Good Neighbors

By Benya Kraus

President & CEO

Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation

This holiday season, Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF) has teamed up with the McKnight Foundation to distribute $100,000 in rapid response “Good Neighbor” grants to support immediate needs like heat assistance, food and other essential supplies. We are doing this through a group of small town Community Foundations and our region’s two community action agencies, knowing that it often takes a neighborly connection to understand what a family may be going through and to get them the support they need.

As such, I’ve been reflecting on how neighborliness is not only the critical ingredient to effective service, but also the antidote to forces that seek to divide us.

Four decades ago, a locally fundraised Waseca Rotary scholarship sent my farm boy father overseas to study tropical medicine so he could treat those infected by leprosy, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS along the Thai-Cambodia refugee border. Those refugees were escaping the violence of the Khmer Rouge at the height of the Vietnam War, and my dad boarded his first international flight in his 20s to serve with Catholic Relief Services. Nearly 50 years later, I buy my Thai groceries from a store in Albert Lea, owned by one of the refugees who lived in the same camp where my father worked. She now runs the nearest Asian grocery store to me for miles. It’s where I get the curry paste I need to invite my next-door neighbors in Harmony over for their first homecooked Thai dinner. Around that table, we learn the details of each other’s lives – the quirks and stories that defy stereotypes of “Young, Asian Woman” or “Rural, White Schoolteacher.”

Neighborliness made that possible. Neighbors invested in my father’s dream to live out his faith through service. His service gave me a neighbor who found new life in America – and a chance to feed and know my own next-door neighbors. Those same neighbors now snow blow our driveway and watch over our house when we’re gone.

When we are neighborly, the world opens up. We see big issues through the lens of human lives, and our understanding becomes richer and more complex. This deepened understanding makes us attentive to the specific needs of those around us – and what we can do to serve.

That attentiveness matters now more than ever. Across the country, headlines seek to use the criminal acts of a few to paint a sweeping, negative narrative about immigrants as a whole – most recently our Somali population – fostering fear in communities that have long been part of our shared life, including here in southern Minnesota. These neighbors own businesses, start child care centers, teach our children and volunteer in ways that strengthen our towns. They are not statistics or stereotypes; they are people whose hopes and contributions make southern Minnesota vibrant. And yet, despite the fact that 95% of Somali people in Minnesota are U.S. citizens, today’s national tone and ethnically targeted deployment of federal immigration raids cause many of our Somali neighbors to wonder whether they truly belong here.

At a time when we might feel influenced into “either/or” camps, let’s lean into our rural sensibility: practical, relational and rooted in care. Immigration reform may not be within SMIF’s purview, but fostering neighborliness is.

Last week, a group of us at SMIF went to a local Somali restaurant in Owatonna and were pleased to see tables full of community members across racial identities enjoying saffron rice and the world’s best beef sambuusas. As we enjoyed our meal, the owner – a man who grew up in the refugee camps of Kenya and resettled to America as a teenager – warmly greeted each person who entered, running between the Somali grocery store next door, after school youth and adult learning center and co-located business space he runs in what were previously vacant, old buildings in downtown Owatonna. When I ask him what keeps him going, his eyes twinkle with gratitude: “The people of southern Minnesota welcomed me when I had no money, little education, but a dream for a better life. It’s my responsibility to pay that kindness forward.”

His story reminds me that being neighborly has a rippling effect. Neighborliness calls us to cut through stereotypes and choose to see the individual in the fullness of who they are — not what national narratives tell us to believe.

For when we are fully seen by those around us, we, too, can fully give of ourselves to the fabric and wellbeing of our communities. To our Somali and other immigrant neighbors, please know we see you and the many ways you contribute to our shared home. To all of us as southern Minnesotans, this holiday season may we give the gift of not only serving our neighbor – but also seeing our neighbor. It’s the simplest gift – and the one that keeps on multiplying.

As always, I welcome your comments and questions. You can reach me at benyak@smifoundation.org or 507-455-3215.

About Benya Kraus

Benya Kraus is the President & CEO of Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation. Benya is the co-founder of Lead for America and served as the Network Advancement Director at Resource Rural.