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In October, Dodge Nature Center hired a new executive director, Missi Arens. With more than 25 years of nonprofit leadership experience, Arens has a passion for natural spaces and what she sees as a shared responsibility to preserve them.
“I’ve always loved nature and the environment,” said Arens. “Everyone in the community has a responsibility to try and maintain that in whatever way that they can, whether it’s recycling, whether it’s educating themselves, whether it’s educating others, whether it’s a bird feeder in your backyard.”
Arens replaces Jason Sanders, who announced his resignation earlier this year to become the president and CEO of Best Prep after more than 15 years of leadership at Dodge.
Favorite Space
Dodge Nature Center serves more than 65,000 children every year at their properties in West St. Paul, Mendota Heights, and Cottage Grove.
Arens has only been on the job for a few months, but she already counts the boardwalk trail at the main property in West St. Paul as one of her favorite spaces.
- Joy at work: “When you get to go across the property and observe all the things that we have to see, why wouldn’t you want to do that every day at work?” she said.
- Fortunate: “How lucky am I to be able to come here every day and walk this boardwalk and see all of these things?” Arens said. “How lucky are we as an organization to be able to provide this for the community? How lucky is the community to be able to come here and experience a variety of different things?”
- Asset: “I just think it’s a tremendous asset,” Arens said. “We don’t have enough spaces like we have here at Dodge.”
Preserving Nature
Arens lives with her husband, two kids, and three dogs south of the metro. They’ve lived there for 24 years, and when they first moved in it was the middle of nowhere. Now development is encroaching.
“As we were driving to dinner last night, another farm field was converted into a development. It’s happening around us so quickly,” Arens said. “If organizations like Dodge Nature Center and other environmental-based organizations don’t preserve the space we currently have here today, it will continue to disappear.”
What to do: “It’s all of our civic responsibility to maintain and preserve the land so that it’s there for future generations,” Arens said. “The more we teach young people now about the importance of that and preserving green space and being kind to our environment, the more we can ensure it is there for the next generation and generations to come.”
Acknowledging the founder: “I would be remiss if I didn’t give a heavy nod to Olivia Dodge for her passion and insightfulness so many years ago, and her keen sense of wanting to preserve space for future generations,” Arens said.
- Olivia Irvine Dodge saw development coming to West St. Paul and bought up surrounding farmland to found the Dodge Nature Center in 1967.
The Impact of Dodge Nature Center
Beyond just preserving nature, Dodge offers those experiences to interact with nature:
- Discovery: “Some kids who live in Minneapolis and St. Paul city proper, they haven’t seen some of the animals and species we have here on this property ever before,” Arens said. “They haven’t ever been to a farm. They don’t know what a chicken coop looks like.”
- Outdoor classroom: “When you bring young people outside, they’re more physically active,” Arens said. “Science shows that the stress goes down, confidence goes up, all of the things that really we want young people to think and feel and experience happen here in our classrooms without walls.”
- Unplugging: “When guests are here, they’re not on their phones,” Arens said. “All of our properties provide a space for people to set their phone down, leave it in the car, leave it at home, and really engage with their friends, their family, their peers, their colleagues, and take in what’s around them.”
- Ongoing education: While we talked in Arens’ office, an insect crawled across my notebook: “Oh, sorry about that. That’s a stink bug,” she said. “You don’t want to smash him because he’ll smell. I can move him for you.” She relocated the bug while seamlessly talking about the value of access to nature.
A Career of Nonprofit Work
“I’ve always been really passionate about the environment and environmental education,” Arens said.
- Her career started leading camps and school programs at the Minnesota Zoo: “I spent many, many nights sleeping under the coral reef at the zoo with school groups on a concrete floor in Discovery Bay where the dolphins once lived.”
- Then she spent 17 years with the Girl Scouts developing STEM programming and then moving into fundraising.
- Most recently she’s worked at the nonprofit Genesys Works in a number of roles.
“I think all of my roles have been like a culmination to this role where I really see myself as kind of the captain of the team,” Arens said. “We have so many staff who are tenured, long-time staff here who are so knowledgeable in the work they do. I see my role as helping to elevate opportunities and voices to ensure our staff and team has what they need in order to be successful.”
In addition to the committed staff, Dodge Nature Center has 270 volunteers that help with a range of projects from property maintenance to seed collecting.
Arens came to Dodge because she wanted to get back to nonprofit work focused on the environment and young people: “It’s not work when you enjoy it so much,” she said.
The Future of Dodge
As Dodge Nature Center approaches its 60th anniversary in 2027, the focus remains unchanged. “We will always stay true to our mission as it is today,” Arens said.
What’s the vision for the future? “That’s a tough question,” Arens said. “On week seven, I’m still learning all the things that we do.”
But she was quick to focus on preservation and education: “If we don’t stop to think about what we can do as individuals today, there will be consequences for tomorrow and future generations, and those generations won’t have some of the things we have here today,” Arens said. “They won’t they won’t see the animals, they won’t see the green space. They won’t see the types of trees and the flowers and the native prairie grasses that were once abundant in the state of Minnesota.”
That passion is reminiscent of Olivia Dodge, who said, “Too many people think, ‘What can I do?’ All of us can do something!”
Arens might have been channeling Dodge when she said, “It’s just important for everyone to say, ‘How can I help?'”
That likely means Dodge Nature Center is in good hands.
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