GIANTS OF THE EARTH HERITAGE CENTER
Programs and results
What we aim to solve
It has been said that it takes a village to raise a child. A village is large enough to provide diverse views and feedback, but small enough so that people get to know many people well over a long period of time and ensure a safe community environments. While there are positive aspects to having children grow up moving from one place to another, we hope to explore the positive aspects of small towns. In small towns we can enjoy the liberty to explore a personal and generational goals as we also reflect on our ancestors' work and sense of purpose. Our Heritage Center provides a means to preserve, share, and discuss the cultural elements that have worked well or not-so-well historically in nurturing health, resilience, kindness, wisdom and a sense of social coherence in our children. Our fun activities and meaningful programming bring young and old together, sometimes challenge conventional attitudes, and promoting appreciation for diverse solutions.
Our programs
What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, and who do the programs serve?
Senior Citizens' Oral Histories
Preserving the stories of senior citizens, and affixing their stories to our collaborative online inclusive family tree is a top priority for Giants of the Earth Heritage Center. The Giants of the Earth Heritage Center not only wishes to preserve senior stories in the short run, but we also wish to create a video editing station within the Giants of the Earth Headquarters, where community members can digitize and share their historical analog videos, to be interspersed with the oral histories in the creation of historical movies documenting our ancestors experiences.
MHC compatibility in small communities
Currently, cord blood is banked by numerous American couples, despite the fact that there is only a 1 in 5 chance of this blood matching a fraternal sibling of the child donor. Further, it is frequently difficult to find compatible organ donors when individuals need them. While technologies exist to identify immune system compatibility between two random individuals, no systematic study has been performed on how to best identify the total number of MHC compatible individuals worldwide. Perhaps the best place to perform preliminary research on developing a compatibility database that would make future regenerative therapies possible would be small towns of highly interrelated individuals. Using human SNP chips, such a study is both possible and highly repeatable.
Spring Grove is a small historic town, located along Norwegian Ridge in Southeastern Minnesota. As the first Norwegian settlement in Minnesota, the town attracted Norwegian settlers, primarily from Hallingdal, Hadeland, and Sigdal. Spring Grove has a well researched and very intertwined family tree, and as such provides a very unique opportunity to study many aspects related to genetics using SNP associated studies. Preliminary evidence suggests that within small communities like Spring Grove, MHC similarity can be shared not only by siblings, but also by distant cousins, who are frequently cousins multiple times over. As a trusted nonprofit organization within the community, Giants of the Earth Heritage Center is in a unique position to conduct research of great significance for the future of regenerative therapy and for the development of personalized vaccines which are both effective and non-autoimmunogenic. We seek funding therefore to provide genetic SNP tests to 100 members of the community. The SNP tests would cost us $400 for the complete test if we order 50 or more at one time. For this particular study, the health related results of the test could be viewable by each participant in the study, as each individual would have complete control over their password and would be requested to only share their information at a "basic" level, which does not include health information. This study will have great fecundity in itself and as a foundation for future studies. Because each SNP kit will provide information on more than 1/2 million SNPs within each person's genome, it lays the foundation for numerous future studies using the same participants that could be conducted at virtually no cost to us or other organizations conducting the research. Due to its proximity to local colleges, participants in the study would also be excellent candidates for nearby student research, allowing local students the opportunity to publish any number of associative studies. Further, these data could be particularly useful at a later date for making sense of the Norwegian Biobank and the data available through Norwegian longitudinal studies, as most of the ancestors of people in Spring Grove came originally from Norway, and would therefore provide a different environment for the same genes to be critically analyzed.
Educational Programs for Genealogists
Provide training and assistance to members looking for building or writing their family history. The cost includes subscriptions to online genealogical resources, salaries for teachers, printing costs, and site rental fees.
Norwegian Ridge Language Camp
The Norwegian Ridge Language Camp is a very successful camp for 4-17 year old children to learn Norwegian from native speakers at Minnesota's first Norwegian settlement in Spring Grove, MN, formerly known as Norwegian Ridge. Please visit www.trueheritage.org to see videos and pictures.
Genetic Genealogy Webconferencing
Giants of the Earth Heritage Center’s Genetic Genealogy Webconferencing Project will provide the same type of genetic genealogy assistance to remote members of Giants of the Earth Heritage Center as it presently does to local users. While millions of people have received genetic tests that could be used for genealogical purposes, most do not understand how to make optimal use of them. These people would be willing to either join an organization that assists them in interpreting their results or pay for such services directly. Thus there is a large market for consultants in genetic genealogy. We intend to provide these services with a trained staff who will work individually or in family groups through webconferencing using the well establishe GoToMeeting software. This software allows for remote desktop sharing and video and audio conferencing for up to 16 users simultaneously.
Spring Grove History Museum
Exhibits: Settling of Spring Grove, Spring Grove Business, Native American History, Spring Grove Farming, Working with Horses, etc
Research on Human and Viral Genome Interaction Leading to Neuropathology
Recently it has been shown that anti-herpesvirus medications are 10 times more effective than other drugs for treating Alzheimer’s Disease. This finding and 150 other published associative studies now strongly support a hypothesis that Dr. Johnathan Storlie advanced in 2006 that herpesviruses were a cause of Alzheimer’s Disease. Dr. Storlie proposed further a detailed model for the genesis of at least 50 percent of Alzheimer’s cases through the interaction between alpha herpesviruses, other herpesviruses, and human gene promoters. By 2006, he had studied extensively the interactions or likely interactions between various herpesviruses. Dr. Storlie's understanding of polyglutamine diseases is based upon a realization of the potential for various herpes virus proteins, called transactivators, to initiate the genes of other herpesviruses that co-infect the same human tissue. Further, Dr. Storlie also hypothesized that herpesviral transactivators and transglutaminases are the agents which induce Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies and his theory uniquely explains the anomalies which have essentially disproven the prion model. Dr. Storlie will also be investigating the unique role that FMR1 deficiency has in neuropathology and attempting to identify the potential for FRM1 complexes (in vaccines or natural infections) with influenza viral RNA polymerase or herpes virus ICP27 (or homologs) to induce autoimmunity against FMR1, resulting in the cognitive dysfunction we call autism. Dr. Storlie's unique position as a genetic analyst at Giants of the Earth has allowed him to further understand how variations in human genes and gene promoters can, to varying degrees, alter the interaction of herpesvirus transactivators, polyglutamine proteins, and transglutaminases with their human host and result in amyloid plaque formation. Finally, his research should have implications for safer vaccine development that could diminish the incidence of a host of neurological diseases.
Where we work
External reviews
Photos
Videos
Our results
How does this organization measure their results? It's a hard question but an important one.
Number of unique website visitors
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Goals & Strategy
Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress.
Charting impact
Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results.
What is the organization aiming to accomplish?
Giants of the Earth Heritage Center is a community stewardship-focused society, specializing in, but not limited to, Norwegian-Americans. The heritage center seeks to raise awareness of what positive psychologists such as Marshall Duke, PhD, refer to as an Intergenerational Self. Marshall Duke's research has shown that exposure to personal family narratives reflecting the oscillating success and failure realities of life, was highly correlated with resilience, or the ability to adapt successfully to challenges in life. By engaging participants in our organization in their own families multigenerational stories we provoke and culturally enriching community events that challenge them to understand their place in history, both as individuals and family members, from various perspectives. Through genealogy, genetic ancestry, our 6th grade Giants' Immigrant Experience Academy, oral history and video documentaries, fine and folk art classes, language, cultural, and music camps, and lectures and festivals, and Ola and Per folk humor, we provide our community with a diverse set of experiences to view our society historically from an antiquarian, monumental, and deconstructive perspective. Again, Dr. Duke's longitudinal studies at Emory University have shown that families and communities familiar with an oscillating narrative based upon shared stories, have life expectations set that empower them to adapt to those issues that arise in their lives. Within Spring Grove's family tree, currently numbering 65,000 individuals we can find thousands of individual stories representing the classic myths that Dr. Duke and Dr. Robyn Fyvush have shown to be important for cultivating resilience. These mythic elements, as outlined by others and well explained by individuals such as Joseph Campbell, include:
Overcoming the Monster
The Quest
Voyage and Return
Rags to Riches
Tragedy
Comedy
Rebirth.
Giants of the Earth hopes that, wherever you live, you and your family take some time pass down stories from older generations and to actively listen to and encourage the questions that younger generations have as they try to understand and create their own unique contribution to your family's narrative.
What are the organization's key strategies for making this happen?
For thousands of years noble lies have evolved and been dogmatically clung to, resulting in strife and war between different cultures who have over-extended the truths of myths into geopolitical areas resulting in unnecessary conflict. Science and true history have the power to transcend the idiosyncracies that divide us and bring us together as a people, all while helping us set reasonable expectations of what is possible in life. Our Genetic Ancestry and Genealogy program acquaints people with thousands of their genetic cousins, helping them to share historical photos, preserve diaries, and learn more about their unique history in order to preserve and at the same time better deconstruct their family narratives. Our Oral Histories program provides a lovely way to preserve the stories of our seniors for generations of children. The stories of children's families provide a very interesting way for children to engage with history, and to appreciate the truly patchwork quilt aspects of their genetic and memetic makeup. Our Norwegian Ridge Language Camp provides wonderful experiences for children to engage with another culture and to learn another language.
What are the organization's capabilities for doing this?
We have a very capable staff, but would like to expand our paid staff in order ensure continuity and also recruit capable people for our technically demanding programs.
What have they accomplished so far and what's next?
Our goals of providing Genetic Ancestry services have been met insofar as we have a staff that helps people with their Genetic Ancestry questions Monday through Saturday from 10-5. We have thousands of hours of videos we have collected from our community, some historical, but we hope to continue to document the history of our area with our Oral Histories. We have been actively collecting video histories from area farmers, and have presented these in our local cinema and on Facebook. Our videos are extremely popular on YouTube and we take pride in the fact that we have the foresight to preserve the stories of so many WWII veterans while we still could. Our Language Camps have also been successful, with large number of children each summer longing to return next year for another fun camp.
Financials
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Operations
The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick.
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Connect with nonprofit leaders
SubscribeBuild relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. Try a low commitment monthly plan today.
- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
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GIANTS OF THE EARTH HERITAGE CENTER
Board of directorsas of 06/18/2019
Karen Gray
Bluff Country Artists, Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum, Trinity Lutheran Church Council
Term: 2009 - 2017
Michael Schmidt
Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum Board of Trustees Vice Chair
Term: 2009 - 2017
Diane Schmidt
No Affiliation
Karen Fried
Spring Grove Public Schools, Bluff Country Artists
Bill Fried
Spring Grove Public High School, Bluff Country Artists
Jillellyn Storlie
Sons of Norway
James Gray
Tri-County Veterinary Services, Bluff Country Artists
Georgia Rosendahl
Sons of Norway
Mary Ann Thurmer
Spring Grove Area Past, Present, and Future
Johnathan Storlie
No Affiliation
Lee Grippen
Sons of Norway
Laura Thorson
Icon Constructors, LLC
Judy Tollefsrud