A partnership between the University of Minnesota Duluth and the Arrowhead Regional Development Commission has won recognition from the National Association of Development Organizations.

The project’s initiators, Beverly Sidlo-Tolliver and Gavin Bukovich, have been working on this issue for years. As Beverly tells the story:

This project really started in 2023 after I attended the Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) conference in OKC. Wendy Schrag from Fresenius Kidney Care presented on their patient dashboard which tracks when patients miss appointments due to transportation. The subsequent conversations led to Gavin Bukovich and I contacting National Center of Mobility Management (now CCAM-TAC), for their Issue Focused Workshop. William Wagner made the trip to Carlton, Mn and we hosted over 30 area health care, transportation, and public health professionals for a day long workshop on health care access and transportation.

After the workshop, we established a Health Care Access Subcommittee under the Arrowhead RTCC with regional health care agencies and assisted living facilities. This group provided us a start on the journey of data collection to provide qualitative support behind the issue, but we quickly realized that the level of data collection and effective analysis was out of scope for a planner/mobility manager.

In 2025, we applied to Empowering Small Minnesota Communities and have been grateful to work with their team, in particular UMD Professor David Beard.

The research and its deliverables are almost complete and will be shared mid-summer. Professor David Beard and videographer Dan Fitzpatrick have traveled the region to host several focus groups and interviews with people to keep the human voice and story in the center of this issue. There will be maps, and data, and information to support policy change in the final research document but keeping sight the person behind each data number collected is what can really save a life.

Last point to highlight is our newly developed Arrowhead Region NEMT Providers working group. This was inspired by a NEMT Roundtable Discussion hosted by Mark Jones, former Executive Director of the Minnesota Rural Health Association. This working group met for first time in May and is providing forum for our NEMT providers to receive peer to peer to support (and more to come). Our NEMT providers and public transit are the conduit for access to health care, and their organizational sustainability is vital.

Mostly, what I brought to the project, I think, most, was (a) an awareness of what university resources could be marshalled to support their vision and (b) the translation skills to connect the community with the university. I knew what we could produce with GIS, what I could learn from the resources of the Martin Library, what incredible talents Dan Fitzpatrick brings to the project. Two other faculty members, Patricia Jewett and Shahrin Upoma, joined to work on developing and analyzing the focus group data. It’s a small army of university resources serving a great project.

I’m a working-class kid from a largely semi-literate family (raised partly by family members who had only graduated middle school or, if they were lucky, high school before they joined the workforce). The skepticism of my grandparents of “this school foolishness,” the call to be meaningful to my community, to make sure that my salary, which is drawn in part from the tax dollars paid by people like my grandparents, feels justifiable to them — I carry these feelings with me every day.

In this project, I have a sense of how I could do work that is meaningful to me and to my community. I’m grateful for these partners and this work.

WDIO captured the story. The press release is below. If you’d like to be part of this project by attending in-person or online focus groups, reach out to dbeard @ d.umn.edu.

Press Release