URBS 230—Community Leadership and Service Learning

Story Assignment

This is an exercise in descriptive writing.

There was an old TV show that used to begin each episode with “There are a million stories in the naked city. This is one of them.” There are tens of millions of stories in community leadership. Identify one of them, and learn enough about that person or organization to go beyond “just the facts” (as Joe Friday used to say) and get to motivations and conflicts and all the other dramatic components that make a story interesting. You may find this information from a number of sources—sometimes there are book-length or chapter-length biographies that have been published; old newspapers (often these are on microfilm) can help; the Minnesota Room at MSU’s Memorial Library has a collection of materials, as does the Minnesota Historical Society; MSU’s Women’s Studies department has been collecting women’s oral histories for a number of years; if the person or people who knew the person are still alive, you could collect some oral history of your own.

By this point in the class, you are familiar with concepts like moral deliberation and civic engagement, theories of leadership, strategies for community capacity building, principles of negotiation, and tools for framing ideas, building social capital, and mobilizing resources. I expect at least some of these concepts and tools to come to life in the story you will be telling. This will present something of a challenge—you do not want to stop the narrative flow to present an academic exposition of one theory or another, but you will need to work it in so that your reader (me, for one) will recognize that it is playing a role. Arthur Clarke’s short story, “Death of the senator,” is a good example of doing this in a short-story format (you do not, however, have to tell your story as a short story, unless you wish to).

However you gather your information, pull it together into a coherent and interesting story. A simple recitation of events is not enough. Every story has a point, a reason for retelling it. Usually, a story also has dramatic conflict (some movement through an obstacle of some sort). In fact, the moral deliberation involved in deciding on an action or using a tool may even be the spine on which you construct your dramatic conflict. You don’t need to recite every detail, every event—you want to tell an interesting story about how someone or some organization did something that made a difference to a community in Minnesota. Your story should be 4-6 pages in length..

If you are looking for ideas, you might consider:

Meridel LeSueur
David Crosby
Kenneth, George, or Charles Dayton
Earl Craig
James P. Shannon
Joan Mondale
Joe Selvaggio
George Latimer
Jack McGowan (There is little written about him, but if you are familiar with Mankato it would make a good oral history project—talk to Amy Kortuem)
Bremer Foundation
McKnight Foundation
Blandin Foundation
The Initiative Funds

MSU