A career she loved. A community she wanted to serve.

Woodbury Mayor Anne Burt joins Sam McKinney for a conversation about a family decision that reshaped her life and the public responsibilities she later chose to take on.

Anne had built a high-ranking career at a Fortune 500 company in a male-dominated water industry. She loved the work and valued her advancement. Leaving full-time corporate work to be more present for her three young children was a difficult choice. She describes the adjustment, the part-time consulting she continued, and the school, coaching, and neighborhood involvement that became part of her family's life in Woodbury.

Her interest in contributing to that community grew into city commission work and, eventually, serving as mayor. Anne discusses planning how Woodbury grows, bringing her water-industry experience to infrastructure issues, and leading through COVID while crediting city staff and residents. She reflects on the responsibility of people trusting her to lead and the community giving behind Power of 100 Women, Greater Woodbury, which she cofounded with Gab Yacovella and Kelly Lindstrom.

Sam shares his own career turning point, connecting the personal choices about family and fulfillment with the practical work of contributing to the place we call home.

In this conversation

• The career Anne loved and the challenge of advancing in a male-dominated water industry.
• Her difficult decision to leave full-time corporate work and be more present for her three young children.
• How she continued consulting part time while becoming involved in schools, coaching, and neighborhood life.
• Her progression into city commissions and planning how Woodbury grows and develops.
• Her reflections on water infrastructure, residents' frustrations, and working with staff and the community through COVID.
• The trust involved in leading a city and her community work with Power of 100 Women, Greater Woodbury.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome to East Side Enterprise
01:09 The St. Croix River and finding home
07:20 A career she loved and the decision to focus on family
09:20 Sam's decision to make a change
11:44 Parenting, part-time consulting, and community involvement
16:24 Time with people who matter
19:35 Chemistry, business, and a career in water
23:25 Family background and growing up with change
26:40 Volunteering, city commissions, and public service
29:30 Planning for a city across generations
34:30 Water infrastructure and residents' frustrations
41:02 Leading through COVID and other challenges
45:45 The person behind the public role
46:33 Four schools in four years
48:48 Noticing people who feel left out
50:48 Serving beyond city duties
51:20 Power of 100 Women, Greater Woodbury
56:30 Legacy and giving back
58:33 Getting involved and voting

Links

• Anne Burt
• Power of 100 Women, Greater Woodbury
• Official Minnesota voting information
• East Side Enterprise

Kathy Hill's career started because somebody was paying attention. She was closing up at a Hardee's when a man finishing a late dinner told her he had been watching how she talked to the people she worked with, gave her his name, and said to come find him if she ever needed a job. Four months later she needed one. She knocked on his door, got hired at a concrete manufacturer, and fell for the masonry and landscape trade hard enough to stay in it for more than twenty years.

She learned it from the people doing it. "It was crusty old masons that taught me all about brick and mortar and stone. It was the landscapers that taught me about how retaining walls are built. It was excavators that taught me about soils." Today she supplies brick and stone for new builds and restorations, including the ones where the original kiln no longer exists and the match has to be found rather than ordered.

The other half of the conversation is about time. Kathy left South Africa at twenty intending to come back, met her husband ten days after arriving in the United States, and could not afford the trip home for six years. It took nine years to become a citizen. She lost her mother in 2011, her father this past May, and one of her brothers two and a half weeks after that. What she draws from it is not despair but a rule she keeps repeating: you do not know when the last hug was until it already was, so make the time now.

Also in here: why nobody punches a wall in a South African house, what face brick is and why almost every old building downtown is covered in it, the difference between asking a client what they want and showing them a wild card they did not ask for, and her case that the artists will save us.

Learn more about Jireh Brick & Stone at jirehbrickandstone.com.

Jane Stobbie Keer’s whole career has one shape to it. "One thing that brings me more joy than anything else in life is elevating people. To walk into a room, teach them, give them knowledge, and have them walk out an inch taller than when they walked in."

She came by it honestly. Her mother was a special education teacher who worked with dyslexic children. Jane got her start at Apple in the UK, took a Mac SE home when almost nobody worked from home, demoed fourteen Newton MessagePads that could not reliably read handwriting, then spent twenty years running Train with Jane, teaching PageMaker, Quark, Photoshop, and the earliest web design software to anyone who walked in.

We get into the two women who each handed her a client list when she started over from nothing, the free classes she still teaches through the library system, the genuinely excellent story behind a surname like Keer Keer, her mother Carolyn and the Wall of Hope, and complex regional pain syndrome type 2, which she has lived with for seventeen years and which is the reason she recorded this episode standing up.