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The Mac Weekly - April 20, 2007 Meet Tom Welna, Director of High Winds, Global Citizen By Timothy Den Herder-Thomas As Director of the High Winds Fund, Tom Welna has lots of experience in global citizenship. The High Winds fund is a joint foundation/business enterprise that focuses on maintaining and enhancing the community within on mile of Macalester's campus. Its priorities include the neighborhood's beauty, serenity and security. The fund is invested in commercial and residential real estate and uses the proceeds to run programs that support its mission, such as grants to the community. While the average Macalester student probably has no idea what the High Winds Fund odes, we all see the products of Tom's work, such as the median on Grand Avenue. In the mid-1980s, Tom graduated from Macalester with a History major. Post-graduation, and during George Latimer's administration, Tom spent four years as the first Executive Directory of the Neighborhood Energy Consortium (NEC), a St. Paul-based environmental association. Through the NEC, Tom started St. Paul's curbside recycling program. The program has since turned into Eureka Recycling, which is Macalester's new waste manager and a key player in the recently formed Zero Waste Committee, which seeks to take Macalester beyond recycling. After working in the NEC, Tom spent four years as St. Paul Deputy Mayor and Chief of Staff for Jim Scheibel. He served as a neighborhood point person on community and environmental work. in 1993, Tom formed a small development company and took on challenging projects, such as building a 4,000 square foot floating bed and breakfast made entirely out of recycled materials - with his bare hands. The boat/building floats on the Mississippi to this day. His company developed exhibits for the Science Museum and refurbished parts of the Coffman Union at the University of Minnesota. After having his first daughter - he later adopted a second girl of the same age from Rostov, Russia - Tom decided to get away from the demanding hours of his company and moved to a house in the Merriam Park neighborhood. He became the Director of the High Winds Fund in the fall of 2002, and three years ago, sold his company to a former employee. Like the former directors of the High Winds Fund, Tom has found its work to be both provincial and global. "We're limited globally by the 1-mile radius," Tom said. "That's the limit on our programs and spending...but there's no limit on the issues we take on. That's how we can be global. We can choose issues to work on with global impacts." For example, Tom points to the HourCar hub he helped start last year with the NEC. The Toyota Prius share by over two dozen community members is a first step in reducing fossil fuel use, transportation problems, and parking, since it allows local residents to avoid additional car use. The current vehicle is only accessible to drivers who have had their licenses at least five years, but Tom anticipates expanding the HourCar to a fleet as demand rises. He is working toward making the next vehicle available to more Macalester students. Another example is the local branch of Patagonia, located in a building owned by High Winds. The company was recruited in part because of the emphasis place don social and environmental responsibility in its corporate culture. Additional environmental efforts have been to assist Facilities Management in recycling the three cottages located where the softball fields will be moved, and to help Environmental Studies launch the EcoHouse on Vernon Street, which will open in the fall. Tom also joins me and three others as members of the CERF Board, the decision-making body for the Clean Energy Revolving Fund, which I helped establish in spring 2006. Each of these actions reaches for smart community design and, by example, confronts suburbanization, urban decay, and the energy crisis. Through the High Winds F und, Tom also operates an extensive foundation effort. This includes granting funds to community organizations and community development initiatives, from local businesses, to home improvement assistance and the Community Councils of Macalester-Groveland and Merriam Park. "[These groups] are already doing great things," Tom Said. "A grant to them goes a lot farther...We get a lot more by working with the community. The fund also serves as a community relations resource, so that local residents have a place to go and an organization responsible for responding to their concerns." The High Winds Fund, initially endowed with $300,000 from Dewitt Wallace, brought up many area houses whose value fell dramatically during the period of suburban flight in the 1960s. Whereas many such communities have fallen into absentee landlord ownership the community around Macalester - at a time, largely owned by the fund - was sold back as single family homes in the 1970s and 80s. Some of this housing supported faculty and staff, ensuring a strong local housing base that keeps professors near campus. Tom explained the importance of this strategy. Not only does local housing keep professors more closely invested in campus and reduce the need for driving, it means that much of Macalester's $30 million annual payroll is reinvested in the community. Macalester is quite unique in this effort. Many schools only prioritize community relations when there is a serious conflict, then let the efforts slip from the priority list. Macalester maintains a commitment to its community relations. Does this work just perpetuate inaccessibility for lower-income residents? Does the fund drive gentrification? Why encourage professors to reinvest in the community when there are surely many more neighborhoods in much more need of help? After weighing such questions, I was glad to find that Tom shares this concern. The fund as at least maintained the livability of the neighborhood for middle class citizens. Faculty and staff, in particular, can get significant down payment assistance for homes in the neighborhood that would otherwise be too expensive. Because this neighborhood is one of the most highly valued in the Twin Cities, and an economic race to the top seems inevitable, that in itself is a significant feat. Tom admits that he hasn't fully resolved the lower-income accessibility problem, but he included affordable housing in the ten-year strategic plan approved three months ago. Despite affordability concerns, the convenience of the community makes it remarkably cost-effective to live here. Restaurants of many price ranges, a grocery store, a hardware store, a movie theater, baking options, and a post office are all close by. "From the junction of Grand and Snelling, within a six-block radius you can live your life, " Tom said. It's a phenomenal experiment in local living, one confronting both our transportation crisis and a fundamental restructuring. "Relocalizing economies is a global issue," Tom said. High Winds has helped preserve the rand Avenue small business community through a combination of direct ownership and collaboration. It sponsors Walk to Work programs, and initiatives such as HourCar that discourage long-distance car culture. Visitors sometimes complain about Macalester's lack of parking, but personally, I'm thrilled to live on a bike and bus campus, and mystified when students say they feel stuck. Incoming faculty and staff often complain about the high prices, and he has to remind them of the avoided expense of owning a car in the suburbs, Tom said. The city offers a cheaper lifestyle. Talking with Tom is often odd. He's quiet, collected, and matter-of-fact in the midst of ideas so massive as to be unimaginable. It's almost impossible for me to describe him as passionate, but nearly everything he does is filled with a sense of intense purpose. When I first met him to discuss how to set up the Clean Energy Revolving Fund with '06 graduate Richard Graves, Tom told us to think big, and then launched into an idea of uniting the Associated Colleges of the Midwest behind a massive rural wind project in the range of a hundred million dollars. We're just starting to think about pursuing that dream now. A random conversation with Tom will lead to mentions of an efficient new heating system he installed in his house, or a new type of light bulb he found. Tom's tidbits of advice - mere anecdotes to him - are the weapons in a global movement for a better future. Few Macalester students really know who he is, yet Tom and the fund he directs have shaped the very nature of our community. Tom can live global citizenship with a job defined by 'within 1 mile of campus.' He doesn't really see global citizenship as a privilege or even really a choice, except in the consciousness with which one enact sit. "Global citizenship is unavoidable for most of us," Tom told me. "The world has shrunk in my lifetime - 46 years...You can hardly not participate. So many issues in our daily lives depend on global resources, networks, and systems...none of us are unaffected. You can feel powerless in the fact of that, or you can grab hold of a few key things and make your make. I'm not unique. I think you'll find that there are lots of people out there, maybe not calling it [global citizenship] - doing it." Tom once stunned me by saying, quietly and plainly, that if small liberal arts colleges cannot take control of their operational efficiency, particularly with respect to energy (costs are doubling every few years now), small residential liberal arts colleges will not exist in 50 years. My whole life has been based on the assumption that this and many other such foundations are in fact weak, but hearing it directly from Tom made it somehow much more real. He told me that he thinks Macalester is defining a new kind of mission, preparing young adults for a different kind of world. Do we actually do that? The result of such global citizenship remains to e seen 0 and it largely lies in our hands. |
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