(03/11/21) - A portrait of Benya Kraus, co-founder of Lead for America, in on her family’s farm in Waseca, Minn., on Thursday, March 11, 2021. HOMECOMERS CREDIT: Jenn Ackerman for The Wall Street Journal

FAIRMONT — Lead for America co-founder Benya Kraus will be in Fairmont Saturday afternoon for the Multicultural Festival. Kraus has received national attention for her work with the organization, recently being featured in the Wall Street Journal and on the CBS This Morning show.

Lead for America is a national nonprofit that supports recent graduates in reinvesting in their hometown communities through a two-year fellowship program.

Kraus was born in Thailand, but spent years of her life growing up in Waseca, where her father’s family is sixth-generation farmers.

“Growing up in Waseca, I didn’t see it as the place that I was going to live in, or that the most dynamic stuff was happening,” Kraus explained.

She went to Tufts University in Boston to study International Relations; however, a family situation brought her back to Waseca.

“As a young adult I was seeing the community in a whole night light. Global challenges were actually being tackled or addressed or needed to be addressed in my family’s home town,” Kraus said.

Kraus started by getting to know the entrepreneurs in the community and learned about Waseca’s 2030 vision, but she said under-skirting all of that was the knowledge that it couldn’t be achieved unless the community could attract and retain talent.

“We needed to make sure the next generations of leaders were prepared to step into those roles,” Kraus explained.

When Kraus went back to her senior year of college, she realized that there was little recruitment infrastructure, so she ended up meeting with her other co-founders and they all agreed they were seeing the same thing in their home communities.

“We looked at how we could we build an organization that could empower and celebrate young people across the country that were dedicating their lives and seeing success as also meaning returning to and reinvesting in their home states and places where the narrative of success often means leaving and not coming back,” Kraus said.

Lead for America is the national organization, but Kraus said she brought that model back to Minnesota and worked on building the state affiliate, Lead for Minnesota, in her hometown of Waseca. She said being a state affiliate allows them to have a much higher concentration of fellows serving across the state and also allows them to reach smaller and more rural communities.

All of the fellows work on locally identified challenges and they also work alongside local leaders who care about the communities and need extra talent or capacity to help move initiatives forward.

“For Fairmont, that was Steve Hawkins. He had approached us and told us about all of the different community projects Project 1590 had going on and how much more they could do if they had somebody working full-time to help coordinate these groups, build relationships and bring state-wide and national types of models to the communities and committees,” Kraus said.

Hawkins said he actually heard about Lead for America through Minnesota Valley Action Council and Tammie Hested. He had a phone conversation with Kraus in early 2020, before Covid.

“We met her in person and she explained the program and it was very exciting to hear what their mission and vision is and what they were trying to accomplish in rural communities across the whole country,” Hawkins said.

Hawkins went on to say they worked with Kraus on developing a project scope that would impact some of the biggest needs in the community, including affordable housing, child care and downtown revitalization.

Alex Young-Williams was placed in Fairmont as a fellow in 2020.

Kraus said of Young-Williams, “He’s not a homecomer in the sense of coming back to the place he grew up, but he’s someone where homecoming is about coming home to the depth of his purpose, which is to care about and activate other people. I think he so deeply wants to improve the lives of people around him and sees the creative potential that could happen in a place like Fairmont.”

Hawkins said Young-Williams has done a lot of behind-the-scene things in Fairmont and in addition to that, he also planned the Multicultural Festival which will take place this weekend from 2-6 p.m. in downtown Fairmont.

“My hope for the event is that a whole diversity of Fairmont residents, especially people across different cultures and new Fairmont residents are able to see this as a starting point for connectedness,” Kraus said.

Both Young-Williams and Kraus hope the festival will be the first of many events in Fairmont that will show how important it is to be a good neighbor.

“By building these relationships, it allows us to come together as neighbors and figure out how do we support one another and build a community that we all want to live in and that our children can also live in and will want to live in, too,” Kraus said.