Keynote Sessions

Cross-Pollination: Interdependence is Our Strength

12:45 - 2:15 P.M.

Join our opening keynote session as we engage in conversation with Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor, Peggy Flanagan (invited). The Lt. Governor will explore the interconnections that build strength for the charitable sector, across government-nonprofit relations, and for Minnesota’s diverse communities. While it’s easy to focus on the differences that divide, we’ll take time to remember the ways that we can live up to the aspirations of an interdependent Minnesota.

About Our Presenter

Peggy Flanagan (invited) is Minnesota’s 50th Lieutenant Governor, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, and currently the country’s highest ranking Native woman elected to executive office. At the center of all her work is making progress for children, working families, communities of color and Indigenous communities, and Minnesotans who have historically been underserved and underrepresented. Previously, the Lt. Governor worked in the nonprofit sector with Wellstone Action and Children’s Defense Fund – Minnesota.

A Conversation on Building Power, Changing Systems, and Creating Abundance

8:45 - 10:15A.M.

We’ll start our morning with Nick Tilsen, president and CEO, NDN Collective and Repa Mekha, president and CEO, Nexus Community Partners. Nick will share reflections about NDN Collective’s strategies to defend Indigenous people; develop communities; and decolonize minds, communities, and sovereign nations. The lived values of NDN Collective offer a path for us to unlock the promise of all communities. Repa will reflect on his work at the intersection of community building and community development. Repa engages communities of color to achieve equitable, sustainable neighborhood revitalization in the Twin Cities region.

After opening remarks, our facilitator, Leah Lemm, senior editor, MPR News, will guide a conversation with Repa and Nick. Together, they will explore themes of place-based innovations, cross-sector systems change, and intersectional solutions for equitable community development. As peers whose work spans the breadth of the charitable sector, their reflections will expose the hard work ahead and reveal the possibilities when we embrace allies in the work.

About Our Presenters

Nick Tilsen (he/him), president and CEO of NDN Collective, is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Nick has over 20 years of experience building place-based innovations that have the ability to inform systems change solutions around climate resiliency, sustainable housing, and equitable community development. He founded NDN Collective to scale these place-based solutions while building needed philanthropic, social impact investment, capacity, and advocacy infrastructure geared towards building the collective power of Indigenous Peoples.

NDN Collective is an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power. Through organizing, activism, philanthropy, grantmaking, capacity-building, and narrative change, they are creating sustainable solutions on Indigenous terms.

Repa Mekha (he/him) serves as president and CEO of Nexus Community Partners. Repa has 30+ years of experience in community-based leadership, community capacity building, asset and wealth building strategies, organizational leadership and development, and systems change work.  He is also co-founder of the Twin Cities African American Leadership Forum.

Nexus Community Partners builds engaged and powerful communities of color so that each and every person can flourish in a joyful and abundant life. For this to be possible, Nexus works to usher out the rigged rules, attitudes, and practices that concentrate wealth and power in fewer and whiter hands. And they are ushering in ways of living, working, and making decisions together that nourish communities for this generation and generations to come.