Fifty Years of Fellowship

“I’d already been doing some soul-searching about how I wanted to give back, and I had a project I’d been working on in my head,” she says. “Just being asked to think about what I could do with a Bush Fellowship helped me get some clarity on what my next chapter was going to be.”

Last March, Berglund learned she’d received a 2014 Bush Fellowship, a gift of time and money that she’s investing in what she calls the “FINNovation Lab,” a business incubator aimed at growing other socially responsible start-ups.

“The hardest part of the Fellowship for me so far has been putting the money into what I need to be the best leader I can be in five or 10 years,” says Berglund, who just hired a coach to help her make the most of her $100,000 Fellowship stipend. “I have to admit I’d never heard of the Bush Fellowship before, so I still can’t believe that an organization is investing money in the givers and the rescuers and the people in my field who are trying to figure out how to do good. I feel really honored — and also really motivated to do more.”

If Jacquie Berglund never imagined she’d be a Bush Fellow, it’s a safe bet that Archibald Bush could not have imagined it either. Though Archie was a boot-strapper himself, starting his journey from Granite Falls to the Fortune 500 with just $25 in his pocket, he was also a teetotaler who saw little redeeming value in beer. More to the point, the fellowship he first outlined was never intended for women, seeking only “experienced men between the ages of 25 and 40 so that they may train themselves further for major leadership in business, government, the professions and union management.”  

While he’d built a fortune worth more than $200 million at the time of his death in 1966, Bush himself believed he might have accomplished even more if he’d had time to look up from his desk and take the long view of the business climate and his own career path. “The Bush Fellowship really came from Archie’s own observation that if he’d had a mid-career opportunity to strengthen his skills and refocus, he could have been a more effective leader in the later part of his career,” says Susan Showalter, a 1983 Bush Fellow, who served as a long-time consultant to the Foundation.

“In his own career, Archie Bush saw that great ideas are nothing without the people to power them," says Bush Foundation President Jen Ford Reedy. "And so investing in individuals is one of the things we do that feels most directly tied to his philanthropic lineage.” While every initiative created over the last 50 years, from the first Bush Leadership Fellows Program to the current Native Nation Rebuilders Program, has expanded on Archie Bush’s original aim, Reedy says they’ve all shared the same premise. “Every fellowship we make is a statement of our belief in the power of people to get things done. It’s true that investing in individuals can be a little riskier than funding organizations or ongoing programs, but for us the higher risk means there’s a higher return, too. If you look at the extraordinary people the Foundation has backed over the last 50 years, there’s no question that providing fellowships has given the region a great rate of return.’’

In the Words of Bush Fellows...

In 2014, the Foundation conducted the Bush Census, a survey of the more than 2,300 Fellows and Rebuilders over the last 50 years. We asked them to report how their experiences had an impact on what they were doing today. Throughout this story you’ll see what just a few of the 400 respondents told us.

In the coming years, evaluators will follow Bush Fellows to help the Foundation determine how its investments in individuals can be better deployed to improve communities throughout Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and 23 Native nations.

Ensuring that the Fellowship program served communities of color, emerging immigrant groups and other underrepresented voices was a drive led by the Foundation’s first president, Humphrey Doermann, and the Fellowship program’s first director, Don Peddie. Both Harvard grads who had worked on the business side of the former Minneapolis Star and Tribune, the two followed their own news sense for seeking out emerging leaders. They also encouraged the talented people they encountered through the Foundation’s organizational grant programs to apply for Fellowships. Impressed by the leadership team behind the state’s first battered women’s shelter, for instance, grantmaking staff practically insisted that Women’s Advocates founder Sharon Rice Vaughan pursue a Fellowship, which she received in 1979. (Though she was not the first woman to earn a Fellowship, “I may have been the first Bush Fellow to wear sandals,” she jokes.)

Many other applicants were recruited via “Peddiegram” — 3x5 notecards Peddie typed up and sent to promising people, encouraging them to pursue the Fellowship program and, particularly, placement at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government—the academic destination for more 100 Bush Fellows since 1964. John Archabal, who joined the Foundation in 1973 and served as director of the Bush Leadership Fellows Program for much of the next 36 years, shared the Foundation’s early commitment to encouraging emerging voices from every point of view.

“John used to emphasize that the Bush Foundation was agnostic on the issues,” Showalter says, choosing Fellows from across the political spectrum and with a broad range of backgrounds and experience. “We knew that the Bush Fellowships could provide credibility to people and open doors, but the respect for the process went both ways,” Showalter says. “Many times after an applicant interview John would lean over in awe and say, ‘Wow, this person is so smart.’ The Foundation itself had great respect for applicants who came forward.”

ACADEMIC BIAS

“Harvard was his alma mater, so he did his best to get everyone to go,” says Will Antell, a 1974 Bush Fellow who went on to found the American Indian Education Association. While Antell, a member of the White Earth Band of Anishinabe, was choosing between four university programs to attend during his Fellowship, Peddie arranged for him to meet Harvard’s famous hockey coach Bill Cleary, an Olympic silver medalist, during his visit to Cambridge. With hockey-playing kids, the meeting was enough to tip Antell toward moving to Massachusetts for a year.

“Don just made a lot of things happen,” Antell recalls. “He wasn’t just an advisor. Once you were a Bush Fellow, he wanted to help you out in every way he could.”

And since 2010, the Native Nation Rebuilders Program has invested in building the leadership skills and nation-building knowledge of more than 110 emerging and existing Native leaders. In 2010, the Foundation launched its current Bush Fellowship Program and in 2013 initiated the Ron McKinley Philanthropy Fellowships. All told, the roll call of individuals who have benefited from support of the “fellowship” model — the Foundation’s five Fellowship programs, three Bush Educator programs, and the Rebuilders program — now includes the names of more than 2,300 people who’ve received nearly $100 million in support.

The Fellowship selection panels frequently encouraged applicants to take their proposals back to the drawing board, pushing them to take greater risks with their Fellowship plans. “Human nature being what it is, people don’t always see in themselves the same talent and potential that other people can see,” Lee says, pointing to Repa Mekha, a 2005 Bush Fellow, now the president and CEO of Nexus Community Partners, as an example of the process.

After a career in social services, Mekha was considering a shift toward economic and community development, “but I wasn’t thinking big enough,” he recalls. “In my original plan I think I’d suggested going to Metro State, but everyone insisted I had to get out of town and go to Harvard. That changed everything for me. It gave me a balcony view of the work I wanted to do, and a global reach that I don’t think a local experience would have provided me.”

During her selection interview, Jenkins says the challenges she outlined in the transgender community, from high rates of domestic violence to growing disenfranchisement caused by voter ID laws, “were new territory for 98 percent of the people on my selection panel, but they gave me their stamp of approval.” Four years later, Jenkins makes time to meet with other emerging leaders looking for advice about how to apply. “Having the Bush Fellowship puts you in this lineage of leadership that is very empowering, and you want to keeping paying it forward.”

Listening to the challenges leaders like Jenkins see in their communities has helped the Foundation be more responsive in its grantmaking, both to organizations and to individuals.  “The defining feature for the Foundation’s Fellowship programs over most of the last 50 years has been flexibility,” says Reedy. “The Bush Fellowship is really unusual in the degree to which it’s personalized — Fellows design their own Fellowships.”

Even so, Kendra Enright worried she was in the wrong place when she took a break from the cafe and bar she ran on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation to show up for her Fellowship interview in 1998. “It seemed like everyone else I met was planning to pursue higher education. I wanted to go to paramedic school,” says Enright. She made a strong case to the selection committee showing how her training could improve health care in her rural tribal community, which sometimes relied on ambulance teams from more than 60 miles away. “I was 42 years old, and I also wanted to show people that you can do what you want at any point in your life,” Enright says, adding that the same philosophy inspired her to start nursing school at the age of 51.

“There is a ‘right time’ for a Bush Fellowship, but the timing isn’t related to age,” says Reedy. “It’s related to moments of openness in a person’s career, where for one reason or another you’re ready to take a risk, and introduce some chaos and disorder and uncertainty into your life. It has to be a moment when you’re willing to be transformed.”

At the same time, Reedy adds, “The time to start thinking about a Bush Fellowship is now — whether you’re ready or not. The power of the program is often in articulating what you want to do. I encourage people to see it as a participatory process — talking to people about your vision and getting help as you figure out the distance between where you are and where you want to go. Then when it fits that right moment of your life, you’re ready.”

The Bush Fellowship helped Enright see how every person in a community makes a difference based on how they answer challenges: “Yes or no — those are the two basic options we’ve got in life. Most of the time we live in our own little boxes, and it’s hard to lift your head up and look out when we’re so tied down to what we’re doing every day — struggling financially or struggling professionally,” she says. “Having the Bush Fellowship gave me the financial means and also that little push to get out of my box and to see what I can do for my people.” It’s also why, after a few years of considering taking part in the Bush Foundation’s Native Nation Rebuilders Program, Enright applied in 2014 and earned a place in Cohort 6.

“I’d say if you want to make a difference,” Enright says, “the answer is usually ‘yes.’”