Honor Schauland – WKS Alumni

Nearly a foot of fresh snow fell the Sunday I interviewed Honor Schauland at the Clair Nelson Community Center in Finland, Minnesota. After driving along Highway 61 with my emergency flashers on going 25 mph, stopping twice along Highway 1 to remove ice and snow from my windshield wipers and getting stuck once, I was very relieved when I arrived. I hoped I had arrived anyway. I was barely able to discern where the driveway and parking lot were due to the amount of snow on the ground already. Honor, however, confidently barreled into the parking lot seconds after I did and assured me that I was fine. She knows this place well after all.

She describes herself as the daughter of a hippie mom and logger dad with “probably an over-developed sense of identity”. Her long red haired pigtails and fresh face give her what I call a sense of playfulness. But don’t let that fool you. This woman is serious about her vision for the Finland community. “This is where I belong,” she told me. “This is what I do.”

Honor grew up in Isabella, Minnesota and talked briefly about the challenges of living far from school in Silver Bay. Over the years, these challenges helped her develop a theory of community living. She views communities as overlapping circles and that we as individuals participate in one or more of these circles at the same time throughout our lives in various capacities. This theory seems to be particularly true in rural areas and has been very true in Honor’s experience.

An artistic, creative person who loves writing and words, Honor was noticed by Wayne Hansen, a William M. Kelley High School English teacher, who encouraged her to enroll in a college-level essay-writing course as a junior. Seniors traditionally took this course and she found herself struggling and out of place. She knows now, however, that what she learned then in a tough environment has served her well.

Honor shares the view of many that college students are often not ready to decide their life path. Her interests at Macalester College veered from Anthropology to Geology to English to Art and back again. After graduation and with a lack of direction, she took a year off and lived at home. While there, she met her mentor, Adrienne Falcon, a former Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center naturalist and future Carleton professor who was building a cabin for herself in the woods. Their shared local community interests fostered a friendship and working relationship that has benefited Finland.

Becoming aware of the Finland community’s on-going desire for a new, central gathering spot, Honor started attending community meetings. Gradually her involvement grew and she recognized a fit for herself. She laughingly talked about her crash course in forming a non-profit, Friends of the Finland Community, for the purposes of making “Finland and its surrounding area an inviting and vibrant place” and more specifically, a conduit through which funds could be raised for a new community center. I encourage you to read about, as Honor puts it, “the grass roots, awesome, democratic, strange, fortuitous community effort” that was “long and messy”. Here is the complete story.

Honor gave me a tour of the new community center. Named after a Lake County Commissioner, the late Clair Nelson, who worked tirelessly to bring people together, the building is a model of a rural, affordable, sustainable community center. Described as a high performance building envelope, solar panels provide electricity and a geothermal loop field provides the building’s heat. Included in the center are a gym, meeting rooms, commercial kitchen and stage. Buried under snow are the playground, skate park and picnic grounds.

The center’s website states that “they are the only entity in the Northern Lake County area providing space for youth, senior citizens, community groups, events, rental space, small business support and incubation, community education classes, advocacy services for survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse, community recreation, free wi-fi internet, public computers, trail maps and information, all in one location!” Now that construction is complete, the community center is “open and flourishing”.

Today, as Director of the nonprofit, Honor’s responsibilities center on grant writing, programming and fund raising. Along with the building manager, volunteer coordinator and youth program directors, Honor works to improve upon what the community center already provides. She hopes to stabilize funding for the center and then turn her attention to other community issues including housing.

You can keep abreast of the activities sponsored by the Friends of the Finland Community by subscribing to their newsletter or visiting their website.

A resident of Finland now, Honor also blogs at Welcome to Finland whose mission is to ‘rejuvenate cultural and community pride in the north woods’. Her most recent post about winter driving was recently featured in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I wish she had written it before I had driven in a snowstorm to Finland MN. I could have used some of her driving tips.

Written by Mary Stefanich Hoffman (Class of 1975)
March, 2018