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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Forum aimed at raising civic engagement

Event set for April 27 at Cook Community Center

Fred Schumacher
Posted 4/20/17

COOK- High school junior Jeff Mattson, president of the student council at Vermilion Country School in Tower, has always been interested in politics, especially world affairs.

Jeff will join four …

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Forum aimed at raising civic engagement

Event set for April 27 at Cook Community Center

Posted

COOK- High school junior Jeff Mattson, president of the student council at Vermilion Country School in Tower, has always been interested in politics, especially world affairs.

Jeff will join four other community leaders for a panel discussion titled “What Makes a Good Citizen?” on Thursday, April 27, from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Cook Community Center.

The forum, which is free and open to the public, is aimed at raising public awareness about civic engagement and encouraging area residents to be active citizens, whether it is through electoral politics, volunteer work, or other ways of contributing to community well being. Audience discussion will follow the presentations, and refreshments will be served.

“I think in general we have lost our civic and political involvement in recent times,” said Bob Champa of Cook, one of the organizers of the event. “I think it’s important to have a good representative democracy, so we need as many people as possible involved. This forum is a way to help start that.”

Champa served a term as a Cook City Council member in the late 1970s, followed by a term on the St. Louis County District 710 School Board (now District 2142). While he served on the city council, he was active in pursuing grants from the IRRRB and the State of Minnesota. He was especially involved in the construction of the building that is now the Cook City Hall and the creation of the Doug Johnson Recreation Area.

“My biggest hope for this event,” Champa said, “is that we reach young people, people 18-25 years old, and light a fire and get a spark going so they get involved in local government and their representative democracy.”

Panelist Jeff Mattson was one of a group of seven Vermilion Country School students who visited Washington, D.C. in 2015 to learn about government in action. They got a chance to meet with Minnesota Senators Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar. Last fall Jeff served as an election judge in the November 2016 election. “I learned a lot about elections that day,” he said.

“If you’re not involved in the political system, you don’t know what’s happening in the world,” Jeff said. The son of Crystal and Chris Mattson, of Tower, he follows major news networks such as CNN and NBC to stay informed.

Politics: The work of the people

“Politics is the work of the people,” argues panel member Pam Brunfelt, who teaches history and political science at Vermilion Community College. “It is everyone’s duty, our responsibility” to be involved in civic life, she said.

“This country has asked very little of its citizens. The only thing it asks of us is to be engaged in the political process so it works. There’s no excuse for not being involved.”

“I grew up in a household where everyone voted—every election, primary, general, every one,” Brunfelt said. “There was no excuse for not voting.”

Originally from Britt, Brunfelt said her father took her and her siblings to the local store each Sunday, where he bought the Duluth and Minneapolis-St. Paul Sunday newspapers. Each child took sections of the paper and lay on the floor reading the news of the day. Unfortunately today, she said, “children don’t see their parents reading the newspaper.”

Her current work as a college instructor at VCC, where she’s been for 20 years, gives her a chance to help students understand the values of this country and learn how to be good citizens and vote based on sound principles.

“I want them to know the obligations of citizenship, what the founding ideals were, and how difficult it is to achieve them. I want them to understand their civil rights and their civil liberties and the notion of the common good.”

Apathy is

dangerous

Steven B. Johnson, also a panelist for the April 27 citizenship forum, was elected last November to the Virginia City Council on his third try.

“I’m a firm believer if you’re going to complain about something, you should do something about it,” Johnson said. He had been attending city council meetings for six years when he finally decided to run for office.

“Apathy is dangerous,” said Johnson. “If people don’t care about their people’s problems, it becomes somebody else’s solution.”

Johnson, an adult educator for Arrowhead Economic Opportunity Agency, has distinguished himself by his accessibility to the voters, holding listening sessions every week. “I want to listen,” he said. “And people want to be heard.”

Davis, McQuillan also on Panel

Also on the panel are Frank S. Davis, Ph.D. and Kathleen McQuillan, both of Cook.

Davis, who has served churches in Virginia, Tower, and Ely, currently works as a psychotherapist in private practice in Duluth and is active on the ministry team at Woodland Presbyterian Church in Babbitt. He lives in rural Cook with his wife, the Reverend Kristin Foster.

Linden Grove resident McQuillan, who first ran for elective office at age 19, was involved in the successful community fight against a toxic waste site at Ash Lake in the 1980s and has been active in grassroots anti-poverty work and in other local and national citizens groups. For 11 years she advocated for the persons with disabilities in their claims for Social Security benefits and organized with the community for fair housing and other rights and resources for disabled people.

“What Makes a Good Citizen?” is sponsored by Northern Progressives, which works to increase public awareness about civic engagement by providing education to help people become politically and civically involved, and Citizens for Civic Education, which produces a regular newspaper column about civics and civic affairs.