The Public Policy Project

Loren Niemi

Loren Niemi was trained as a community organizer in the classic Saul Alinsky style at the Ecumenical Institute (now the Institute for Cultural Affairs) in Chicago in 1967. He applied the lessons learned as an anti-war/anti-draft organizer and in Senator Gene McCarthy’s 1968 and George McGovern’s 1972 Democratic political campaigns.

From 1973-1978, he was a community organizer in Minneapolis working with resident based neighborhood organizations in the Seward, Stevens Square, Elliot Park and Phillips neighborhoods. He also served as the Executive Director of Elliot Park Neighborhood Inc. from 1992-1998, guiding the downtown Minneapolis neighborhood through a 4.6 million dollar Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP) process, as well as working collaboratively with the People of Phillips, the Native American community and other stakeholders to restructure a cost-effective and humane approach to Hennepin County’s chronic alcoholism program.

In 1998, Loren was a recipient of an Archibald Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship to research the vital role of storytelling as a tool in neighborhood and community development. He returned to Chicago to work as a national organizational development and communications consultant with David Hunt’s Community Building Storytelling Project. In 2001, Loren became the Manager of the Ramsey Action Project/Family Service’s Public Policy Project with its focus on issues of race, especially as it intersects equity and access. He was the primary architect of the design and implementation of The Public Policy Project’s training process and took the program independent of CHSFS in partnership with James Trice in 2005.

Loren has a BA with a double major in Philosophy and Studio Arts from St. Mary’s College and a MA in Liberal Studies with a concentration in American Culture from Hamline University. He is the co-author (with Elizabeth Ellis) of Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories and a 2nd book, The Book of Plots on the uses of narrative. Loren teaches Storytelling in the Communications Department of Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, MN. He received an Oracle award for national leadership and service from the National Storytelling Network in 2007.