So Much Summer Fun!
By: Kaare Melby
9/2/2025
Summer has been flying by, and while we are exhausted, it’s been fun! There have been too many wonderful moments to recap them all, but we wanted to share a few summer highlights with you. First off, we felt very blessed to host a film showing of the new documentary: Finland, Minnesota. This film featured many community members and captures the essence and character of our community. After the film, we were excited to serve fresh-baked sourdough pizza using our new pizza oven. This was the first time we had fired it up for a public event, and it was a huge success. Special thanks to Shawn Nowotczynski for helping to prepare the pizza. The film is now going on tour to Finland (Europe) and visiting many film festivals with its creators: William Besonen and Issac Hanson. Due to agreements with those film festivals, we weren’t able to get a public copy of the film. But they have assured us that once they return to the USA, they will be able to get us a copy, and maybe we can have another showing of the film.
The Finland Community Youth Program took its show on the road and brought youth activities to the Finland Heritage Site for the Tori this summer. They had face painting, balloon animals, crafts, and more. A good time was had by all.
Another event we wanted to tell you about was the From Farm To Table event that was coordinated by the Finland Food Chain and made possible by a grant from the USDA Local Food Purchase Assistance Program.
At this event we were able to provide many local families with locally grown and raised foods. The grant funds paid the farmers for their goods, allowing us to offer the food free of charge to the Finland community. We were excited by the big turnout, and we were able to distribute all of the food to families in only a few short hours. Projects like this help increase food security in our community and help build local food resilience by supporting new farmers in our area.
Finally, we want to thank everyone who came out to the Labor Day Community Picnic! It was a great success, and we had a lovely time hanging out and sharing another end-of-summer meal together.
These events really underline how important it is for all of us to get together just for fun – just to enjoy each other’s company. That’s definitely part of our community’s cultural heritage. Special thanks to Greg and Cindy Hanson for coordinating the Labor Day Community Picnic.
But don’t for a moment think that we’re going to wind down with summer. We have many fun events and activities coming up, from the booya to the farmers market to the Halloween festival, we’re just getting started with the fun.
