About LFMN

Waseca, MN

Mission + Vision

Our Mission

By 2040, 15 thousand of Minnesota' most dynamic & diverse leaders working on our communities' toughest challenges.

Our Vision

A more unified Minnesota, built upon communities that care.

Our Approach

We work towards this cultural tipping point through three pillars of Education, Systems-Change, and Pathways.

Our main Pathways Program includes the Hometown Fellowship. We recruit, train, and place young leaders in two-year paid fellowships in their hometown or home state communities - particularly in places with bold visions, but lack the capacity to attract and retain the next generation of leaders to carry it forward.

Joe Grochmal, Fellow

A mural painted by a Native artist in the Lower Sioux Dakota Immersion Daycare Center

Union speaks to the vision of shared prosperity, justice, and connectedness between our urban and rural regions, and across all members of our local communities.

Communities that care speak to the vision of collective community leadership practicing “resilient togetherness” in service of local action toward systems change.

Street mural outside Hmong supermarket in Walnut Grove

2019 Changemaker Summit in Washington, D.C.

Lead For America

LFMN is a state affiliate of Lead for America, a national 501c(3), sharing national recruitment and operations support.

LFMN Fellows are part of LFA's national movement of change-makers. They attend the annual Changemaker Summit, build an intimate network of locally-rooted leaders, engage in the wide breadth of LFA programming across core pillars, and have access to LFA's national network of leading mentors - which includes mayors & elected officials, Nobel Peace Prize nominees, scholarly experts, and community leaders.

LFA works on three core pillars:

Education

Pathways

Systems-Change

For more information on LFA, click here.