Benya Kraus joined the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF) as president and CEO in early June. Prior to leading SMIF, she worked for Resource Rural, a national philanthropic fund that aims to unlock public and private capital for rural and tribal communities. She started her career as a social entrepreneur, co-founding Lead for America, a national non-profit that supports emerging leaders in returning and reinvesting in their hometowns.
How did someone who grew up in Thailand and attended college on the east coast end up leading the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF)?
Benya: On my dad’s side is a six-generation farming family in Waseca County, and my mom also grew up in agriculture, but in northern Thailand, where I was born and grew up most of my life. I would spend my summers and Christmases at the family farm. After college I moved to Waseca to understand and be part of this larger legacy of stewardship and commitment to place.
That reciprocity and commitment to place was really appealing. And so, with a few other 20-something-year-olds, we started a national organization called Lead for America. It was all about trying to get talent to return and reinvest in our hometowns. We ran a fellowship program that would connect people back to the communities they loved and have them work on a big challenge facing their community. We built that out and scaled it; it is still a growing organization. We graduated our 600th fellow this past summer, and we are in 45 states now.
Through Lead for America, I came back to Waseca and built out our Minnesota operation. That’s where I got to know SMIF, which was one of our first supporters. They helped us place fellows across southern Minnesota and worked with all the other initiative foundations to do the same across the state. That led me to become very interested in how to get capital and investments to flow and stay and circulate in rural communities. So, I went to the University of Chicago for two years to get my MBA and transitioned out of Lead for America and focused on entrepreneurship and finance. I was looking to come back home to southern Minnesota and figure out how to make business and financial models work. I did that and worked in national philanthropy for a bit, trying to get foundations to move their dollars into rural communities. That’s ultimately what led me to SMIF.
What do you see as the biggest challenge for your region?
Benya: I feel like I’m coming in at such a good time because we’ll be kicking off a pretty intensive year-long public and community engagement process to help us refine what the next five-year strategic plan will be.
But, based on the road trips I’ve taken since I started, one really big thing that I hear in almost every single conversation is concern about this demographic cliff that we’re encountering as a region. And it’s not just as a region, it is the state, it is the nation: when natural death rates will outpace natural birth rates as a country. It’s even more pronounced in our smaller rural communities sometimes.
What role do you see for businesses in the effort to retain and recruit talent?
Benya: I’m also interested in local ownership and how we make sure that part of an economic development strategy is thinking about how we keep and retain local wealth as much as possible. When you have employers and businesses that are headquartered and built from and within your community, there’s a tighter level of civic accountability and involvement from those employers in the future of their community. There’s a whole continuum around local ownership. The backbone of so many of our rural economies has been the cooperative — that’s how we’ve been able to deliver electricity, and increasingly, broadband. There are companies here that have really strong community investment components, including housing, or a new farmer-owned oat mill.
Privately owned local businesses also play a key role. I think Harmony Enterprises, Inc. is a good example of how you become a global company but retain that strong local identity, and where the ownership is reflective of the community. Who owns it — and who is able to keep the wealth and recirculate that wealth back into the community — matters a lot in rural communities.
Oftentimes we think of an entrepreneur as a founder with a new idea who is starting something totally from scratch. I think what our region will really need is to think about entrepreneurship through acquisition. How do we prepare businesses to sell to the next generation? Also, we need to think about how we are preparing the next generation of workforce, not just to work in the business, but also to work on the business, and the financing tools or training tools to help with that. As we look at the demographic cliff, entrepreneurship through acquisition is going to be a huge thing.
How do you see SMIF supporting and then further advancing an already strong manufacturing sector in your area?
Benya: Our three biggest industries are advanced manufacturing, agriculture, and health care. With the introduction of AI in all these different sectors, there is a lot of potential for innovation. It’s happening already, and I hope as a regional foundation we can serve as a convener and accelerator for these connections, and see these industries not as in silos but how they converge, overlap, and intersect with each other.
Across our 20 counties, we need to think about how we can be a broker of connections and facilitate innovation. I think the future of innovation and economic vitality anywhere, but particularly in southern Minnesota, is about how we get out of silos and start melding these different sectors and ways of thinking and doing business with each other.
There’s also a role for us to help bring capital to our region. When I think of this 20-county region, we are blessed to have both a Mankato on one side and a Rochester on the other side and 12 regional micropolitan areas as well as our smaller rural communities. In every one of these places we’ve done listening road trips, I’ve been pleasantly affirmed that we’re not lacking a pipeline of projects and investment opportunities. We can show up in a community and our convener there will bring about 30 people who each have a project they are pursuing. Sometimes you just need to get closer to the ground, and you find out about them through the power of relationships. I do think the ingenuity and creativity and that “business school pipeline” of investible projects is here. We just have to do a better job of aligning and bringing that capital to the ideas and people who fuel our region.
Return to the Winter 2025 issue of Enterprise Minnesota® magazine.
