James Kanne of the Land Stewardship Project led area residents in brainstorming ways to organize and help their communities, during a talk Wednesday in Marshall.

MARSHALL — Making stronger communities is something that takes teamwork, James Kanne said. But before you can bring people together for a common goal, you often need to build relationships.

“We’ve got (community) groups, but we need to activate the people. And you do that by talking to them one-on-one,” Kanne told a group of area residents gathered in Marshall this week.

On Wednesday, Kanne, a Franklin area resident and a policy organizer with the Land Stewardship Project, led a talk about community organizing and building a shared vision for western Minnesota.

The Land Stewardship Project is a nonprofit that focuses on encouraging sustainable agriculture and healthy communities. But the vision meeting wasn’t really focused on specific agriculture issues or policies, so much as connecting with people over shared values.

“You’ve got to get to people in the area where they live first,” Kanne said of the vision meeting. “You get them involved through their ideas. And the next step is, ‘I want to do something in my area.'”

Kanne had participants in the vision session work backward, starting by sharing their concerns for the future. The concerns the group shared ranged from topics like food insecurity, to the economic effects of labor shortages and breakdowns in the global supply chain.

From there, the group brainstormed ways to address those concerns in their communities, and ideas for community groups who could help to reach those goals. Kanne said finding common ground with neighbors could help people organize more effectively than just talking about policy or politics.

“You can see how this can cut across a lot of political boundaries, where people are disagreeing on policy,” he said. Most people could agree on goals like wanting a safe and healthy environment, or for farmers to be able to provide for their families. “Something that I’ve been doing is going out and talking to people one-on-one, and you can find these shared values when you do that.”

Participating in community groups are one way that people act on their values, Kanne said. Area residents took turns sharing how different groups supported their shared values. Paul Sobocinski said the Minnesota Farmers Union looked at the question of how to keep people on the land, and to strengthen farm commmunities.

“We know that farmers face lots of challenges, and one of the challenges is unfair markets, and lack of competition,” Sobocinski said. “That’s why, for example, the Farmers Union is involved in meat processing, how to keep our small meat processing plants out here in southwestern Minnesota.”

“Another policy piece people have worked together on is beginning farmers, like the beginning farmer tax credit, and getting more people into agriculture,” he said.

Al Kruse said an example of a group working with shared values was CURE, which works in areas including the environment and water. “That’s a shared value, I think, for everybody, that we want to be able to breathe and live in a healthy environment,” Kruse said.

Local libraries were another group supported by shared values and community, said Allison Broesder, head librarian at the Canby, Madison, and Dawson Public Libraries.

“When we’re looking at libraries, that’s kind of the whole job, is building community,” she said. Broesder said bringing people together for community programs was “really what it’s about in the end, as well as having access to information and education that maybe they’re not getting elsewhere.”

Other community examples people brought up ranged from food cooperatives, to women’s church groups.

Kanne encouraged the audience to use their ideas to try build connections in their communities. “The Land Stewardship Project feels that by working from the grassroots on up, we get results,” he said.

Kanne said he hoped to hold similar vision meetings in other Minnesota communities. So far, groups in Willmar and Litchfield had reached out, he said.