creative leadership : Featured Stories

While the concept of the green job is a nice fusion of much-needed employment growth and environmental responsibility, it's been hard to get a handle on the size and even the definition of this part of the job market. But according to Matt Entenza and other experts, the picture in Minnesota is getting clearer as more jobs fit the category. In fact, this small but growing sector may be the IT of the future.

It's long been known that biking is good for your health, good as a transportation option, good for reducing carbon emissions. But it's becoming clearer and clearer that cities that are bike-friendly are also attracting the kind of talent that builds the businesses of the future.

No doubt about it: the aristocracy of the circus are the aerialists, the trapeze and high-wire and other up-in-the-air artists who defy gravity (and major injury or death) by soaring high above the crowd. There's a deceptively modest-looking place in Northeast Minneapolis where you can study these arcane skills, and photographer Bill Kelley paid it a recent visit.

With 150,000 immigrants and refugees from Africa living within its borders, Minnesota's ties to the continent are growing. Some nonprofits here are leading the way toward a new model for helping Africa develop, replacing the top-down aid mentality with models of mutuality, transparency, and--most of all--face-to-face friendship.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my enthusiasms and discoveries as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: At an upcoming potluck and community meeting,  you can get to know a unique arts-based activist group in Saint Paul's Frogtown.

The historic Minneapolis building, once given over entirely to commodities like wheat and rye, is turning into one of the major hubs for high-tech in the Twin Cities. Credit an ambitious coworking space as catalyst, an ideal downtown location, and (surprise!) the continuing need for techies to actually inhabit the same physical space.

The largest hospital-connected integrative-medicine clinic in the United States is in Minneapolis. The Penny George Institute, run by Courtney Baechler, MD, adds aromatherapy, acupuncture, and other once-fringe healing arts to hospital patients' treatments--and the results are earning respect in the medical mainstream.

Web journalist, Ruby on Rails geek, entrepreneur, and DIY maven Bruno Bornsztein, founder of Curbly.com and a handful of other sites, typifies the tech-savvy business guy circa 2012. But his most intriguing characteristic might be the limit he's put on his ambition.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my discoveries and enthusiasms as I make my way around the Twin Cities.Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: The ever-deeper Minnesota-China connection, over breakfast.

Crowdfunding powerhouse Kickstarter is becoming the go-to support system for a wider and wider variety of business ventures locally and nationally. Here are three Twin Cities success stories: a wallet, a home-security device, a restaurant--that illustrate how Kickstarter fuses funding, marketing, R and D, and even a kind of before-the-fact customer support.

The founder and artistic director of Youth Performance Company reflects on what she's learned from the kids she works with about the real source of the "bullying epidemic" in our schools--and why she commissioned a musical theater piece to deal with it.

The Dakota War of 1862, the survival of Native languages, Minneapolis' urban Indian heartland--these were the challenging themes that a group of young Native filmmakers took up this summer at an innovative media institute dedicated to reconnecting them with their roots.

The Twin Cities' long tradition of innovation in public green space is continuing, and even ramping up, as park planners invent ways to meet new challenges: ambitious riverfront development plans, changing environmental concerns, the Central Corridor, urban farming, and the needs of new immigrants.

If you've got a startup ready or revving, but don't happen to live in the investment hotbeds on the East or West coasts, it can be a challenge to fund your dreams. Enter crowd-sourced funding. Once pretty much limited to artistic projects like new bands, Kickstarter and its cousins are becoming the recourse of choice for a wider and wider array of baby businesses.

Far from simply decorating the light-rail route, Saint Paul's Central Corridor Public Art Plan is redefining art in the public sphere.