Minnesota Voices

For 33-year-old Peggy Flanagan, health care policy is "super personal." About a decade ago, Flanagan’s mom had to go on social security disability because her pain was so bad.

The teenager would not get out of Gada Roba’s car. He had seen the people drinking as they waited outside the homeless shelter. The youth was Muslim and had never been around people who were drinking. Threatened at home, the immigrant student had approached his teacher, Roba for help. But he was too frightened to stay at the shelter and insisted Roba drop him off on Lake Street. “It was near a mosque where they often let people stay the night,” Roba explains. “I went home. But I couldn’t sleep. I had just left a child on the street.”

Fast-talking and intense, Susan Hubbard is a great interview: she has a lot to say and lots of facts and citations to back it up. Hard work and intensity go way back: while majoring in journalism in her hometown Oswego State University, she went to work for the local newspaper, sold ads, wrote stories, and also managed a coffeehouse.

I talked to Hubbard a few weeks ago. She left her position as CEO of Eureka Recycling ("I put a ten-year limit on CEO-ness and started the transition two years ago and it went smoothly.") a couple of months ago and is trying to "breathe a little bit" as she looks around for her next move.

Yvonne Cheung Ho came to the United States from Hong Kong in 1972. “I had a sister in Minnesota at the time," Cheung Ho recalled. "She told me about Minnesota. She told me everything.