By Activate Rural Program Director Sarina Otaibi and Associate Director Courtney Bergey Swanson
On Tuesday, September 15th, 2026, an Activate Rural Workshop was held at the Madison Mercantile in Madison, MN.
DoPT’s The YES! House team partnered with Activate Rural to host 20 community leaders in southwest Minnesota for a day of sharing, learning, and exploring the creative assets of Madison (pop. 1,507).
Attendees were eager to discuss ideas and share practical ways to bolster the arts in their community. Several were looking for ideas to build gathering places in their communities, and several more were seeking guidance on activating buildings in need of a new use.
Throughout the day, participants worked together on playful building exercises, engaged in conversation and networking, and heard from several speakers on regional stories of community engagement, funding and resources, and programming. Speakers included:
Sarina Otaibi, DoPT Activate Rural Program Director
Christine Fischer, Regional Director of Southwest MN Small Business Development Center (SBDC)
Nicole DeBoer, Executive Director of Southwest Minnesota Arts Council (SMAC)
Luwaina Al-Otaibi, Program Director of The YES! House in Granite Falls, MN
Madison Mercantile founder and Executive Director Kris Shelstad also spoke to the group, sharing her story of building out the space and engaging the community in the process.
Kris provided a tour of the multi-use creative gathering place, which houses a gallery, coffee shop, and community gathering space.
In addition to the Madison Mercantile, attendees also had the opportunity to stroll a few blocks down to tour the Prairie Arts Center, a former church building that has served as an arts center since the 1970s.
The building was recently renovated by a Madison alum and then donated to the Mercantile’s nonprofit for the continued use as an arts center.
The Activate Rural Workshop was held as part of the southwest Minnesota Small Business Development grant project and supported, in part, by the State of Minnesota through a grant from The Office of Small Business Development, Department of Employment and Economic Development.
Department of Public Transformation (DoPT) believes in working with artists, cultural workers, and connectors to strengthen rural places by supporting the role of community assets—social, cultural, and built—as a lens to help communities investigate and celebrate their collective story: past, present, and future. Activate Rural supports third places, creative space use, and building activation projects—art galleries and cultural centers, creative coffee shops and taprooms, theaters, artist studios, performance and event venues, multi-use creative places, and more—that inspire, motivate, and open up possibilities for rural communities.
