Our Teams
Communication & network taskforce
There are already community-building and belonging building efforts in our community. Who is doing what? What is available to folks? What are events and resources we should know about? This task force works on regular communication for a newsletter and social media, letting our community members know how they can be involved in efforts that build belonging and citizen engagement and why that is important.
The team is led by David Haeg, a community movement builder, masterful communicator, and enthusiast for getting neighbors together to create positive change.
events taskforce
During our engagement sessions there were a lot of excellent ideas about various events we could host to build belonging and connection in our community. Are you interested in determining what event/s would best suit our community and making them happen? If so, join the events taskforce!
The team is led by Barb Westmoreland, a community builder with immense knowledge and love for our community who spent the majority of her career creative positive impact in the Hopkins Public Schools.
collective impact taskforce
The big idea that came out of our co-creation process, was ‘YOU Belong’ a Collective Impact approach to building a sense of belonging by aligning the activities and efforts of key community institutions and harnessing the power of learning and experimenting together. We learned that forming a Collective Impact model will take quite a bit of effort, time and coordination. This task force cultivates relationships with institutions, learns more about the model, defines how it can work best of our community and guides a first iteration of a Youth Collective within the school districts of our community.
The team is led by Nerita Hughes, an expert on education and youth engagement, with deep knowledge of cross-institutional work and passion for innovation.
about minnetonka collective
We are a grassroots group passionate about increasing the sense of community in Minnetonka and creating ways for folks who live, work, study, give care and play here to connect and know each other in meaningful ways.
We want to be part of a connected and thriving community and we believe in the power of empathy and a disciplined innovation approach as a way to unite, harness the wisdom and creativity of our community, and use it to create new ideas, solutions and programs. We are innovators, dreamers, engaged citizens and optimists.
We embarked on a multi-year process to engage our community and understand how can we ensure it is welcoming and inclusive for everyone, so that we can all collectively thrive. As a result, we found four major themes and five community-building ideas we invite you to explore in our report.
our story
It all started in 2018 when Elena Imaretska ran in a special election for the City of Minnetonka Council. In her meetings with the community she heard a theme - desire for a greater sense of belonging and need for community building. She was lucky to meet a few others who were passionate about grassroots community building and thus the Minnetonka Collective was born, special thanks to the original team of David Haeg, Sandy Johnson and Fred Reuning who kick started the work. Now several years later and through the engagement, ideas and advice of many more community members we are delighted to be actively working towards implementing YOU BELONG, a Collective Impact Model.