Macalester Today

Kate Maehr ’89 admits that she isn’t the most likely person to run one of the Midwest’s largest food distribution networks. The executive who preceded her in this huge Chicago warehouse was a retired Marine brigadier general, more accustomed to giving orders and deploying personnel than is Maehr, an English major and mother of two with a passion for Madame Bovary.

Still, she picked up a skill at Macalester while running the campus literary magazine that has served her surprisingly well in a field she never imagined entering. “I’ve always been fascinated by the power of narrative,” says Maehr. “Now I use those skills I learned at Mac to tell the story of what it’s like to be hungry in Chicago—and then I tell people what they can do about it.”

Maehr is executive director of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, the largest food shelf network in the country, which distributes 46 million pounds of food to more than a half million of Chicago’s hungry every year. Her storytelling abilities helped drive a $30 million development effort to build the centralized warehouse where she now works, managing a staff of 150 employees, thousands of volunteers and donors, and an annual budget of $18 million.

Not a trained logistician, engineer, or MBA, Maehr has a management style she picked up in her first-year seminar. “Probably the most important thing I took away from Macalester was the ability to ask why. Why do we do it this way? Why do we make people go to one place for food stamps, another place to visit a WIC site, and another place to get food at a food shelf?” says Maehr, who admits that challenging the status quo “doesn’t always make me the most popular person in the room.”

But her inquiring method does get results, particularly during the relief effort she coordinated in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, which earned her recognition on the cover of Crain’s Chicago Business as one of the “40 under 40” civic leaders to watch. Maehr herself believes that her husband, Sam Pickering ’89, is more deserving of recognition for community service. “He’s a Chicago public school teacher,” she says. “They’re the real champions of the world.”

Yet her career path is instructive in the growing debate in higher education that asks whether colleges are producing enough graduates like Maehr, who plan to use their campus-honed talents to make the world a better place. In fact, in her commencement address last spring, Harvard’s new president, Drew Gilpin Faust, raised concerns about the fact that nearly half of Harvard graduates entering the workplace in 2007 took high-salary jobs with financial and consulting firms, rather than work in the public sector or non-profit world. Even in 2008, with a more challenging economy, 39 percent of Harvard grads made the same choice. The trend is so strong that a prominent Harvard professor has begun teaching a “reflections” seminar to students at Harvard, Amherst, and Colby, pushing them to ponder their education and aspirations.

But many Macalester alums offer a different perspective on that debate about whether it’s necessary to choose a life of civic engagement over a livable salary. “It’s kind of corny, but almost everyone I met at Macalester wants to change the world,” says Kes Puckorius ’03, an economics major from Lithuania. “And it’s amazing how many of them are doing that.” Their experiences suggest that there may be no single path from college into community service—though for many, coming to Macalester was the first step.

Finding a Mission
From its beginnings as a Presbyterian college, Macalester has always attracted students with a strong sense of mission, and today’s students carry on those traditions in new ways. For the last two decades, the annual Cooperative Institutional Research Program surveys of the country’s incoming freshmen have consistently shown that Macalester students have higher rates of volunteerism and greater interest in promoting racial understanding, community action, and changing social values than do their peers at other institutions.

“I see a lot of students who come to Macalester in part to find these kindred spirits—young people who want to be change agents,” says Karin Trail-Johnson, associate dean of the Institute for Global Citizenship, and director of the Civic Engagement Center (CEC). “When you ask them what they want to do, they want to do it all. So our job as educators is to keep that flame alive by showing them what they can accomplish, even in their time on campus.”

That lesson starts during first-year students week, when all 500 students take part in a one-day service project or community exploration event that helps “set the expectation that this is part of the college mission,” says Trail-Johnson, noting that the CEC works with nearly half the student body every year. In fact, 92 percent of Macalester students will take part in some kind of community service before they graduate—volunteering for a local non-profit, interning for a public service agency, working in one of the 45 work/study community service positions, or taking one of the 36 classes that include some aspect of community-based outreach or research in their coursework. Although these projects are generally located close to campus, students are often surprised to find their community service connects them to a wider world than they may have expected to find in the Twin Cities. When Munem Alidina ’05 went on a retreat with several professors to the Mercado Central, a cooperative Latin American marketplace in Minneapolis, it was the Tanzanian native’s “introduction to how many cultures there really are here,” he recalls. Alidina became especially interested in the wave of Somali refugees who began arriving in the Twin Cities in the 1990s. “Maybe being from East Africa myself is why it first interested me,” says Alidina, who went on to teach English and other skills to Somali immigrants at Volunteers of America (VOA) on Minneapolis’s West Bank.

Although he works now as a consultant for the financial services firm Deloitte, with assignments that frequently take him away from Minneapolis, Alidina recently corralled coworkers to spend a day at the VOA refurbishing computers, doing landscape work, and learning about the needs of the West Bank community during a Deloitte community service day. “It seemed like a good opportunity to introduce people to the work that goes on there,” he says.

“If you can help to tell a story in a way that engages people and increases their understanding of a part of the world they didn’t know anything about, you can show them why this matters,
and why they should care.” —Karin Ronnow ’84

Such community service projects are also a way to introduce Mac students to work they might like to do in the future. Trail-Johnson reports that many graduates find jobs with organizations they’ve interned for during college, among them the Minnesota Public Interest Research Group and Campus Compact. Other students find that their community service work helps them hone their career interests even before commencement. For instance, Rachel Farris ’05 worked at Planned Parenthood while she was a student, providing direct service to clients. Gaining on-the-job experience and a growing knowledge of Twin Cities women’s advocacy groups helped Farris find a job as operations administrator for the Jeremiah Program, founded by Macalester alumna Gloria Perez Jordan ’99. The Cities non-profit fosters self-sufficiency in single mothers by offering them housing and mentoring while they earn post-secondary degrees.

Farris recently visited one of Johnson’s classes and shared what she’s learned about community service and finding a career. “She was really struck by how many ways you can effect change working in philanthropy,” recalls Johnson. “It was exciting to hear such a recent alum make that discovery, because that’s a message we really try to emphasize. Community service doesn’t have to mean joining the Peace Corps, or leaving your job every lunch hour to volunteer as an ESL teacher—it means being a change agent wherever you are. Whether you’re a CEO or a social worker, you can make the world a better place by working for change within your own sphere.”

Karin Ronnow ‘84 in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, with her driver (above) and a teacher (below) from one of the Central Asia Institute’s schools. She called her project following Three Cups of Tea’s Greg Mortenson “one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.”

Change Agents On the Job
That’s a lesson that many alums say they learned at Macalester, even before there was an official Civic Engagement Center on campus. “Macalester taught me to be an independent thinker, and not to be afraid of what I believe in,” recalls Rebecca Otto ’85. The first Democratic woman ever elected state auditor of Minnesota, Otto is also a passionate advocate for green building, and lives in a passive solar, super-insulated, wind-powered house she and her husband built together.

She uses their home to spread the word about energy efficient building, and recently distributed her own “Best Practices Guide” to local governments showing them what they can do to save energy and reduce costs. “When people say, ‘One person can’t make a difference,’ Macalester taught me to say, ‘Watch me,’” she says.

It was an assignment from anthropology professor Jack Weatherford asking students to learn and locate every country in the world that first got Ann Jolicoeur Thomas ’93 thinking about how to build community across cultures. That’s now one of her goals for SEEdebate.org, an online classroom tool she and a partner launched recently, which allows students to discuss and debate current events with classrooms across the country. Although she spent 10 years running her family’s paper business in Massachusetts, the 2004 election prompted her to make a change: “I wanted to get young people interested in politics and voting, and engaged in the world around them.” Though SEEdebate.org is still in its infancy, more than 2,500 users have already found the site and used it to share their varying viewpoints. The discussions about gun control between students in Montana and in Queens, New York, “have been just awesome,” says Thomas.

Karin Ronnow ’84 recently saw an opportunity in her job to make some global connections to her own community of Bozeman, Montana. Bozeman is also home base for Greg Mortenson, co-author of the best-selling Three Cups of Tea and co-founder of the Central Asia Institute, which has created community-based schools in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Bozeman Daily Chronicle, where Ronnow works as managing editor, originally declined her proposal to follow Mortenson on a trip to Afghanistan, so Ronnow and a photographer paid for the journey themselves. The five-part series they returned with proved so popular with readers, however, that the publisher decided to reimburse them for their expenses. Now 150,000 additional copies of their series have been distributed far outside of Bozeman.

“That project has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career,” says Ronnow, who plans to travel with Mortenson again. “If you can help to tell a story in a way that engages people and increases their understanding of a part of the world they didn’t know anything about, then you can show them why this matters, and why they should care.” In her work with the Global Fund for Children, Joan Shifrin ’79 saw firsthand what a difference could be made in the lives of children in developing countries by improving the lives of their mothers. “We know that when you put money in the hands of women they tend to spend it in more effective ways—they feed their children, they send them to school,” says the former international studies major.

Ten years ago, she and a partner launched Global Goods Partners, a fair-trade, non-profit group that promotes women-led development initiatives by selling textiles and handcrafts made in marginalized communities in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. “One of the lessons I learned at Macalester was that small change can lead to bigger change,” says Shifrin, who says the same principle applies to her non-profit, where “a small purchase can have a very big effect on other people’s lives.”

Rachel Farris ’05, above, in a Jeremiah Program child care center. Says Farris, “I do a mixture of human resources, facilities management, fishing people’s keys out of the elevator—it can be 100 different things in a day.”

It’s worth noting that Shifrin, who attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins, didn’t go directly into non-profit work. “I worked in the private sector, and I felt like that’s where I needed to be financially,” she says. “It was only after becoming a mother, and looking at what I really felt invested in personally that I made the move to non-profits.”

In fact, many Macalester alumni who have worked in both worlds say there may be less cause for concern in the trend toward high-salary jobs right after graduation. “I remember when I went to work for a consulting firm, some of my friends thought I’d sold my soul to the capitalists,” jokes Fred Swaniker ’99, originally from Ghana (see story on page 32). Yet it was the experience he gained working for a consulting firm in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the skills he took from the Stanford business school training the firm paid for that gave him the tools he needed to open the African Leadership Academy.

Though Swaniker did ultimately give up his consulting work to “focus on my dream,” other Mac alums have managed to combine careers in business with civic engagement work. For instance, former economics major Michael Okrob ’04 works for a management consulting firm in Berlin but has also co-founded Teach First, a German version of for America.

Kes Puckorius ’03 went to work for the Analysis Group in Boston, and inspired by the non-profit work of his wife, Robin Rich ’03, has also served on the boards of a charter school, a homeless shelter, and a music-based youth development program, among other non-profit work. Now finishing his second year at Wharton business school, he’s a guest board member of the White-Williams Scholars, a program designed to help high-achieving Philadelphia public school students get to college. After he completes graduate school, Puckorius and his wife plan to return to Boston, where he expects to take up careers that combine equal parts private sector work and community service. “I think you can do both,” he says.

“We need to have an ecosystem in which everybody has a role to play,” agrees Swaniker. “It’s not one group against another—we’re all partners in making the world a better place. That’s something I love about the spirit of Macalester, that desire to do good and change the world.”

Chicago food bank director Maehr hopes that spirit continues to move other Macalester grads into jobs like hers, where the needs are only growing in this uncertain economy. “The stakes are high,” says Maehr, who saw customers to Chicago area food shelves shoot up by nearly 40 percent last fall. “We need the best and brightest doing this work.”

St. Paul resident Laura Billings is a regular contributor to Macalester Today.