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Rebuilding a Small Community in the Face of Tragedy
by Blandin Foundation Posted in Grants
A devastating fire in 2022 hasn’t stopped Spring Grove from revitalizing their downtown main street
The original plan was a relatively simple one: add a new community space onto the existing and much beloved cinema in the heart of Spring Grove, Minnesota, located a little more than an hour’s drive southeast of Rochester in Houston County.
In the years prior, leaders from the school district, local businesses, faith communities, municipal government, and nonprofit organizations had come together to form Spring Grove 2030, a committee dedicated to making the town a more resourceful, more welcoming place for its 1,446 residents. They’d conducted a variety of workshops, public surveys and focus groups to learn more about the town’s needs. A community center became the focus, with potential for amenities like classrooms, a performing arts venue, an expanded public and school library, a food shelf and family resource center, senior dining facilities, a wellness studio, a business incubator, a pop-up retail space, and a “community living room” where citizens could visit and gather.
To help make these dreams a reality, the SG2030 team applied for support from Blandin Foundation’s Rural Leadership Boost Grant program.
“We have the ingredients, and now it’s time to write the recipe,” the SG2030 committee included in their initial application.
Unfortunately, the plan (and that recipe) all changed on Dec. 22, 2022, right before the Christmas holiday weekend, when a fire broke out in an apartment complex in downtown Spring Grove just months after the city received funding for the community center project. The apartment complex sat on top of a frequently visited local hardware store. It was destroyed that night, along with two other businesses along the town’s main street.
Jana Elton, Spring Grove’s city clerk, had just recently started her new job. “The fire department battled that fire for something like 10 hours straight,” she said. “It was below zero that night, so all of the equipment, all of the fire trucks, and everything else were breaking down. Plus, when they’re battling a fire, they have to turn the electricity off, so half of our city didn’t have power that night. After 10 to 11 hours, people’s pipes started freezing. Next thing you know, we’re moving everybody out of the south half of town into a warming shelter. My husband was literally driving around in the city van, carrying people out of their houses who were handicapped and freezing. It was a disaster for our whole city, not just our downtown. A very traumatic night for many people.”
Losing a significant stretch of Spring Grove’s downtown main street devastated residents on top of the horror of the fire itself, especially coming after years of hardship and closing businesses in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several residents were even displaced in the fire’s aftermath.
“A downtown area is the community hub, right? Those are the gathering spaces,” Elton said. “Those are the places that make rural communities what they are. To have that be gone is really heartbreaking.”
Once the smoke and immediate emergency had somewhat cleared, it became obvious to the SG2030 team that their community center project would need to shift, both in scope and specifics.
“We had the cinema down the street, and that building was doing okay. We thought, ‘Now we have a hole literally in our downtown, and we need to fill it with something. Why not this?’”
But the SG2030 team was concerned: What if they weren’t allowed to pivot the project under the terms of the grant funding they’d received?
“To go through all of that work, filling everything out, getting the plans together to add on to our cinema and make this great community space … and then all of a sudden you’ve got this horrible fire? It’s scary,” Elton shared with us. “And then what if [a foundation] just says ‘nope’ and yanks the funding from us?”
Thankfully, the funding that the city of Spring Grove had received from Blandin Foundation’s Rural Leadership Boost Grant program was designed to be flexible. “Our approach to grantmaking is intentionally flexible because rural communities thrive when they can innovate, adjust, and grow,” explained Mary Magnuson, rural placemaking grants program officer at Blandin Foundation. “We support communities and leaders to realize their vision, not just check off steps in their predetermined project plan. When they need to pivot, we want our support to move with them — not stand in the way.”
“Any time that an organization is willing to work with you, especially in a circumstance like ours, it’s only for the betterment of our city,” Elton said. “Working with Blandin has been wonderful.”
Blandin Foundation’s support of rural community creativity and resiliency stretches beyond its grantmaking. Specifically, their Placemaking Community of Practice, a cohort-style resource for grantees to build relationships and share information across their communities. It was during the 2022–2023 cohort – in the moments and months after the fire – that Courtney Bergey Swanson, community and business development specialist supporting Spring Grove in her capacity at Community and Economic Development Associates (CEDA), connected with folks from the Silver Bay Library and learned about two additional grant opportunities that could further advance the Spring Grove revitalization project. The cohort and connection gave Courtney the direction, confidence and push to begin an even more intentional planning process (hiring an architect, beginning robust community engagement) and then apply. Those two successful Minnesota Department of Education grants, totally $1.2M, turned the project up to a full boil.
Elton and the rest of the SG2030 team hope to have the new community center, as well as a new library, built within the next two years and are at the point of purchasing lots and finalizing designs. Despite the delays and setbacks at the outset, the team — and the Spring Grove community — remain energized and excited about the project’s progress.
“We are confident that the process has led us down the right path, even if it’s taken more time and effort than initially expected,” the SG2030 team shared in a project update this fall. “Despite the changes and challenges we endured, the process led us to a deeper sense of understanding within our community. We were able to both get into the weeds and zoom out with a very wide lens, which helped us to create solutions that felt authentic and not forced. We would not be anywhere near this point if it hadn’t been for the generous funding from Blandin.”
