In 2003, Bemidji was a community without direction. There was little cooperation, and though it was growing, it seemed as though opportunities were slipping away. It was a community without a rudder.

The staff at the Center for Community Stewardship put out a call to action, challenging leaders to come together as stewards of Bemidji’s future. The leaders were encouraged, trained and inspired. With the guidance of the CCS, these stewards helped the community agree upon a “shared destiny,” and with it an action plan of seventeen destiny drivers to get there. Bemidji Leads! was born.

The CCS believes success is about real change and real action, and Bemidji Leads! has done just that. The results of Bemidji Leads! have been incredible:

• After nearly 15 years of struggle, Bemidji Leads! breathed new life into a regional event center effort, and today the funding is in place to make a $50 million center a reality.
• There are new clusters of economic innovation in Bemidji spurred by Bemidji Leads!, including Bemidji Bio and the Ingenuity Frontier, creating jobs for Bemidji in the knowledge economy.
• Through concentrated development and marketing, the regional airport has become a major economic engine.
• More than 10,000 trees were planted in Bemidji last year to reforest the community, and 10,000 more will be planted every year for the next ten.

These are but a few examples of the tangible success stories that this movement has been responsible for. Today, more than 300 community members are working with Bemidji Leads! By working together to place the community first, these everyday residents became something more – a force for positive change in the lives of their neighbors and their community.

Bemidji is not alone. Center for Community Stewardship's staff also helped to initiate Progress Park Rapids, then the Seventh Generation Initiative in Mahnomen, MN, both of which are seeing the same culture-changing results.

< Back to Success Stories