02/18/2026
Proud to learn more about our Organizing Director, Karin, in this interview with Folks of Minnesota.
Saint Cloud, MN
Karin loves making people feel welcome and comfortable – “I love being a hostess. It’s one of my favorite things. I think that’s a good thing. I always try to make people feel comfortable in my home and have what they need. People enter my space and they’re entering community with me and my family. In my work, I’m really lucky to have gotten opportunities throughout my whole life where I get to be in places across different cultures, across different languages, with people from a really broad range of backgrounds. It’s taught me what it means to make everyone feel welcome in many different ways. I used to be a Senior Director for Refugee and Immigration Services until about a year ago when that department was cut by the White House administration.
I currently work at the Workers Center where we support low wage workers, which here in Saint Cloud is often a lot of immigrant community members. We get to advocate and organization for immigrant and other low-wage workers so all workers can thrive.
I am almost 40 years ago and I grew up in Southeast Iowa. We lived in a very small town yet very semi-urban. The town was roughly 25,000 people but it felt like a big city compared to the ones around. We were surrounded by cornfields and I detasseled corn as a kid and thought that was totally normal. I was really privileged to have a lot of people as family. Neighbors were family, family was family, and random people who didn’t have other family was family. Our Christmas table had people every year that weren’t our family but were our chosen family. They had nowhere else to go.
After high school I went to college at a private school where I had some scholarships. I studied Education until that didn’t work out and then I made my own major. I called it: Do Good in the World. It was a combination of international humanitarian nonprofit material, as well as leadership, education, and how to support children. I started that around 2016.
As life goes right now, I have 2 little kiddos, I got married, and my brother-in-law lives with us too. We’ve got a fun little community. We’re trying to create more community in our neighborhood, and I’m spending more time on that. I’ve been very overwhelmed in most of my careers and right now I’m trying to make a better balance where I actually know who my neighbors are so my kids have people that they know who live nearby, etc. I've reached out and found out where are the other kids, where are their single moms, where are their older adults who maybe don't have people living nearby. We had stopped doing the National Night Out in our neighborhood, and I realized that the woman who had been leading it in the past, maybe she just felt overwhelmed, and that's why we weren't doing it. I contacted her and partnered up with her, and we launched it again. So joining in those kinds of normalized community opportunities, joined the local book club, which I totally am not usually the person to do that. I host wine nights every now and then, watch the other people's kids, share information like this. My neighborhood actually is very interested in what's happening with ICE in our community, and I didn't really know that.
I think ICE is devastating. I probably would have abolished ICE years ago, maybe even when it was launched. I think the United States has created a system for processing immigration that isn't necessary to do it this way. Many other countries process immigration as if it was a service component. You'd go to a government center, not to a jail in order to be processed. I would love to see us look at immigrants as the valued community members that they are, contributors in so many different ways. And eventually, oftentimes, they are long-standing residents. They are often trying to seek new community, and they're experiencing that in a local level, but at a national level, it's a fight, and it just shouldn't be that way.
ICE is destroying community, in my opinion. Well, actually, they're building community of opposition. So I’d they're doing a great job at building opposition to them. But on the day to day, I get to see what it looks like in people's homes when they don't feel like they can go outside, when they're kids. I am a notary as well, and I help parents create documents that say, if they get detained, who can take care of my child? And it's devastating to have to think like that, knowing that it is a realistic preparation. It is a step of preparation they should make, that it is possible that they will be removed from their homes and that their children would then be temporarily or permanently abandoned in that regard and that they need to designate another person to care for their children. And that's not acceptable.
To President Trump: It’s okay to retire. You’ve got dementia. You are a sick human. What you are doing is not acceptable. You are not a good leader. You are leading nothing except pain and abuse. You are a dictator and an abuser and you need to get out.
Our world needs more people to grow up. We must learn to get past this behavior, this separatism. We’re doing it to each other as our ancestors have done in their generations, and the generations before that. We have to choose a different way. We have to learn from the past and actually make a different future. We cannot sustain this.
The shirt that I am wearing is from Imprint Apparel here in Saint Cloud. They have this logo on record so if you want a shirt like this, reach out to them.
