tuleah Palmer:Nothing has ever been done alone. And we can do it in an interconnected way where there is mutuality and shared prosperity. It does not have to be exploitive anymore, but it take it's gonna take time and commitment from people to dig in, be curious, and act.
R.T. Rybak:So I will take that to say that my commitment is to be part of and help bring our other partners in philanthropy into accelerating what's going on with energy across the state.
Tuleah Palmer:And, I
R.T. Rybak:mean, I'd love us to think about water. I'd love us to think about many other things. People will always be able to cynically look at the idea of 1 Minnesota. Well, it's not 1 Minnesota because of this or that. Yeah.
R.T. Rybak:But I do think we're on a better path toward it and a better understanding. So how about you and I work together on that energy thing, and we'll see if we can bring more of our colleagues in?
Tuleah Palmer:I think it'd be great. I think that I mean, we're all about that. I mean, we're working with some folks in DC . And some of our foundations nationally. The foundation's new strategic direction is really looking at how to make this happen.
Tuleah Palmer:We're the only private foundation in rural Minnesota. There are community foundations with much smaller asset bases. And I also think that it's worth sharing, Ellen, that like 5% of Minnesota's philanthropy is leaving the cities. And that's a real problem. I mean, it's very urban centered philanthropic dollars and those philanthropic dollars having come from a place where I'm doing the community development work or economic development work writing and managing grants.
Tuleah Palmer:And like that is the catalyst funding. That's what sets you up with your baseline dollars to be doing the financing and the capital stacking and the grant writing for public sources. It's really interesting to analyze the inflation reduction act and and be surprised to find out that only 2% of those 1,000,000,000 of dollars are dedicated specifically for rural. How is that possible? So we're great at the foundation, RT and at the Blandin Foundation, Really analyzing to what degree does this really benefit, like a one state work, rural America.
Tuleah Palmer:Not in ways that are othering or divisive or defensive, but in ways that have, mutuality and shared prosperity and a reasonable quality of life for everybody.
R.T. Rybak:You know, just on that that issue of the inflation reduction act and all that, the the dollars we got from the Environmental Protection Agency for environmental justice came through that, and that's going to be 40% urban, 30% rural, 30%, for tribal communities. And so there's going to be a really good opportunities for, for that to be an example of how we can intentionally do the same. The most money that comes through the Minneapolis Foundation is controlled by individuals who have funds. And I think there's a real hunger to hold up opportunities for them that are about urban rural connections. I I do think people get this.
R.T. Rybak:They just don't know where to click in.
Tuleah Palmer:What are
Ellen Wolter:some of the things that philanthropy is doing to support an infrastructure that really brings rural and urban spaces together that incorporates this idea of rural urban interdependence into funding, into programming.
R.T. Rybak:We have a very large EPA grant that's going to be, have a significant rural component to it. But in addition, we do a number of things that are trying to get people to see this as one state. Couple years ago, we did a program called Climate Reaction that helped our fund holders, understand food systems. And so we took them to Dream of Wild Health, a native led farm in Hugo. We took them to sharing our roots in Northfield that does regenerative agriculture and opens up opportunities for immigrant farmers.
R.T. Rybak:So that became really helpful to people to begin to understand how food systems can really be rethought in a big way. We're gonna bring our climate work together in the fall with a very large public meeting on environment that will be about our environmental justice work and the water work, and that is absolutely statewide work. And my hope in that is that while people in our fund holder base do give all around the world and certainly around the state, there will be more tangible ways through that to to be part of.
Ellen Wolter:Tuleah, you get the last word.
Tuleah Palmer:I get the last word. I am so good at that. Ask anybody around our office. You know, just like a few things to think about in terms of why I'm showing them this way. You know, how do you hold the responsibility of being a private foundation, and what does that mean?
Tuleah Palmer:We don't have to do Dora cultivation. We don't have to manage the tension between who has wealth and who needs support. And so we've been really reflective deliberately to think about what is our role in a space that's going to have the most multipliers. A big part of what the Blandin Foundation has done in our new strategic plan is dig deeply into the research and the data that's going to be helpful for our urban funding partners because we know that there are multiple demands on philanthropy right now. And so we need to provide deep and rich information that's going to help our urban partners be able to make the quickest decisions that they can make, not wasting time and then, like, resources on building on the capacity arm of understanding rural issues and rural culture.
Tuleah Palmer:We have built out an advocacy arm that's creating more visibility of these issues. You know, one of the things I didn't say in terms of, like, where do I call home? You know, I live in Cass Lake. Cass Lake is a super fun site that's been here with Saint Regis Paper Company since 1985. 40 years, it's been a super fun site.
Tuleah Palmer:And if you think about that as a small community on a reservation, if that were in the cities, that would no longer be a super fun site. Proximity is a huge issue in the infrastructure and logistics of what's happening and why it's happening. I wanted to kind of share that as a as an example of out of sight, out of mind, and how tricky this really is to do the partnering. Like, RT and I can go, yeah, we're gonna work together. We have been working together.
Tuleah Palmer:How are we gonna affect change together is a different question. And so for the Blandin Foundation to think through, how are we offering solutions to urban funders and public funders? How are we identifying the data that's very relevant, informative, useful, and timely to other funders? How do we make visible communities and people that that are not visible because of the loss of media or the proximity issues, the isolation, the remote nature of of rural culture, rural people? The other thing that we're doing at the Blandin Foundation is looking more deliberately at how urban practitioners and rural practitioners can be working in communities of practice together to build networks across the state of Minnesota.
Tuleah Palmer:Isolation is a huge barrier to, like, change agents in rural places. And then the other thing that we've been working on doing is focusing our competitive grant making more on small communities that have never received funding, not just from us, but from anyone else ever. And then learning from them and asking them to help us understand what's happening. And so really making sure that the Blandin Foundation is a servant funder in these organizations and that we're truly asking the questions that are going to pull for information that's gonna be helpful, not just for the community as well, but for the greater good who's interested in this work. Because I think that that whole connection and communication component is just a critical role that the Blandin Foundation can play in creating a sturdier interconnectedness commitment.
Ellen Wolter:Thanks so much, R.T. and Tuleah, for just a really fantastic conversation, and and thanks for sharing your wisdom and expertise today. Thank you.
R.T. Rybak:Thank you. I learned a lot. So thanks, guys.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebyside@umn.edu. Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Wolter. Nancy Rosenbaum is our senior producer. Special thanks to Jan Jackola, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits.
Tuleah Palmer:It
Music (Jim Griswold):really doesn't matter at all.
Ellen Wolter:You can find episodes of Side by Side wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back next week with another episode. I'm Ellen Walter, and this is Side by Side.
Music (Jim Griswold):Singing a song side by side.
