{"id":18682,"date":"2022-07-18T16:30:47","date_gmt":"2022-07-18T16:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=18682"},"modified":"2026-02-27T22:48:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T22:48:09","slug":"bridge-builder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2022\/07\/bridge-builder\/","title":{"rendered":"Bridge Builder"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Laura Billings Coleman \/ Photo by David J. Turner<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just before Minnesota lawmakers returned to the Capitol this spring, Migdalia Loyola Mel\u00e9ndez \u201996, Governor Tim Walz\u2019s deputy chief of staff for public engagement, convened a few dozen leaders from across the state in an online meeting. The representatives of rural and urban communities, Native communities, communities of color, and disability and LGBTQ+ communities gathered to talk about what to expect as legislators resumed their debate on the fate of an historic $9.25 billion state surplus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sitting in her office at the Capitol, gazing into a computer screen, she warmly greeted the online assemblage without a hint of Zoom fatigue. Quite the opposite, in fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI actually find it fascinating to think how much we are able to do now because of video conferencing,\u201d says Loyola, who started this position in February 2019, meeting people in coffee shops and hiring staff to handle the various types of constituent contacts the governor\u2019s office typically receives each year. When the pandemic hit a year later, limiting travel and forcing office workers like her to log in from home, \u201cthere was a lot of grief about what we lost and what we had to adapt to,\u201d she says. \u201cBut at the same time, all of these barriers we used to think about\u2014How do you bring many <\/em>people together from different areas? <\/em>What will it cost? How do you make <\/em>it accessible?<\/em>\u2014just got lifted. Now I look back and wonder, why didn\u2019t we think of this before?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finding ways to make the democratic process more accessible to the people it serves is Loyola\u2019s mission as head of the office of public engagement for Governor Walz and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan. Her position is a first-of-its-kind effort to ensure that the views and voices of those who are far too often underrepresented in state government\u2014 including veterans, people of color, Native people, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community\u2014are reflected in the administration\u2019s work. Critics on the other side of the aisle originally grumbled about the cost of staffing the new office, which handles everything from requests for proclamations to input about pending legislation, but the unprecedented events of the last two years may have proven the department\u2019s value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf we had not had this office through COVID and in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, it would have been really difficult to be able to maintain that dialogue with community members,\u201d Loyola says. While Minnesotans are known for their chart-topping levels of civic engagement, they were even more eager to offer feedback in 2020. During that year, her office handled nearly thirty times the number of constituent contacts than the previous year. \u201cPeople are living through some hard things right now,\u201d she says. \u201cThe weight that we have carried as a society, and hearing those stories all of the time, it can be very daunting. But I want to approach every conversation from a place of empathy and understanding, so that people leave that interaction feeling heard,  and feeling like their opinion was valued. At the end of the day, I try to ask myself, \u2018How many bridges did I build today?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A native of Puerto Rico, Loyola came to Minnesota to study international studies and environmental studies at Macalester. After college, she spent two decades working for nonprofits such as Casa de Esperanza (now Esperanza United), Planned Parenthood, and Blue Cross Blue Shield\u2019s Center for Prevention. Working with communities on social justice and equity initiatives has been the common denominator in all of her career moves, she says, \u201cthough I never imagined myself in government, because when I was at Macalester, jobs like mine did not exist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Loyola says she believes more states and local institutions will need to expand their public engagement efforts if they hope to turn the tide on Americans\u2019 declining levels of trust in government, especially within communities of color. \u201cMaking change\u2014especially legislative change\u2014is not easy,\u201d she says. \u201cThat is not an accident, because many of our systems were constructed to be exclusionary. There\u2019s been a long history of people not being able to be part of the process.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s why her office also reaches out to communities, making individuals aware of policy proposals and legislative opportunities that may affect them, while actively soliciting ideas for making laws and systems simpler for people in Minnesota to access and understand. Signs of progress include new proposals for making state grantmaking opportunities more equitable for organizations led by Indigenous, Black, and other communities of color, and encouraging a more diverse group of Minnesotans to take part in the open appointment process for the state\u2019s 130 boards, commissions, task forces, and advisory councils. Loyola is also proud of how quickly the state translated all of its COVID-19 communications into Spanish, Hmong, and Somali, and how it ensured public health press conferences included ASL interpretation and closed captioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEmbedding equity into all of these decisions is not an easy undertaking,\u201d she says, \u201cand it came from the community really pressuring and asking for these changes.\u201d Now the question facing her office is how to maintain the innovations beyond the pandemic. While swift, sweeping changes are rare in state government, Loyola says that these smaller successes give her hope that more transparent, more representative, and more responsive government systems are possible, regardless of the outcome of November\u2019s gubernatorial election. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to change everything in just three years, but I do hope that we\u2019ve opened doors in new ways, and that people have seen what\u2019s possible for their communities through the legislative process, even when I\u2019m not here,\u201d she says. \u201cThe more people know how to access government, the more it\u2019s going to change their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

St. Paul writer Laura Billings Coleman is a frequent contributor to <\/em>Macalester Today.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Migdalia Loyola Mel\u00e9ndez \u201996 helps Minnesotans connect with their government.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":18730,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18682"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30845,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18682\/revisions\/30845"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}