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PROGRAM SPONSORS

University of Minnesota Extension

Youth Work Institute

MN Department of Education

Center for Youth Development

Minnesota 4-H Foundation

Friendship Institute

McKnight Foundation

University of Minnesota Libraries

College of Education & Human Development

Youth Development Leadership Program

Youth Studies Program

Family, Youth & Community Program

Youth & Policy Editorial Board

Brenda J. Child, Ph.D.

Boarding School Era

Brenda J. Child is an associate professor of history in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. in History at the University of Iowa and was a Katrin Lamon Fellow at the School of American Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her book, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (University of Nebraska, 1998), won the North American Indian Prose Award. Child was a consultant to the exhibit, “Remembering Our Indian School Days” at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona and co-author of the book that accompanied the exhibit, Away From Home (Heard, 2000). She is a board member of the Minnesota Historical Society, the Division of Indian Works, and the Circle newspaper in Minnesota, and chairs the advisory board to the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis. At the University of Minnesota, she was a recipient of the President’s Award for Outstanding Community Service. Child was born on the Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota where she is a tribal member.

Sandra White Hawk

Foster Care and Adoption Era

Sandra L. White Hawk is Sicangu Lakota, an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, and a United States Navy Veteran. Ms. White Hawk is also a co-founder and the Executive Director of First Nations Orphan Association (FNOA) an organization that offers advocacy to adoptees and fostered individuals and their families in accordance with our traditional spiritual heritage and the Indian Child Welfare Act. FNOA serves to unite First Nations adoptees and fostered individuals with professionals, community leaders, other adoptees, fostered individuals and spiritual leaders. FNOA's activities serve to educate social services providers in the cultural traditions and values of Indian families and their communities with the goal of bridging and enhancing services.

Kirk Crow Shoe

Today's Work

Kirk Crow Shoe currently serves at the Director of the Healing Spirit Program for the Division of Indian Work in Minneapolis. This work allows him to oversee a program that serves Native American boys who are in long term foster care. He has served as a City of Mpls Youth Violence Committee member since its start. He has served the Indian Community in both the States and Canada the majority of his career. In MN, he’s served the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community and the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center. Prior to providing services in an urban setting, he was an Outward Bound Instructor for many years working with Native Youth-at-Risk.

He is Northern Peigan, Blackfoot from Alberta, Canada. His parents are Betty Ann and Morris Little Wolf; he is married and has two children.

Molly Rojas Collins
Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota Libraries.

U of MN IHRC Archive Workshop

Molly Collins received her M. A. in Teaching English as a Second Language in 1999 from the University of Minnesota. She currently works in the Commanding English program, a program for freshman immigrant and refugee students, which is a currently housed in the PSTL program of the College of Education and Human Development. In Collins' writing class, college students interview immigrant community elders, translate the interviews into English, and research their community histories. In May 2008, the students read excerpts from their work at the Immigration History Research Center before selected materials were archived.

David Klaassen
Archivist, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

U of MN Social Welfare Archives Workshop

David has been with the SWHA since 1975, where he is responsible for the acquisition of historical records of voluntary-sector service and reform organizations and their arrangement, description, and use. He has written on the nature of archival resources and research, on the relationship between archives and the organizations who donate their records, and on confidentiality and other issues affecting the use of archival records.

Barbara Milon

Phyllis Wheatley Community Center

Barbara Milon is Executive Director at the Phyllis Wheatley Community Center, in North Minneapolis. PWCC opened its doors in 1924 as the first settlement house and agency dedicated to serving African-Americans. For almost 85 years it has remained a cornerstone for North Minneapolis, having served almost a quarter million children and families. Prior to her leadership role at PWCC, Ms. Milon was Executive Director at the Neighborhood Development Corporations Association in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Renae Oswald-Anderson

Neighborhood House

Renae Oswald-Anderson, Vice President of Community Building, has total operational responsibility for Neighborhood House programs and service delivery. She has over 25 years experience in the nonprofit sector at many levels in both the Twin Cities and in greater Minnesota. Prior to joining Neighborhood House, she was the Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of Neighbor to Neighbor, a community center similar to Neighborhood House. From 1990-1998, she led the Good Neighbor Foundation, which she co-founded and directed until its merger with Capitol Community Services to form Neighbor to Neighbor. She is the past- chair of the Board of Directors of the Senior Service Consortium of Ramsey County, serves on the North Central Regional Blood Board of the American Red Cross, and on the Metropolitan Alliance for Connected Communities (MACC) Evaluation Capacity Building Team.

Anthony R. Wagner

Tony Wagner is president of Pillsbury United Communities, an association of community centers and affiliated organizations with 250 employees in ten locations in Minneapolis' inner city neighborhoods. Tony also serves as President of New Unity, a community employment corporation that serves as the economic development arm of Pillsbury United Communities.

Amy Chalifoux Anderson, Sara Bielawski, and Peggy Pond

Giesela Konopka and Project Girl

Sara Bielawski finished up her M.Ed. in Youth Development Leadership (YDL) in May and is working at the U of MN Center for Urban and Regional Affairs. She also works with homeless and runaway youth at The Bridge.

Amy Chalifoux Anderson is the Youth Development Coordinator for the White Bear Lake Area Schools. She plans to finish her YDL M.Ed by the end of 2008.

Peggy Pond is also completing her YDL M.Ed. and works with the Youth Studies program as the Undergraduate Community Program Assistant in the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota. Previously Peggy has worked in alternative secondary education programs with an emphasis in outdoor leadership.

Dan Conrad, Ph.D.

Why Did They Take That Game Away from Us?
The rapid spread and then outlawing of girls' basketball and other competitive sports in the early 20th Century as the story played out in one rural Minnesota community.

Dan Conrad is a retired teacher, having taught at Hopkins High School, The Children’s Theatre in Minneapolis, and the Center for Youth Development and Research at the University of Minnesota. Two of his aunts were captains of Cokato High School Girls’ Basketball teams in the early 1920s.

Judith Erickson

Playing Indian: A Metaphor to Grow On?

Youth Organizations in Wartime

Judith Erickson retired in 2001 after more than a decade as Research Director for the Indiana Youth Institute in Indianapolis where her responsibilities involved annual Kids Count in Indiana Data Books and the Indiana Youth Polls. Her career in youth work includes positions on the faculty of Macalester College and the Center for Youth Development and Research at the University of Minnesota, a Visiting Fellowship at the Boys Town Center for the Study of Youth Development, Program Associate with the Science Education Directorate of the National Science Foundation, and earlier, as district/camp director for the Camp Fire Girls of Minneapolis and child welfare casework for the public welfare department in Spokane County, Washington. She holds an A.B. degree from Wheaton College and advanced degrees from the University of Minnesota. In retirement, she is looking forward to completing a monograph on the history of out-of-school organizations for American youth.

Ruth Gilchrist

Settlements Beyond the City: Taking Art to Depressed Areas

Ruth Gilchrist is a regional Education, Training and Development Officer with UK Youth. Previously she served 16 years as a development worker for Newcastle YMCA. She has extensive youth and community field experience. Ruth is a member of the editorial board of the journal Youth & Policy and has edited and contributed to seven books and is currently involved in research into the settlements of the north east of England.

Tony Jeffs

Towards a History of the Community School

Tony Jeffs is Honorary Senior Lecturer, Studies in Youth and Community Work, University of Durham, U.K. He previously taught social policy and sociology at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, U.K. Tony is a prolific author on informal education and youth work, youth work and civic engagement, and the role of youth workers in education of young people. Amongst his many publications are Young People and the Youth Service (1979); Youth Work (1988 with Mark Smith); Henry Morris (1999) Informal Education (1999 with Mark Smith); and Essays in the History of Youth Work (2001) and Architects of Change. Studies in the History of Community and Youth Work (2004) (both edited with Ruth Gilchrist and Jean Spence). Tony Jeffs founded and continues to be an editor of Youth and Policy.

Simon Bradford, Ph.D.

Aspects of Youth Policy Development in Mid Twentieth Century England

Dr Simon Bradford is a sociologist teaching and researching in the School of Sport and Education, Brunel University, London. He is Director of the Centre for Youth Work Studies, a research and teaching centre in the School. His research interests lie in the historical and sociological development of professional services for young people, the sociology of youth, youth culture and youth practices. He is also Chair of the North Reading Youth Project, a multi-centre project that undertakes a range of work with young people and communities in Reading. In his spare time, Simon is a season ticket holder and passionate supporter of Reading FC (of Marcus Hahnemann and Bobby Convey fame!).

Two Homes, One Dream

Directed by Andy Wilhide
Produced by the MN Historical Society

Fifteen young Somali women from St. Paul Public Schools filmed, interviewed and edited a documentary on the Somali community in the Twin Cities. The 45-minute DVD covers a range of topics about adjusting to life in America for teens, adults and elders.

Included with the DVD is a short piece, “What’s with the Hijab?” The film talks about what the hijab means in Islam and why it is important to Muslim women. This is a great educational resource to learn about one of Minnesota’s recent immigrant communities.

Kate Searls

We Couldn't Live at Home

Kate Searls is the founding director of The Sheltering Home Chronicles, a grass-roots initiative that uses art and history to spark conversations about Minnesota’s over 30,000 children who, each year, are unable to live at home. Her other areas of research activity include: business-to-business marketing, internet-enabled sourcing strategy, trust in buyer-seller relationships and consumer behavior.

A 1949 party at the Old Jewish Sheltering Home for Children/Oak Park Home (the institution went by both names in this community)

Kate is Founding Director of "The Sheltering Home Chronicles". Over the past 28 years, Searls has conducted academic and applied research and published articles in such diverse topic areas as: Older Women and Public Policy, Clinical Orthopaedics, Trust in Buyer-Seller Relationships, Product and Service Innovations and Ethnography.

The Heart of Bassett Place

Mick Caouette, Writer and Producer

Mick Caouette has been producing historical documentary films since 1996, including, The Scottsboro Boys The Capture and Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hubert H. Humphrey: The Art of the Possible , Kindred Spirits: The Story of John F. Thomas, and Eugene J. McCarthy: Muses and Mementos.

In 2000, Caouette completed The Heart of Bassett Place: W. Gertrude Brown and the Wheatley House. Through the voices of those that grew up there, and original film from the 1930’s, the documentary explored life at The Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House in Minneapolis; the settlement was known as “the greatest settlement house for Negroes in the United States.” The film has found a prominent place in the curricula of social work, black history, and women’s history programs, at colleges and universities throughout the United States.

In addition to full length documentaries, Caouette has produced museum installations for the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Historical Society, and short pieces for presentations by Vice President Walter Mondale and President Bill Clinton. From 1996 to 2001, Caouette collected, transferred and cataloged archival films for the Audio-Visual Curator of the Minnesota Historical Society. He holds a Master’s Degree in History and Film, and has taught graduate classes at Hamline University in St. Paul. Most of his life he has been a professional working musician.