Lynn Rued’s Northland story starts at a classic north woods fall pot-luck—the kind where you bring your lawn chair and a dish to share and sit around talking and eating and charring marshmallows until the embers die. “I was standing there talking with my mom and this older guy comes up, a real Jeremiah Johnson type, and he starts telling us how he moved up to this area in the 60s to go to Northland College,” she recalls. “He said it completely changed his worldview. Transformed him. I had never heard of Northland before, but his enthusiasm for the College really intrigued me.”

“When I got home, I pulled up the website, and I thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. This is so me!’ I resonated with the College’s environmental philosophy and felt an immediate kinship with the Northland community. I ended up applying for a job as gift coordinator. And here I am!”

While Lynn didn’t get to Northland from a traditional pathway—she didn’t grow up here, she didn’t go to school here—she still found us. “I came to this place through the context of community,” she said. “That woodsman at the pot-luck? His enthusiasm for Northland, his spark, sparked mine!”