James Kielsmeier
American educator
James "Jim" Kielsmeier is founder and President/CEO of the National Youth Leadership Council, based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He also founded the Center for Experiential Education and Service-Learning at the University of Minnesota, where he is also an adjunct professor. Kielsmeier helped initiate the nonprofit African Reconciliation and Development Corps International and led their first project in Somalia (1993–94) during the civil war.
Biography
Kielsmeier spent time as a youth worker in Harlem, and then as a U.S. Army Infantry platoon leader and community relations officer in Korea during the 1960s. In Korea, he developed a program placing GIs as tutors in schools. A former middle and high school teacher and Outward Bound instructor, Kielsmeier founded the National Youth Leadership Council in 1983, initially based at the University of Minnesota.
Kielsmeier has also been engaged in the design and implementation of comprehensive state and federal youth service and service-learning models. He has advised three Minnesota governors, helped U.S. Senators Dave Durenberger and Paul Wellstone write the 1990 and 1993 National and Community Service Act, advised the Clinton and Obama Administrations’ transition teams, and testified before the Minnesota House and Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. Kielsmeier also helped initiate the nonprofit African Reconciliation and Development Corps International, and led its first project to build schools in Somalia during the civil war in 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “James Kielsmeier” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.