Fosston picked as All-American City

I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.

June 19, 1996

By Devlyn Brooks

Staff Writer

The 1,500 residents of Fosston can hold their heads high. This past weekend, their city was picked by a 12-member jury as one of the United States' All-American Cities.

The annual All-America City and Community Award, sponsored by The Allstate Foundation and the National Civic League, is the oldest award in the nation for civic accomplishment. The award is given to 10 cities every year for tackling problems such as racial and ethnic discord, crime, neighborhood blight and joblessness.

Of the 10 communities receiving the award, Fosston was by far the smallest with its official population of 1,529. The next smallest winning city was Quincy, Fla., with a population of 7,551. The largest city to win the award was New Orleans, which has a population of 1.3 million.

Mayor Arvid Clementson, responsible for entering his city in the contest, said he was always aware of the content but thought Fosston was too small to win. Then, this year, he said he decided nothing could be hurt by entering, and now the rest is history.

Fosston sent a delegation of 16 people to the contest in Fort Worth, Texas, to impress the judges. A 12-member jury heard 10-minute presentations from 29 other cities as well. After the 10 minutes allowed to present their city, the delegation faced a tough 10-minute question-and-answer period, Clementson said.

"When we first got there, we saw we were competing against some pretty big guns. Some cities had as many as 100 delegates there -- cities like New Orleans," Clementson said. "We started to wonder whey we were there."

However, as the Fosston delegation soon realized, it was not the size of a community that impressed the judges, but the spirit of cooperation and collaboration demonstrated by the communities as a whole, something the Fosston community has committed itself to.

Last November, Fosston voters approved a $5.6 million bond issue with which to expand and upgrade their school district. In October, Fosston became home to the first Radio Shack franchise in the world operated by high school students. And the town has converted a retired church building into the Embassy Center, which houses events from some 20 volunteer organizations.

It was projects such as these that won the award for Fosston, Clementson said.

"It just goes to show that no matter how big the size of your community, you can get anything done you set out to do," Fosston Deputy City Clerk Rosanne Erickson said. "It is the community's award. It goes to everybody in the community, not just the delegation that went down there."

Erickson, along with Clementson and Bonnie Stewart, director of the Fosston Economic Development Authority, were the ones who co-wrote the contest's application.

Clementson said Fosston is allowed to do anything the city wants with the contest's emblem, and he said they are going to use it to the extreme. They can use it on city letterhead, billboards, marketing campaigns and even businesses can use it for advertising, he said.

The award is going to help keep the momentum going to keep cooperating and collaborating to make the community better, he said. Clementson said the city would like to use the award to attract businesses and people to Fosston.

"I guess you can be as imaginative and creative with this award as you want to be," he said.

Erickson said now that the contest is over, Fosston still is busy planning other projects, but wasn't ready to discuss them at this point.

"We are going to ride on the crest as long as we can," she said. "Volunteerism is a way of life here. We don't think about it; we just do it."