Tallitha Reese

Jennifer Drinkwater describes herself as a “glass-half-empty kind of person.”

The Ames, Iowa-based artist understands how challenges can weigh on people. We all experience tough times, of course. And it’s natural to feel overwhelmed when facing news of war, natural disasters, and other negative world happenings.

Yet despite being wired to watch for threats – “I am not an optimist by nature. I’m more of a realist,” Jennifer says – she fully appreciates the power of redirecting one’s attention. So, in 2019, she launched the What’s Good Project to help citizens recognize and celebrate the resources in their own backyards. 

In participating What’s Good Project towns, Jennifer talks with residents and explores local landscapes. Then, she creates multi-layered acrylic paintings that showcase what makes each community special. The initiative mixes art and engagement.

“The What’s Good Project is inspired by the philosophy of asset-based community development. According to research, when we shift our focus from what’s wrong to what’s right, we can affect positive change where we live,” Jennifer writes on the project’s website, whatsgoodproject.com.

Creating change isn’t about overlooking problems or adopting a starry-eyed view. Instead, it starts with identifying and expanding upon what already works.

“As individuals and as small groups, people can make such a difference. They are making such a difference. But we don’t hear enough about those stories,” Jennifer says.

This July, Jennifer will share What’s Good Project stories and paintings, plus new paintings of her favorite Northeast Iowa places, during an exhibit at ArtHaus in Decorah (see sidebar below for event details).

Sketching plans

Jennifer’s own story starts in Mississippi, where she grew up. She loved drawing and painting from an early age. She double-majored in studio art and anthropology at Tulane University and spent summers doing trail maintenance on the Appalachian Trail. After graduation, Jennifer moved to Massachusetts for a Student Conservation Association-AmeriCorps position. There, she did trail work and taught middle-school environmental classes. Soon, she got accepted into an environmental education graduate program. 

Though she was passionate about nature, Jennifer wasn’t sure if teaching was the right next step. She reflected on this while doing a section hike on the Appalachian Trail.

“While I was hiking, I realized, ‘Okay, you’ve got to go paint. You’ll figure this out,’” she says.

Instead of studying environmental education, Jennifer earned a Master of Fine Arts at East Carolina University. She then moved to Ames to teach drawing and painting at Iowa State University (ISU). A few years into that role, she spotted an opening for a community arts specialist with ISU Extension and Outreach. The new hire would drive community and economic development through art. 

While she didn’t have a development background, Jennifer saw an opportunity to draw on her two areas of undergraduate study. She landed the job. Since 2015, she’s split her time between the ISU College of Design and ISU Extension.

Jennifer calls the mix “stupefying and magical.” 

“As a younger person, there’s no way I could have designed a job that bridged cultural anthropology and art,” she says. “I always tell students, ‘Don’t compartmentalize your interests, because you don’t know how they will braid together in life.’”

Exploring ideas

For the newly created extension position, Jennifer chatted with community members and arts advocates across Iowa. Then, she started organizing interactive projects. In Perry, she helped participants enlarge and carve images from photographs onto pieces of wood. They drove a steamroller over the inked carvings to create prints. In Ames, she coordinated a yarn-bombing installation that covered a building in more than 1,200 hand-knit squares. For another Perry project, Jennifer distributed disposable cameras to fifth graders. She asked them to photograph what they loved about their town, and the images anchored a large-scale photo mural.

People started asking Jennifer how to organize their own events. To share ideas and spark creativity, she published several free, downloadable tool kits on the What’s Good Project website. (Some are also available through the Iowa Arts Council and ISU Extension.) The kits contain step-by-step instructions for starting community projects. Each covers topics like site considerations, budgeting, funding, engagement, and evaluations. 

Jennifer’s first tool kit tackled murals. She based a yarn-bombing tool kit on her experience in Ames, and it’s been a popular, less-permanent alternative to murals. Another kit outlines how to stage pop-up events and exhibitions. And the most downloaded release, a plan-of-work tool kit helpful for individual artists and community groups alike, provides practical guidance for brainstorming, setting goals, and collaborating on creative projects.

The tool kits highlight both nuts-and-bolts basics and project benefits. Jennifer has seen installations that showcase unique assets, honor local history, and engage an assortment of community members.

“There’s an acronym that we use in extension: STP, or the ‘same ten people.’ It makes me laugh, but there’s truth in it. When communities get the same volunteers, it’s easy to forget there are all these other people with talents and skills and interests,” she says. “Art becomes a way of engaging with different people, or more introverted people, or more creative people. It becomes an easy way of getting to know somebody without having a focus group or serious meeting. You can sit around and knit together and build friendships under the guise of something totally different.”

Establishing the What’s Good Project

Three years after she started the ISU Extension job, Jennifer took an arts business class. One assignment involved explaining the “why” behind her creative work.

“I’ve written artist statements my entire life. But this was about figuring out, at the core, what is your value system? How do you recognize yourself as an artist? What does your work communicate?” she says. 

After reviewing her wide-ranging projects, she discovered a common thread.

“I’m not somebody who is self-expressive in my painting. I don’t paint my story, but I love other people’s stories,” Jennifer says. “I started thinking, ‘What if I was more deliberate about it?’”

That lightbulb moment led to the What’s Good Project. Working in Iowa and Mississippi, Jennifer visits small towns and talks with locals. She attends major events. She studies an area’s history. She spends time at parks, cafes, shops, and attractions. Jennifer then documents a community’s treasured places and prized features in vibrant paintings, layering images of structures and scenery atop bright, underlying patterns.

The goal is to highlight the positive and help other communities build momentum by sharing what works.

Sales of original What’s Good Project paintings and prints raise money for nonprofits in participating towns – about $16,000 and counting since 2019. Some images get used in visitor guides or advertisements. Jennifer also creates postcards from various paintings. Twice a year, her email newsletter subscribers receive a hand-written postcard that shares the story behind an image.

Making a difference

What’s Good Project art spotlights a town’s attributes, while also helping residents see their surroundings in a new way. 

“Jennifer’s paintings were an awakening to a lot of people living here,” says Velma Benson-Wilson, the economic and tourism director for Quitman County, Mississippi.

The birthplace of singer Charley Pride, Quitman County has deep musical roots, historic Native American sites, and a storied civil rights legacy. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., visited the Mississippi Delta community in early 1968, when Quitman was the nation’s poorest county. The poverty he saw in the county seat of Marks cemented the small town’s significance in King’s Poor People’s Campaign for economic justice.

While poverty still impacts the area, Quitman County has cultural and recreational riches. The What’s Good Project encouraged community members to embrace those treasures.

“Sometimes you don’t appreciate what you’ve got until you see it in a different light. Jennifer brought awareness to the assets that we have and how we can take advantage of them,” Velma says.

A similar thing happened after Jennifer painted scenes in the southern Iowa town of Oskaloosa.  

“You see people really study and consider the paintings. They look at these places that they see every day through a different lens. It creates a different appreciation for where you are,” says Allison McGuire, who leads community engagement and education at Oskaloosa’s George Daily Community Auditorium. 

Allison and her husband, Andy, who is the auditorium’s executive director, invited Jennifer to bring the What’s Good Project to Oskaloosa. After kicking things off with conversations at the town’s 2021 Art on the Square festival, Jennifer interviewed more than a dozen residents. Those discussions informed 15 related paintings. Subjects range from Maskunky Marsh, a local birdwatching hotspot, to Penn Central Mall’s center court, a popular community gathering space. 

The paintings were unveiled during Art on the Square in 2023. Descriptions accompanying each image talked not about the painting process or style of work, but the stories behind each piece. 

“It has nothing to do with the artist or the art. It has everything to do with the people that inspired it. You’re hearing from students and longtime community elders and people who just moved, and they all tell stories of what’s important here,” Andy says.

This work has changed Jennifer’s whole outlook on life.

“I feel like it’s made me a better person. It’s made me a lighter person. I do feel different, having talked to all these people. I know more about their sacrifices. I hear what they believe in and how hard they are working to really make their small towns better,” Jennifer says.

The stories, and the people behind them, can transform whole communities.

“There’s research to back this up,” Jennifer says. “I’m meeting people in these tiny towns in Mississippi and Iowa who have no idea what asset-based community development is, but they’re doing it. Things are improving, and things are working, and people are excited because there’s momentum. There’s joy. You can see it in action.”

Meet Jennifer & View the What’s Good Project

To see Jennifer Drinkwater’s work, including What’s Good Project images and paintings of places she likes to visit in the Driftless, swing by ArtHaus (107 W. Broadway, Decorah) between July 5 and 27. Jennifer will greet guests during the exhibit’s opening reception on Friday, July 5, from 7 to 9 pm.

For additional What’s Good Project information, and to join Jennifer’s postcard list, visit whatsgoodproject.com.

It takes grit, focus, and true resolve to run a marathon. Hours upon hours of training, in good weather and bad. The ability to dig deep, then deeper, and then even deeper to finish those 26.2 miles. And, for most, it takes an unending source of inspiration.

For Jennifer Sime of Decorah, Iowa – who ran her fourth Chicago Marathon to support the Danny Did Foundation October 2023 – that inspiration is her son, Brendan, who passed away at age 19 in November 2017 from Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP). Each year, more than 1 in 1,000 people with epilepsy die from SUDEP; it is the leading cause of death in people with uncontrolled seizures.

“After I ran the New York City Marathon in 2005, I said, ‘never again,’” says Jennifer, a registered nurse case manager at Gundersen Health System in La Crosse, Wisconsin. “But I started following the social media of the Danny Did Foundation, which advances public awareness of SUDEP, and they were recruiting their team for the 2019 Chicago Marathon – I thought that doing it would be healing for me as I have always used running as an outlet.”

Within days of her joining Team Danny Did, the foundation’s president, Tom Stanton, reached out to Jennifer by phone to learn more about her story. “It was one of the most genuine, heartfelt conversations I have ever had about Brendan,” she recalls. “I constantly talk about that first encounter and what a pivotal moment that was, not only in my advocacy but also in my grief journey, to have someone understand it on many different levels – I knew right then that I wanted to be part of the foundation, to work to perhaps save someone else’s son or daughter.”

Today, four years later, Jennifer is, in fact, much more than “a part of” the Danny Did Foundation. She has raised thousands of dollars to support the organization’s mission by running the Chicago Marathon year after year. She has served on its board since 2021. She has given inspirational talks on its behalf, spreading the word about epilepsy and SUDEP and sharing Brendan’s story – most recently taking the stage at the foundation’s “Hearts and Hugs” gala in October 2023. 

It’s a space Jennifer never dreamed she would occupy prior to November 28, 2017. That was the day Brendan passed away from a seizure while asleep in his room at Iowa State University – and the day his family (including Jennifer; her daughters, Josie, Mya, and Ivy; her husband, Todd; and Brendan’s father and stepmother, Perry and Meg Numedahl) were left struggling with the finality of their loss. 

Diagnosed with epilepsy at age 10, after his fourth-grade teacher, Karen Van Der Maaten, noticed he was showing signs of the disorder in class, Brendan had, says Jennifer, been managing the condition well for years under the care of a neurologist and the watchful eyes of his family. A top student at Decorah High School, he was active in his church (Decorah Lutheran) and on the athletic field, participating in football and track all four years and, his senior year, qualifying for the state track meet as part of the 4×800 meter relay team. He also earned numerous academic honors. Brendan seemed, says Jennifer, “to be clicking on all cylinders” when he began classes as a mechanical engineering major at Iowa State University in the fall of 2017.

And while Brendan and his parents knew well that college would “bring on a whole other level of stress,” they were, despite all the doctors’ visits over all the years, unaware of SUDEP. “The goal was always getting his condition managed with the hope of going off medication,” says Jennifer. “No one ever emphasized how very serious this condition can be if you don’t do all the things you need to do to continue to manage it.”

In the years since Brendan’s death, Jennifer has channeled her grief into advocacy, raising awareness of the disorder and SUDEP both within and beyond the epilepsy community. Inspired by his ISU flag football team, who coined the term, she and his family and friends formed the “B Team,” which raises funds for nonprofits like the Epilepsy Foundation of Iowa (EFIA) while emphasizing the values that Brendan espoused during his life, including kindness, compassion, and hard work.   

Beyond fundraising for EFIA, Jennifer also serves on its Community Engagement Board, and as the EFIA SUDEP Ambassador. Since 2019, she has traveled to the State Capitol in Des Moines to thank legislators for annual financial support of EFIA and to lobby for passage of the Seizure Safe Schools legislation, which would require school personnel to complete seizure-recognition and first aid training and require students with epilepsy to have a Seizure Action Plan on file, and/or require the administration of FDA-approved treatments in the school setting. Twenty-three other states have already passed this legislation; Jennifer continues to work to bring Iowa into the fold.

“We all have a personal story to share, and mine is that Brendan’s teacher was the one who recognized his epilepsy first,” says Jennifer. “If you can establish a connection, and make it personal, the room becomes so much smaller.” The legislation has cleared the House of Representatives almost unanimously for years but has faced hurdles in the Senate. Undeterred, Jennifer says she will keep on working to help secure the bill’s passage. 

“One of my favorite parts of advocacy is bringing people to the cause because it really is about the cause and about the people who are impacted,” says Jennifer. “I am proud to be a voice to a kid who just wanted to be normal, who didn’t deserve this, and who does deserve to have his life story shared in a way that can help others now – I know Brendan would never want to be known as the boy with epilepsy but the boy who lived his life to the fullest despite it.” 

Walter Langland was Interviewed by family friend Heidi Ludeking

Walter Langland served in both WWII and the Korean War. Interviewer Heidi Ludeking had the privilege of spending time with Walt in 2016 when she chaperoned him and her father on an Honor Flight for Veterans to the monuments in Washington DC. During World War II, Walt worked in Italy typing up transfer orders for people and objects from one base to another and to get servicemen back home. He worked stateside during the Korean War, processing mail.

It was on that trip that Heidi learned of Walt’s contributions of service not only to his country through his time in the Army, but also to his community when he returned. 

His 40 consecutive years of elected office included the Iowa Legislature, the first Decorah Community School District board following its reorganization, Farm Bureau, the Board of Supervisors, and the Hospital Board. Alongside these posts, he also served as superintendent of Sunday School at Highland Lutheran Church and sang in a Barbershop Quartet, enjoying the close harmony of the group. He grew up on the home farm just outside Spring Grove, Minnesota, where his son, Steve, still farms. Walter and his family were stewards of their land, receiving the State of Iowa Soil Conservation award for six miles of terracing on the farm, and their strip and contour practices in 1978. In 2027, it will become a Heritage Farm, being held by the Langland family for 150 years.

Walt was born on the farm in 1927, the youngest of nine children, and was actively helping on the farm until he turned 94. Walter married his high school sweetheart, Adeline Lovsteun, in 1950. This year, Walt celebrated his 96th birthday and they celebrated 73 years of marriage. 

What’s the best advice anyone ever gave you?

My mom always said not to smoke and to respect others. That matches a life philosophy I later read, “What maintains one vice would bring up two children.”

What’s your advice to others?

Be friendly but be cautious about who you are real friends with. Choose friends that enjoy your lifestyle.

What did you want to be when you grew up? 

I wanted to be a civil engineer. After I graduated from Luther College with a degree in math, science and physical education, I was going to go to Iowa State University to study engineering, but I joined my brother on the farm instead. I spent my first few years teaching and working on the farm until it became too much, and I left teaching. 

Try to describe yourself in one sentence. 

I enjoy seeing people and talking to them.

If you could eat one thing every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? 

I enjoy my time at Mabe’s, Family Table, and Culvers, as a way to get out and see people and enjoy time with friends. I usually see someone I know or recognize. 

Walter has had Guardian Angels protecting him though life. He shares more about his experiences here:

My first Guardian Angel ensured I returned safely from service in Italy. I wanted to fly back to the US but was denied and had to type up my own orders to return home by ship, a six-day trip I had encountered before and did not want to repeat. The plane I would have taken home never arrived stateside, crashing in the Alps on its way to Germany. 

The second was on my honeymoon with Addie to Niagara Falls. We were out in a boat and the motor was not latched properly and fell into the water. I could have fallen in or tipped the boat trying to grab it in the middle of the lake. We were not swimmers, and that Guardian Angel was keeping us in the boat.

My third time was on the farm when the silo loader malfunctioned. My yells were heard by a contractor on the farm to turn off the loader just in time. 

 What advice would you give to a teenager who is making decisions about studying and college?

Pick a career that you could continue to use in some way for the rest of your life. Even after you are married and raise a family.