Community Conversations

Jafra Said is a human rights activist who came to the US from Syria several years ago when she married an American.  Jafra spoke recently at a Loaves and Fishes Roundtable Discussion on sanctuary, nativism and the lives of people caught in the middle.

Last December, local television reporter and news anchor Michelle Lee retired after almost 40 years as a broadcaster.  Within a few weeks, she boarded a bus with a crowd of other Northlanders and headed for Washington DC.

Never one to miss a chance to stretch KUMD’s budget with volunteers, I asked Michelle if she’d mind capturing some audio and doing some interviews for us on the trip, and she graciously consented, then joined me in the studio to talk about the trip. 

As KUMD prepares to blow out 2017 with our 60th anniversary, we don't want to lose sight of all the things we did this year to get people talking. Thirty years of For The Birds.  Expanded Homegrown Music Festival coverage.  The local musician making national news.  KUMD was where you turned when you wanted to hear what the loss of David Bowie, Prince or the other icons who said goodbye this year meant to music. We take a look back at how KUMD had you talking this year.

Veteran's Day honors the veterans among us ... but many veterans aren't comfortable with the stereotypes they face when they get home.  What if they don't want to be seen as either heroes or "damaged," somehow? Is there anything in-between?

Many environmentalists and tribes have been united in recent years and months over proposed mining or pipeline projects they’re concerned post a hazard to our Minnesota waterways.  But on the Standing Rock reservation in south central North Dakota, a quiet, lonely place where three biggest towns have under a thousand people each, some kind of tipping point has been reached.  On this reservation in the middle of nowhere, where about 15-thousand people live on just over two million acres of land thousands of native people and allies have gathered to shut down construction of the Dakota Access

Photo 1: Mathers Museum of World Cultures/Flickr
Cheyenne woman Jennie Red Robe with her child.
 Location: Crow Reservation, Montana
Date: 1909
Photo 2: John Tewell
A black family at the Hermitage Plantation, Savannah, Georgia, USA, about 1907
Photo 3: Marion Doss/Flickr
Prisoners in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany, December 19, 1938.
 

Photo 1: Mathers Museum of World Cultures/Flickr
Crow Woman and Child, Location: Crow Reservation, Montana
Photo 2: elycefeliz/Flickr
Photo 3: Raymund Flandez/Flickr
A Jewish woman walks towards the gas chambers with three young children after going through the selection process on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This month's Community Conversation, talking about local reactions to the mass shooting in Orlando, is as notable for who's NOT on the air as for who is.  Several people we contacted didn't dare do an interview, even anonymously, for fear they'd be outed, threatened or hurt as a result.  A year after same-sex marriage became legal in Minnesota ... have we continued to move forward?  Or back?

Money.  Whether we have it or we don’t, it’s a constant in our everyday lives.  Its presence – or absence is felt as we go about our business every single day.  So why is it so hard to talk about?

It started as a way to grieve … and honor a respected journalist in our community.

It’s grown to be a project involving more disparate people and groups than anyone could imagine.

Jobs in the Northland don't come just from mining, industry or tourism;  it turns out there’s good money   generated – AND jobs – in the arts and in the groups charged with taking care of other folks. 

Even after an entire semester in Jacki Buffington-Vollum's class on mental illness and crime, many students refuse to believe that anyone could commit violence without being mentally ill.​  The numbers say society is more afraid of mental illness now than we were in the '50s - but here in the Northland, are we afraid because we're actually in danger or because we're just ... uncomfortable?  UMD Professor and forensic clinical psychologist Jacki Buffington-Vollum and Duluth patrol officer Jake Willis are our guests as we talk crime, mental illness and what we're really afraid of.