Will Heller

Art Is More Than Expression. It Is How Communities Build Their Future.

Celebrating National Arts and Humanities Month at Pillsbury United Communities

When communities face uncertainty, artists often help us see what institutions cannot: the possibilities that exist beyond the challenges of today. Through storytelling, creativity, and cultural expression, artists have long helped communities find their voices, reclaim their narratives, and imagine a different future.

This October, as we celebrate National Arts and Humanities Month, we are reminded that the arts are not simply something to enjoy. They are essential to how communities connect, organize, heal, make meaning, and create change.

For generations, Pillsbury United Communities (PUC) has worked alongside Minnesota neighborhoods, recognizing that vibrant communities are built not simply through programs and services, but through relationships, shared experiences, and opportunities for neighbors to shape the places they call home.

Artists have always been central to building collective power.

Across our community centers, arts programming, and neighborhood partnerships, creativity opens doors that traditional institutions sometimes cannot. It creates porous platforms for young people to discover their voices, neighbors to understand one another, and communities to imagine new possibilities.

This is the power of people- and place-based work.

When organizations are deeply rooted in neighborhoods, they develop something that cannot be replicated through a grant cycle or strategic plan: relationships built on proximity, history, and trust.

Those relationships become especially important during moments of uncertainty.

During the height of the visible Operation Metro Surge, as intensified federal immigration enforcement created fear and perpetrated violent disruption across Twin Cities communities, PUC drew upon its neighborhood relationships to respond to emerging needs. Our response reinforced a fundamental truth: the value of community-based organizations is measured not only by the programs we operate, but by our ability to listen, adapt, and stand alongside our neighbors when crisis comes.

Artists are essential to that response.

Creative expression helps communities process trauma, preserve cultural lineage, challenge dominant narratives, and make visible the humanity behind complex public debates. Artists help us understand not only what is happening around us, but what might be possible beyond it.

The importance of arts and expression becomes especially visible in moments of community crisis, like Operation Metro Surge. During such a time of acute hardship, when our impulse was perhaps to turn away or go numb, our communities responded with unabashed expression and creativity that ignited our collective imagination and stirred us to engage more deeply with the nuance and complexity of what was unfolding in our neighborhoods, as well as the world at large. This sort of expression challenges us to show up for each other, encouraging us to participate and uniting us in civic action.

One such story, shared with me by a member of my immediate community in the spring of 2026, is a painful and detailed account of their experience of being detained during Operation Metro Surge, which they asked me to turn into graphic medicine. You can read it here.

Creative storytelling is also a necessary part of combating the false narratives that may surround a community. Through such authentic, in-the-moment expression, a community’s artists and storytellers also become its documenters, sharing the concealed stories of resistance that then serve as part of a shared public record. Cultural art and expression remind us of our humanity, both individual and collective, and help us to engage with that humanity, even when it is heavy and difficult. It is a vital tributary of the great river of justice and liberation.

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Nonprofit, philanthropic, and elected leaders must resist treating arts and culture as secondary investments, particularly when budgets tighten or immediate needs grow. The arts are not a luxury reserved for times of stability. They are among the tools communities use to build belonging, resilience, and collective power.

That means investing in artists, supporting accessible creative spaces, and recognizing cultural institutions as essential partners in neighborhood development. It also means ensuring that residents, especially young people and residents of historically disinvested communities, can tell their own stories and influence decisions that shape their futures.

National Arts and Humanities Month is both a celebration of creativity and a reminder of our responsibility to sustain it. Serendipitously, four members of our leadership team gathered in Oakland, California this month to work with other Wallace Foundation grantees who are focused on arts-based work

At PUC, we believe stronger communities emerge when people have the resources to meet today’s challenges and the freedom to imagine tomorrow’s possibilities.

Artists have always been central to systems change. They challenge what we accept, illuminate what we overlook, and help communities envision futures that institutions alone cannot create. If we are serious about building more just, connected, and abundant communities, artists must remain supported and resourced in shaping what comes next.

For nearly 150 years, arts and culture have been a foundational element of the PUC mission. To support that mission, Click Here.

Will Heller

Building Pathways to What Comes Next: Understanding and Embracing the Future of Workforce Development

Work has always been about more than earning a paycheck. At its best, work creates independence, builds confidence, connects us to one another, and gives people the opportunity to imagine a different future for themselves and their families.

During Workforce Development Month, we celebrate the people who make those possibilities real: young people stepping into their first jobs, workers building new skills, employers opening doors, mentors sharing what they know, and community organizations connecting talent and opportunity.

For generations, Pillsbury United Communities (PUC) has worked alongside communities as economies and neighborhoods have changed. Today, workforce development is not simply about helping someone find a job, but helping people build the skills, relationships, experiences, and confidence to thrive in a changing world.

You can see that philosophy across PUC.

At Full Cycle, bicycles become much more than bicycles. Young adults gain hands-on work experience while learning responsibility, problem-solving, teamwork, and the rhythms of a workplace. Across our social enterprises, businesses create economic value while becoming places where people learn, grow, lead, and discover their abilities. PUC also connects 18–24-year-olds who don’t envision themselves in two- or four-year degree programs to high-demand credentials and certificates that can be earned in nine months or less. Programs like HVAC, phlebotomy, barbering, and CNA training lead to direct employment opportunities while giving students a sense of purpose providing needed services in community.

Our partnership with the City of Minneapolis through Step Up creates another doorway. A summer internship may seem like a small experience in the arc of a career, but entering a professional environment, meeting a mentor, building a network, and seeing yourself differently can have an impact far beyond one summer.

The same is true of our theater-based Technical Arts Training @ Pillsbury, where people discover careers in production, lighting, sound, stagecraft, and the many professions that bring creative work to life. Sometimes workforce development begins with skills training. Sometimes it begins by helping someone discover that a career they never knew existed could belong to them.

Together with our broader youth development work, these experiences reflect a belief that has long guided PUC. Talent is everywhere, even when opportunity is not.

That belief matters enormously today.

Our economy is changing quickly. Employers face new skill demands and economic uncertainty while workers navigate rising costs, shifting industries, and persistent disparities in opportunity. Race, geography, income, education, and professional networks still have far too much influence over who gets an opportunity and who does not.

Artificial intelligence is adding another layer of change. AI will reshape jobs, automate tasks, create new occupations, and change the skills employers value. It holds tremendous promise, but history reminds us that technological progress does not automatically produce shared prosperity. Without intentional action, innovation can deepen existing divides just as easily as it can expand opportunity.

For workforce development organizations, the challenge is bigger than teaching people to use the latest technology. We must prepare people to navigate change itself.

That means combining technical skills with deeply human capabilities that will become even more valuable in an AI-enabled economy: curiosity, judgment, creativity, communication, collaboration, leadership, and adaptability. It means strengthening connections between young people and employers, neighborhoods and growing industries, and people with talent and institutions with the power to open doors.

It also means listening.

Community-based organizations like PUC occupy a unique place in this work because we are connected to people across many parts of their lives. Our community centers, youth programs, arts and cultural work, social enterprises, neighborhood relationships, and employer partnerships allow us to see possibilities that don’t always fit neatly inside traditional workforce systems.

Our opportunity is to bring those pieces together more intentionally.

Imagine a young person entering a PUC community center, discovering a passion through an arts or youth program, gaining work experience through Full Cycle or Step Up, developing specialized skills through an apprenticeship, meeting a mentor, and beginning a career they could not have imagined a few years earlier.

That is more than a workforce program. It is an ecosystem of possibility.

As we celebrate Workforce Development Month, we are proud of what PUC and our partners have built. But we are even more interested in what comes next.

The future of work is still being written. Technology, employers, and public policy will help shape it. Communities must help shape it too.

At Pillsbury United Communities, we believe the measure of that future should not simply be how many jobs our economy creates or how sophisticated our technology becomes. It should be whether more people can see a place for themselves in that future, whether opportunity reaches neighborhoods too often left outside prosperity, and whether the next generation has the tools and confidence to build lives of purpose and possibility.

That is the future of workforce development we want to help create.

If you would like to support this important work, feel free to donate Here!

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