Chante' Mitchell 2020 Dena Laurent-Sorensen Profile in Courage Award

Nomination of Joe Hoefgen, Nominated by 10 classmates:  Logan Masenthin, Chelsea Ren Morton, Jaron Balderes, Brian Bickers, Joshua Robinson, Austin Good, Charissa Jessepe, Ian Hutcheson, Jason Rohloff, and Tyesha Ignacio.  

On behalf of the Master of Public Administration/KUCIMAT cohort of 2018, we would like to nominate Chanté Mitchell for the Dena Laurent-Sorensen Profile in Courage Award.

In the four years we have known Chanté Mitchell, she has shown up in every situation with compassion and courage for her community. While in the program Chanté continued to urge the curriculum, professors, and her classmates to consider the difficult subjects of equity and inclusion in all matters. Outside of the classroom, she would frequently discuss with us on a personal level the ways these inequities show up both professionally and personally. As you can imagine, these conversations require an intense level of vulnerability and heart.

Since leaving graduate school, Chanté continuously pushes her coworkers, supervisors, and organization to think innovatively and equitably. She has done so in homogeneous Minnesota environments, Brooklyn Park, and diverse environments such as San Antonio. As Brooklyn Park’s Management System Coordinator, she analyzes data and performance. In this role, she fights for transparency of data, data improvements, and how best to showcase the available data. She was recently featured on a webinar about ESRI Story Maps for the visualizations she created with a colleague to further show the work her city is doing in relation to their 2025 goals, including diversity metrics.

Chanté also overcomes obstacles as a young professional, and particularly as a woman of color. Even before the pandemic, she pushed her supervisors to reimagine what work looks like as the younger generation hits the workforce. Offering work from home options is one idea she’s offered to grow the talent pool in local government organizations. It is not easy to stand up for what you believe in as a young professional starting at an organization, and it is even more difficult as a woman of color. Yet she persists.

Chanté has always shown courage, but the pandemic, and particularly the death of George Floyd in her community, have further inspired her passion and renewed her desire to fight. The civil unrest that occurred all across the country over these last few months practically began on Chanté’s doorstep. Through it all, she remained strong. She joined her organization’s REDI team, which stands for Racial Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, to help push the dialogue on how to improve the work life of BIPOC employees. She is also working in close collaboration with a colleague to start a resource group for BIPOC employees. They brought a majority of Brooklyn Park’s BIPOC staff together and provided a forum to speak on issues they have with working in the City. This conversation included the City Manager. Chanté and her colleague then proposed an action plan stemming from that conversation.

In addition to Chanté’s professional courage, she has also been vocal on social media and her inner social circles on how we can go about enacting change from the local level. This includes informing her friends that do not work in government about local government practices and encouraging her colleagues in local government to be aware of certain dynamics. She provides tips and tricks on how to get involved and is always willing to answer questions.

She has also assisted in events for the larger Minneapolis community, such as providing much needed resources like food and hygiene products both during the pandemic and during the civil unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder. Through all this, she has shared her pain and vulnerability as she finds her way forward. Her courage, compassion, honesty, value alignment, and persistence are the hallmarks of a true and transformational leader.

In short, we cannot think of another among us who is more deserving of this recognition and award. Overcoming the challenges of race, gender, age, and years of experience in the field to lead the conversation and initiatives on the most difficult areas of social unrest of our time in the hopes of paving the way for others to thrive in local government has served as a consistent inspiration to us all.