I was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin and moved back to the area in 2006 to attend Winona State University. When I graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2009, I intended to take a year off to do service work while I applied to medical school.
I moved into Bethany House, which at the time was the only emergency housing in Winona County. This experience transformed my life, inspiring me to work on solving the hardest problems in order to help Winona. One year of volunteering quickly turned into three. Living at Bethany House, we provided shelter, food, and companionship for the men receiving services.
In 2011, we learned about oil and gas companies that were approaching Winona County land owners to purchase bluffs and bulldoze them for the sand inside. The volunteers at Bethany House started a protest movement that garnered national attention and ultimately led to the banning of frac sand mining.
In 2013, my wife and I learned about the thousands of migrants dying on the U.S/Mexico border. We biked to Tucson and spent 18 months providing life-saving humanitarian aid in the desert. During this time we also provided housing for Central American refugees who were fleeing cartel violence.
We moved back to Winona hoping to find a way to work on climate change, while also nurturing ourselves and the land. This led to the start of my farm business in 2017, rotationally grazing cattle on a southern Winona County farm. To this day, I have kept my farm business as a part-time endeavor so that I can continue to volunteer with various projects in the Winona area.
In 2022, I launched an improbable campaign. I ran against the most popular Republican in Winona County, the person who served as the Republican Senate Majority leader. Our campaign knocked 21,000 doors, and raised the maximum amount of money allowed, in a surprisingly short amount of time. Although I did not win that race, I performed better than any other DFL candidate in the past ten years in Winona County.
Following the 2022 campaign, I worked for two years at Engage Winona, studying housing policy and training previously homeless folks on how to be housing advocates in Winona. I currently work with Minnesota Voice to increase voter and civic participation across rural southern Minnesota.
In Winona, I currently sit on the Economic Development Authority and Mi Energy Citizen Board, volunteer with Wilson Fire Department and Rescue, serve as Co-Chair of Hope for Homes, and sit as a community member on the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. I recently finished terms with the Home and Community Options Board and the University of Minnesota’s Rural Experts Advocating for Community Health Program.
I have been married to Rachel Stoll since 2019; together we have two small children, who provide my motivation and desire to make Winona County a more affordable place to live, raise a family, and retire.
