Tuesday, May 26, 2009

To Mayor Elizabeth Kautz and the City Council of Burnsville, Minnesota,

I am writing today concerning the fate of an important and valuable asset to our
community, THE GARAGE. The idea of THE GARAGE was hatched more than ten years ago to
fill a niche previously unserved, providing a safe haven for our city's youth lacking the support
of sports, clubs, and organizations offered by schools and churches in Burnsville and the
surrounding area. THE GARAGE stands alone, a unique institution not only among our
neighbors in the Twin Cities but nationwide in the services it provides to our community, and the
City of Burnsville stands alone in its commitment to THE GARAGE for over a decade. It is an
institution of our city, one that makes us distinctive, and one we should all be proud to support.
Surely you are already aware of the many awards and recognition THE GARAGE has
received over the years. While these honors proclaim its significance to those who do not know
THE GARAGE, those of us, and our friends and families, who have firsthand experience with it
need no reminders of its unparalleled excellence. Throughout junior and high school THE
GARAGE provided me and my peers opportunities to develop life-long skills in critical thinking,
leadership, and vocational pursuit. Many of the individuals served by THE GARAGE go on to
do great work, emerging early as leaders of their local communities. Our alums are Editor in
Chiefs at college newspapers and General Managers of college radio stations; we are
entrepreneurs, teachers, graduate students, professional sound engineers, community organizers,
and world citizens. All of us have one thing in common. When we look back on our experiences,
THE GARAGE stands out as one of the most important and influential forces that shaped our
vocational and lifestyle decisions.
As of roughly nine o’clock this morning, I became a graduate of Gustavus Adolphus
College. As a student I became active in the campus radio station early on; driven by a passion
for community leadership, and promotion of local and independent music I developed through
my work with THE GARAGE. I quickly rose to Programming Director by the end of my first
year, and General Manager by junior year, the same year I served on Gustavus’ Presidential
Search Committee. My sophomore year I fostered a community of 21 first year students as a
Collegiate Fellow in Gustavus’ Residential Life program. This past year I created a new
internship through which students can produce a weekly podcast while studying abroad, and
piloted that program in the fall while studying in China. Earlier this month I was recognized on
several fronts for my leadership on various campus initiatives over the past four years.
Could I have done all this without THE GARAGE? Perhaps, but THE GARAGE
provided foundational skills and a unique lens through which I focused my work: community. I
was at THE GARAGE while it was still relatively new. As a member of the GARAGE Advisory
Board (GAB) I was constantly reminded of our purpose: providing and fostering a community of
our peers. As GAB members, we constantly wrestled with what kind of community we wanted to
shape, who our members were and how they would be properly served by the policies and
programs we established. We were concerned, for example, with how our community members
would receive a no re-entry policy on show nights. We were also concerned with how to handle
those who did not respect our community, and with how our Constitution and Bylaws reflected
our commitment to the people we served, a concern which culminated in my writing a complete
overhaul of the GAB Constitution during my junior year of high school.
During my first year of college, not a week passed without me bragging about the
community I was proud to have been a part of at THE GARAGE, and the lasting impact it had
on my youth continued to inform my decisions throughout the rest of my college career. As a CF
I thought intentionally about the kind of community I was creating and how I expected that
community to behave as a component of the campus. How could I be the best leader for these
students during their first year, and what do these students need from me, and from each other, to
make a community that supports and fosters them into life-long learners? A driving force in my
work with the campus radio station was identifying the campus community’s needs, and what we
needed from our participants to construct an organization responsive to those needs.
THE GARAGE taught us how to be stewards of our community, and it taught us how to
affect change as participants, leaders, and observers within that community. It taught us the value
of diversity, and how to approach issues about which we are passionate with our minds open to
alternative ideas, and that all ideas, whether we agree with them or not, are worth pursuing. It
taught us lessons we did not even know we were learning about interpersonal communication,
political science, and sociology. Of all the myriad people I interacted with from across the
country in my four years of college, not one other person had a community center that even
mimicked what THE GARAGE provided its youth. Elimination of this asset would come as a
loss to the City of Burnsville as a community dedicated to the arts, education, and to our youth.
Even worse, cutting THE GARAGE would deny future generations of youth the opportunity to
live, learn, and dream within this community that has proven itself time and again a safe and
epistemic community committed to its participants.

Sincerely,
Greg Boone
1408 Irving Ln
Burnsville, MN 55337