Pifhers creating a circle of success in Frazee and the region

By Robert Williams

Editor

Over the past few years, Dan and Karen Pifher have been two of the most influential people in Frazee, making their nominations for Grand Marshals of this year’s Turkey Days celebration a culmination of the positive energy they have put into their own pursuits to make Frazee a better place.

Being the driving force behind CornerStone Community and Youth Center and then moving onto creating their own business Creating Community Consulting, the Pifhers have taken their personal motivations to bring about positive change and spread it around Frazee and are working to bring the tools that made the successes they have seen here a reality for other communities.

Karen created CornerStone from the ground up, while working at Essentia Health in Detroit Lakes. As the project progressed, she eventually left the healthcare field to open Creating Community Consulting.

Finding a replacement as executive director at CornerStone in Mackenzie Hamm was critical to alleviating some of the pressure.

“The reality was the executive director can’t be there to run operations every day and do all the fundraising and grant writing. Mackenzie and I make a great team,” Karen said.

“Mackenzie has a special relationship with the kids; she relates to them very well,” said Dan. “I think she’s got a special knack on top of that in driving kids to come in.”

As CornerStone continues to evolve, the center has gone from a place for kids to spend quality time to a place that is now creating civic-minded kids who make their own positive changes in the community.

Some of those kids are on the boards of other entities in town and a group recently made a trip to the legislature to discuss the many benefits they have received from Frazee’s one-of-a-kind youth center.

“We’re making a difference in the lives of kids and that was the goal,” said Karen.

The couple have found a way to compliment each other and come together in life and work.

Changes in the pharmaceutical industry and increased stress led Dan to leave the field, and fall back to what he enjoyed as a kid, working carpentry at the end of 2021.

“I miss patient interaction and I miss the science end of it and I’ve got some unknown health issues where it makes it kind of unsafe to go back to that,” said Dan.

The two are on the opposite side of risk and work together to find a balance…most of the time.

“We match well that way,” Dan said. “She’s the idea person and I’m the one bringing her back to reality at times. Do you have enough time? Enough money? Enough health? Have you thought about this, this and this?”

“No, but we’re going to do it anyway,” Karen laughed.

The two met in Wolf Lake in 2017 when a mutual friend set them up.

Both were working in healthcare. Karen was at Essentia working on community wellness; Dan was working as a pharmacist in Park Rapids.

“We started hanging out and it was kind of love at first sight—we were dating in a couple weeks and were married six months later,” said Dan.

Harvest Church also brought the couple together.

“We have a lot of common interests; we’re both active people and enjoy the outdoors, construction and remodeling,” Dan said.

Karen came as a package deal raising three kids after a divorce a few years before meeting Dan. She took dating seriously and had a list of 10 things that were really important to her.

“Dating sucks, in case nobody knew that,” Karen laughed. “It was hard, especially when you’re a single parent with three kids and trying to find somebody to fit into our crazy life. I was just trying to figure out life and survive and take care of my kids and make a better life for them.”

Dan was a career bachelor heavily focused on work and education. He holds three degrees in electrical engineering, a bachelor’s in pharmaceutical science and a pharmacology doctorate, along with three minor degrees.

He was working at a pharmacy that closed in Grand Rapids in 2015 and got a tip of an opening in Park Rapids at Walgreens. His move to Wolf Lake allowed him to live a quiet existence to the point there were people in Wolf Lake wagering on what his job was to if he was in the witness protection program.

“That was my life for two years, just working, hiking or fishing,” he said. “I just kind of kept to myself. I was either at home or work. I’ve always been kind of an outdoor loner. I always wanted somebody to share it with, but I wasn’t going to settle for just an easy relationship. If I’m going to make a relationship, I want it to last. That’s part of the reason I was still single.”

The couple have also used their home to help kids in need.

“She’s good at adopting other kids too,” said Dan. “We’ve taken in several kids with nowhere else to go for a few months to a year to get them back on their feet.”

They were caring for a girl in need up to just a month ago.

“We’ve had five different kids living with us who have experienced homelessness in the last 10-12 years,” said Karen. 

For Karen, helping others stems from her own personal struggles.

“I was a pregnant teen; I had my son when I was 16 and I know what it’s like to struggle,” she said.

Dan related a story of Karen’s that always struck him. She was living in Winona as a young mother and was in the grocery store with a handful of quarters trying to figure out how she was going to feed her son for the next week.

“That hits hard,” he said. “More people are experiencing that now with the cost of living and inflation.”

“I was crying because I had to choose between butter and milk for mac n’ cheese and I couldn’t afford both,” Karen said. “That’s just always stuck with me.”

The work the Pifhers do, at home or at the office, is a huge part of their life and how they live it.

“It comes from our faith; Dan and I are pretty involved at Harvest Church and it’s a big part of our life. What would Jesus do? Take in the masses. Serve the people. You can drive the economy and improve well-being at the same time. They go together. When you take care of people they show up for each other, they’re willing to share ideas; they’ll engage and want to make things better. A lot of our work is focused on how do we provide a place where families and opportunities can thrive?” Karen said.

Not being afraid to fail, finding motivation out of failure and dealing with negative reactions to their work has become a fuel for making things better.

“Failure isn’t always a backward slide,” Dan said. “It can be a springboard to something better. To have people comfortable enough to try and succeed or fail. Failure is not the end.”

Plenty of those trials came in the years getting CornerStone off the ground from funding to providing fun for the community’s children. That path had plenty of ups and downs.

“If we went back and did it we wouldn’t do it the same way,” Dan said. “We can teach people to avoid those pitfalls.”

“We learned a lot from it,” said Karen. “We understand things better and it gave us so much momentum to keep moving forward.”

The journey also took plenty of compromise and finding ways to bring people together.

“If you set out to be perfect you will never be able to succeed in this type of work because you have to be flexible and nimble when you’re working with lots of people,” said Karen.

“There is compromise,” Dan said. “What’s perfect for one is not going to be perfect for someone else, but if the end goal is something that is good for everybody that’s something people can get on board with.”

They deal with contention to this day, even when CornerStone has become such a positive force for kids in Frazee and the surrounding communities.

“We still don’t have 100 percent support,” said Dan. “We have overwhelming support but there are still detractors and I think there always will be.”

At the beginning of 2024, Karen and CCC took steps into local government by taking over as the Economic Development Authority consultants for the city of Frazee.

Both Dan and Karen, along with President Tom Watson, made a big push to get the Community Club back on track with increased participation and a new sense of motivation towards bettering the community itself.

Much of the funding for Wannigan Regional Park came from the combined efforts of the Pifhers working with the Frazee Development Corporation to bring a new and big amenity to town. Traffic to Frazee has increased thousands since the park landed one of Thomas Dambo’s troll art installations.

“Getting the community excited, active and engaged; it drives other people’s momentum forward and doing that just this year alone, we’ve seen so much change,” said Dan.

“The biggest thing and the reason we’ve been so successful is because of all the people,” Karen said. “I try to listen, if we want the community to be better. We try to ask people what they want and do surveys and engage. When they tell us what they want, let’s make a plan and figure out how to give it to them.”

“They’re more likely to support and engage in it if it’s something they want,” said Dan.

“We get credit, but really it’s all the people behind the scenes that show up,” Karen said. “That’s what has made everything work. People believing that things can be different and showing up and helping.”

All of the positive changes have changed the perception of Frazee and the Pifhers hear about it often and are asked to bring that change to other communities.

“Frazee has had a stigma like a bedroom community or a throw off from DL or Perham and now you have people from DL and Perham looking at us and the movement last year,” said Dan. “That’s exciting and they want to be a part of that. Us being kind of in the background, now we’re in the forefront where they’re looking at us.”

The Blandin Foundation will be visiting in August to showcase that change by completing a ripple map showing the effect of the creation and success of CornerStone and how that has affected Frazee.

“That’s going to show where we started and that’s what CornerStone was formed around and all the things that have happened because of that momentum,” said Karen.

In the beginning, CornerStone was not without its detractors and some resistance from the public.

“We had a lot of resistance at the beginning,” said Dan. “That’s not going to work. It’s never going to last. There’s only going to be a few people that show up or it’s only going to be the bad kids that end up there. There was a whole bunch of stuff and a lot of active opposition. Not just opposition, but active opposition.”

After seeing the success of the youth center downstairs and the increasing traffic at the bistro and art center upstairs, that resistance is fading.

“Some of the most vocal opponents, several of them have come back and apologized and are actively involved,” Dan said. “It’s one of those things where you’ve got to not listen to that, believe in your mission and let the work speak for itself.”

It also took plenty of intestinal fortitude for the Pifhers and the group of people supporting them. CCC is now up to 10 employees in two years since Karen joined with co-owner Megan Jenson.

“The amount of sheer willpower or stupidity to just not give up because there were so many times where it would have been easy to walk away and give up and be like this will never happen,” said Karen. “We don’t have enough money or enough time and it’s not that it never crosses your mind but you just work through it and we had the right people that just kept pushing and believed it could happen.”

Their perseverance has paid off.

“Pitfalls kept arising and you’d get one problem fixed and here another problem would arise; you work through it,” said Dan.

With CCC continuing to expand so is the reach of the company.

“My goal was to create an organization that improved well-being and community and to be the best at it in this region,” Karen said. “I wanted to do good things and make enough money to survive. I had no idea that within two years we’d have all of these staff.”

From raising a family, taking in kids in need to add to their own family, career changes, and most recently the discovery of Dan’s health issues that are still being diagnosed, the Pifhers have been a major force in bringing positive change and they look to continue that well into the future regardless of any obstacles.

“I’m very driven by achieving goals; I have a lot of vision; I can see what I think the future can look like and I love being curious about how other people can come into that so we can create a strategy to get there,” Karen said. “That’s my jam. There is nothing better than seeing people thrive. That fuels my soul when I see people happy and thriving.”

Coming from a background of being a teen mother and poor most of her life, Karen knows what it is like to not fit in, be heard, or have access to resources and be judged because of that.

In a way, with her work, she has become a local solution to many of those issues that are affecting others. Together, the Pifhers are creating a circle and cycle of success for others.

“When we’re in abundance we want to give back in abundance,” said Dan. “That eases the pressures of somebody else to where they have abundance and they can give.”

“What would Frazee look like if every person who lived here felt like they could contribute ideas and contribute to the betterment and people would listen?” Karen said. “That’s my goal. How do we make that happen? How do we include everybody and there are people who choose not to and that’s okay. For whoever wants to, that is the culture of how we do things.

“The reality is there is nothing better than working in your own community where you live. I believe so strongly that we can do this here.”