(lively music) (dramatic music) - Hello and welcome to "Prairie Pulse."

Coming up a little bit later in the show, we'll get instructions on how to use high-tech equipment at the Becker County Museum in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota.

But first, our guest joining me now is Dr. and Reverend Aaron Suomala Folkerds, who teaches counseling at Minnesota State University Moorhead, and also helps the Moorhead Police Department.

Thanks for joining us today.

- Yeah, great to be with you.

Thanks for having me.

- A lot of information that I gave people there.

- Yeah.

- But let's start off first with, tell the folks a little bit about yourself and your background maybe.

- Sure.

Sure.

Well, I've kind of taken a circuitous career, been involved in a lot of different things.

Currently I work full-time at MSUM, Minnesota State University Moorhead, in the counseling Master's program, and also work as a wellness coordinator with the Moorhead Police Department.

I have lived in Moorhead for the last 10 years.

We've got just a wonderful community in the Fargo-Moorhead area.

Married to my wife, Mary, who's a pastor at Good Shepherd in Moorhead.

Have a son, Paul.

And we have two exchange students living with us as well.

One from Rwanda named Esther, and one from Slovakia, and her name is Tamaya and she just celebrated a birthday yesterday and just love being in this community.

In addition to all the other work I'm doing, I'm also a private pilot and I love flying.

That's kind of my, that's my hobby on the side that gives me great joy and my stress relief.

So, I love- I'm a curious person, love to do lots of different things.

- Well, it sounds like it.

And we are gonna talk about a few different things.

You may have added one, now you're a pilot too.

How did it happen, university professor and ordained minister?

- Goes back to the whole notion of, I'm just curious.

I'm interested in everybody and (chuckling) everything.

So I graduated from University of Minnesota Morris with my undergrad.

Worked for a couple years in insurance.

And down at Minneapolis at Lutheran Brotherhood, my wife and I decided to go to seminary.

So we both went to seminary in Chicago.

Spent about five years down in Chicago.

And while I was there, I worked for a year as a hospital chaplain on the south side of Chicago.

And that's where I really became interested in kind of the counseling aspect of things.

I always kind of knew I was gonna be a pastor, my dad's a pastor, but then doing that work, there's a hospital chaplain there who'd introduced me to kind of the world of counseling.

And then started a Master's program in Southern Minnesota when we were working as pastors down kind of in the New Ulm area.

So finished out my Master's degree in counseling at Minnesota State Mankato, and then entered into the doctoral program shortly after that.

And I worked both as a pastor and as a counselor kind of simultaneously throughout my career.

That's why I say I've had a circuitous career, just interested in everything.

And then eventually moved in to teaching.

And I've been, this is my fourth year of teaching at MSUM and then I taught for a year at University of Mary before that, so- - So where, you know, where do you minister and what's your philosophy or denomination?

- Sure, so I'm a part of the ELCA, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

So currently, I'm not actively working as a pastor.

I do help consult.

I'm the, officially I'm the Minister of Mental Health with the Northwestern Minnesota Synod.

So I help consult with pastors, different mental health issues within the church, and also just consult with people who might need referrals for counseling and those sorts of things.

So.

- Okay.

Well, then let's turn to your job with Moorhead Police Department.

What's your role with the department?

- Sure.

So again, kind of like my career.

I'm always doing a lot of things at once.

I started off there as a chaplain, so I'm the chaplain at the Moorhead Police Department.

And then once I finished my doctoral degree and re-careered into teaching, then started in a role, a part-time role as a wellness coordinator, an embedded mental health professional at the police department.

- Hm mm.

Did the department approach you about this or did, you know, how did it all come about?

- Sure, sure.

The way it kind of came about, this is a long, this is a while back now, 2016, I was working as a pastor actively at that time at Christ the King in Moorhead.

And a letter went out just asking area pastors if they'd be interested in considering being a chaplain.

And having worked as a hospital chaplain in Chicago, I missed that chaplaincy piece, you know, I hadn't been working as a chaplain.

I thought, hey, this would be a great opportunity.

I also have worked as an EMT.

I'm an EMT, emergency medical technician.

Ran with an ambulance in Southern Minnesota when I was down there.

And I've always had an interest in working with first responders.

I was also on our local fire department in La Salle and was kind of the medical professional for them, was a first responder in our area.

So I carried a ditch kit and all that to help get things started when the ambulance came.

So, I worked a lot with law enforcement as well at the hospital in Chicago.

So just had a heart for law enforcement and for those that work in the first responder trades.

And so I thought, hey, this is an excellent opportunity.

Answered the call and then started off as a chaplain there in a volunteer capacity from 2016.

And then in 2020 is when I went on as a part-time wellness coordinator, an embedded mental health professional.

- Yeah, can you talk about the stress of being a police officer?

- Yeah.

- And the stress you see when counseling officers?

- Sure.

Yeah, it's a very stressful position.

Just to give you an example, you know, the average person might encounter one or two critical incidents.

And a critical incident being like a traumatic incident of some kind that someone might experience.

Whereas a police officer might encounter between 600 to 800 critical incidents over the course of their career.

So they're seeing trauma evolve, varieties.

You know, doing CPR on a young child, you're seeing difficult car accidents, going to unattended deaths.

It could be a whole variety of different things.

And there's kind of that notion of vicarious trauma, where you're seeing the trauma of others, you're experiencing that trauma sometimes firsthand.

And that can be incredibly stressful for an officer.

And that's part of the role that I serve.

I'm not doing any active counseling at the police department but I'm there to help officers process calls.

And we also do things like critical incidents, stress debriefing, which is a process to work through a difficult call.

And also available to help kind of be a bridge between the police department and like our employee assistance program and help officers get connected to more formal counseling.

- Yeah.

Of course, I know confidentiality, you can't say much probably about certain events or anything, but is there anything that you can allude to?

I mean, do you go out, do you work only with the police officers?

Are you a connection between the officers and even the families that they're dealing with at times?

Do you deal with that?

- Yeah, yeah.

Occasionally I'll go out.

You know, if it's an unattended death or something like that and there's family present that perhaps might need some support, I go out on calls occasionally.

And I think that's a really great thing, you know, that we can show up and not only are we caring for the family, you know, in terms of what has to happen, you know, by law and legally, those sorts of things, but we're also caring for families in our community from an emotional perspective as well.

And so I've done that a number of times where I've gone out and cared for families.

And that's a real honor to be able to go out and just sit with people during one of their most difficult days and to hear their story and to be a support for families.

- Is your position common amongst other police departments, across the nation for that matter or is it a little unique in its own right?

- Yeah, it's becoming more common.

But when we started in 2020, we were probably one of maybe 12 departments across the country that had somebody embedded within the department.

So it was a pretty, pretty rare thing to have a person like me in that role.

- Yeah, how many officers are employed at Moorhead Police Department, and do you ever counsel other police departments, I guess?

- Sure, sure.

I think we're allotted 61 officers, but just with kind of the shortage of getting people connected (chuckling) into the policing trade, you know we're, I think we're maybe around 50 or so, a little over that, but we're allotted for 61.

So I'm just involved in working with the Moorhead Police Department.

Occasionally I'll do some consulting with other departments.

I've been down to the Alexandria, the law enforcement school down there.

I've done some talks down there and connected with some of the cadets kind of coming up through the ranks.

- You know, with the advent of body cam footage of becoming more and more prevalent, I guess, makes it a little more transparent for the officers, but it also probably brings on more stress for the job, doesn't it, or?

- It's actually, from the officers I've talked to, it's actually the opposite.

That they're glad that that's there, that it's just a, in some ways they almost feel like it's an extra set of protection that, you know, they're able to show exactly what happened on a particular call.

- Yeah so, you know, as you, since you're close to it with the department, from a national perspective, do you see most police officers, you know, doing a good job, but yet when a bad incident occurs, whether it's George Floyd or things like Memphis, you know, it gives the officers a bad name.

So, how do you balance this or analyze that when you think about it or talk about it?

- Sure.

Yeah.

Well every industry has kind of bad actors, so to speak.

The officers I've worked with and I've seen are just the most incredible people that I've ever encountered and worked with.

It's a very complex job, very difficult job.

And one of the things that we're really working hard at doing is helping to take care of the officer.

You know, officers, healthy officers are gonna have healthy interactions with the public.

And so that's a key part of our wellness program and why you're seeing wellness programs really grow and expand across the country.

It's been really interesting just in the last five years how people are paying more and more attention to officer wellness and I think it's a really wonderful thing.

I was at a conference down in Atlanta just about a year and a half ago, and there were a thousand police officers from across the country at this wellness conference.

And it seems like more and more departments are looking at ways of taking care of their officers.

- You know, do officers come to you for counseling or is it mandated on certain cases that they have to circle around and get counseling?

Or do you have regular sessions?

Or any, all the above?

I don't know.

- Sure.

And I'm not, again, I'm not doing any formal counseling but I'm always available for officers just to debrief, you know, anything at work or at home.

And so officers take me up on that, on that offer to be able to just be available.

And it's all about that relationship, right?

That's a really key thing.

And I keep regular office hours at the department.

I try to be there, you know.

At least five hours a week, I've got an office there and officers stop by.

And sometimes I find it's just having those general conversations about life, hunting, fishing, you know, that really can be an effective way of connecting with officers.

Even taking some officers flying and I want to continue expanding that as well.

That's been really a fun way to connect with them.

And, you know, there's something when you're flying, you know, 4 or 5,000 feet above the ground, you get a little different perspective on life.

And so that's been fun.

- We can talk about that later, I guess.

But going back here, in your opinion, what's the hardest job of being a police officer?

- Yeah, I think it's that, you know, the unknowns of the job.

You know, you're always thinking about safety, you know, I think that's a challenging thing.

And I think that you're dealing with that percent of the population that can be, you know, challenging.

And sometimes I think that that can maybe cloud your perception, you know, just of what life is like, maybe it's sometimes hard to be, you know, positive when you're dealing with such difficult challenges day in, day out with your job.

So I think those are all kind of challenging aspects of the position.

- You mentioned some vacancies, you know, what do you hear or see about police departments across the region or across the country having trouble filling positions or recruiting officers?

Especially due to the stress and high profile cases that are in the papers all the time?

- Right, yeah it's gone down significantly.

I don't have an exact statistic for you, but something like applications are down 80% over the last, you know, 10 years or so.

And even schools, law enforcement programs, there's less students that are going into the profession as well.

So at some level we're almost at a really, at a crisis level, I think, 'cause more and more retirements are happening and less people are kind of answering the call, so to speak, to become a police officer.

- Yeah.

Well let's switch gears a little bit from police officer to university.

What classes do you teach at Moorhead State?

- Sure.

So we're a small department.

There's just three of us.

So I teach a whole variety of different courses.

So I teach, this semester I'm teaching diagnosis and treatment planning and multicultural counseling, family counseling, a child and adolescent counseling, just kind of runs the gamut.

Counseling theories, ethics, skills, whole variety of different classes.

So it's a pretty big Master's degree and it's preparing people to become licensed professional clinical counselors.

- And for those who caught me, it's Minnesota State University Moorhead to get it correctly.

But some of the publications you've written or specific research you've done, tell us about that.

- Yeah, so my dissertation was on issues around grief and loss and death.

You know, working as a pastor, I worked a lot with issues of death and grief and loss, a lot of funerals.

And I got into the counseling world and I realized, wow, we don't really talk a whole lot about grief and loss.

I wonder how we're doing with that?

So I did a dissertation looking at counseling journals and how we cover issues of grief and loss in counseling journals.

So I analyzed five different journals over 36 years and looked at well over 6,000 articles.

And what I found is that 1% of the articles are about grief and loss.

So death is something that affects 100% of us but it was only talked about 1% of the time in the counseling journals.

So that's kind of been my main area.

And then also working with first responders and police officers, is another topic as well.

- Hm mm.

Yeah, what role does religion play in modern life?

And is declining church membership, are you seeing that?

And, you know, is that an issue, do you feel or not?

- Yeah.

Yeah, I think that, you know, people, we're talking about religion and spirituality and you look at kind of what religion means and it means reconnection, you know.

And so I think that's really the role of religion, is connection.

Connection to each other and also connection to a higher power, however you envision that higher power.

Mother Teresa diagnosed the problems of the world by saying that the problem with the world is we've forgotten that we belong to each other.

And I think that religion, spirituality can remind us that we're deeply connected to each other.

And I think that that's also perhaps at the core of why mental health issues continue to be on the rise.

I think there's kind of an epidemic of the fact that we've forgotten that we belong to each other as a society and as a world.

- You know, you talked a lot about things that are, what I wrote down here, work-life balance, being a pilot, taking people up, there's some tranquility to being up in the clouds or flying over.

- Yeah.

- Can you speak to that at all about, especially as it relates to stress and things for, whether it's police officer or any job?

- Perspective.

(chuckling) It's all about perspective.

I had the opportunity to fly with my flight instructor in a Cessna Citation jet from down to Arizona.

And we were flying back at night and we're up, you know, 30-some thousand feet.

And from that perspective, I could see Sioux Falls and I could see Fargo, I could see Bismarck all from that perspective, you know.

And, you know, from Fargo to Bismarck, or to Sioux Falls, that's about, what, four hours, something like that.

And I could, it was just a few inches from my perspective.

I could cover up- I could cover up Fargo with my thumb.

And it just puts things in perspective.

And I think that that, for me that's, that's the way I try to mitigate my stress, is just to put things in perspective.

- So what's the best part of your job or jobs, you know, is there?

- I get to do it all.

I'm a curious person.

I get to connect with people and hear people's stories.

It's a great honor to walk with people, you know, people who are struggling but people who are doing well too.

And just to be with people, people are pretty amazing.

- Well thanks for joining us today and thanks for all your information.

- [Aaron] Yeah, great to be with you.

Thank you.

- Stay tuned for more.

(lively music) The new Becker County Museum in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, is a long time dream come true for the community.

Among the new features is an entire floor dedicated to science and STEM programming for visitors of all ages.

(funky techno music) - STEM and science and math are so important in today's world.

You see more and more industries in our own region involving things like robots and coding every single day.

And so the goal is to be able to teach them that problem-solving, working together but also the ability to work independently.

- We go off deeper into the sort of makerspace, really super science stuff like 3D printing, lasers.

We have a Wazer, and things like that.

So where you can actually make and learn things that are part of industry.

So there's a couple of different ways you can approach 3D printing.

If you really want to do the work or you want to do something custom, you create it in the computer on the screen until you think you've got it.

You build that slowly but surely with shape.

So here's a cylinder, we pull a cylinder in.

And we can use the tools to set the height and the size and the rotation and all of that.

And you add shapes together one by one to create what you want for your final outcome.

And you take that file in whatever way you can, you get it to your 3D printer.

That can be a thumb drive, it can be on a network, it can be a lot of things.

And then you start the 3D printer doing that.

And what it does is it takes a plastic filament, many different materials available, draws it into the head, melts it, and squirts it out in a little pattern on the table that eventually builds from the bottom-up in layers, your 3D design.

And there's a lot of things about that, the density, whether the inside is filled, solid or hollow, that kind of thing.

What the structure is, what the material is, all the temperatures.

And it makes your creation on the table.

(lively techno music) Laser engraver cutters do two different things.

They use a laser, in this case it's a CO2 laser.

So CO2 lasers are applicable to things that you can set on fire.

That's basically your standard of guessing is if, can I laser this?

Well, will it set on fire if I put it in the campfire?

Yes.

Okay.

So with that, you have kind of the same thing.

You have a computer program where you generate your graphic.

And you have to decide between two things, engrave or cut.

Again, you get your graphic to your laser, however that is, put the material in the bed.

You set the focus because of how far you are from the laser is critically important.

And so then you start your burn and hopefully you learn a few tricks along the way.

So I've got our work material lined up on the bed of the big laser, again, ready to do this.

And so the first thing we do is we go into the screen, and we go to the Function, and we choose Autofocus down here (electronic beeps) and hit Enter.

And Autofocus is gonna raise the bed or the Z axis until it touches the sensor, and then it's gonna back down away from it, the exact correct distance.

And you can verify that with the focus light there, the little red dot, is right under the laser head so we can tell that it's the right distance away.

It uses a little parallax to do that.

The laser head is straight up and down.

The focus light comes from over here at an angle.

And so when it's the correct distance, they cross.

So then, we'll close the lid because you can't run this one with the lid open because it will sever limbs.

(lively music) So our piece is done, so we're gonna open it up and we're gonna see if I still have a job or not.

So there's the boss's folder with a nice lightly engraved re-imagine logo.

(lively music) So with laser, we actually have two different lasers here.

We have the large format, more industrial laser that's a little harder on the frontend then the software.

You have to kind of have a real good knowledge of what you're doing and know a lot of the factors about it.

We also have a smaller laser that's branded as the Glowforge and that's getting popular in the makerspace world.

And that one is super easy to use.

Of course, the capabilities are lower and smaller, it's less power, it's a smaller bed size, all of those things.

But the interface for it is super simple.

It's a webpage basically.

You go there, you drag an image into it or you drag an outline into it.

You can get a lot of that stuff off of Etsy and other places like that.

And poof, in just minutes, you can unbox this thing and be lasering on a small scale nice, neat little things.

(lively music) The WAZER is interesting and that again is one of those things where Becky came in and said, "Hey, I've got an idea."

And I'm like, "What is a WAZER?"

(laughing) And then I saw it and we did an online demo with it and I'm like, "We have to have a WAZER.

It's really cool."

So WAZER is a brand name or a branded name for water jet cutting.

The water jet cutting, again, is important because it's used in industry for a lot of things.

Industries have been cutting on large expensive water jet cutters for maybe a decade or two.

The WAZER brings that to a scale that a lot of us can have, or at least some place like the museum can have it around so you can come in and touch it.

And it literally says in the intro too, it cuts anything, which I find, you know, I'm like, "Ooh, it cuts anything."

But it uses high pressure water, much like a pressure washer.

And then it adds in a little bit of real fine sand that has sharp edges of an abrasive material.

It mixes those two together and it shoots it at your material at an extreme rate of speed.

And then that will trace out and cut out a pattern in whatever you put in there.

So you can make an image or a shape, a pattern on your computer, send it to this thing, and it'll cut it out with great precision.

And I'm gonna pick the logo, re-imagine.

And there's a few steps.

Prepare the machine to cut it.

Yep, that's sure what I want to do.

Lift the nozzle clear of any obstructions.

So you manually lift the nozzle up so that there's room under it.

Okay, I've done that.

And what it's gonna do is it's gonna hone itself now.

So it's gonna find the starting corner and calibrate itself and make sure that it's good to go.

And then I'm gonna choose Cut Material.

And it's gonna tell me to close the lid.

And then we press this to start it.

Now this one is noisy and messy.

Here we go.

(machine whizzing) The mistakes I made here, you can see, it's a little over-cut in areas.

It isn't really ready to break completely out, but it came pretty close for a first try.

But that's part of STEM steam and the fun of learning as you work through those things, one iteration at a time until you get it.

(lively music) - We spoke with teachers, "When you come to this facility, what sorts of lessons would you like your kids to take away from it?

What sorts of opportunities are you wanting us to provide?"

It also reinforces.

Many of our area schools have lasers.

Many of our area schools now have 3D printers.

What something like this at our local museum offers is the ability for a teacher to give an assignment now.

You go and print this project, you go and create this piece.

And it challenges students to learn a little bit on their own without maybe a teacher looking right over their shoulder.

- Well, that's all we have on "Prairie Pulse" for this week.

And as always, thanks for watching.

(lively music) - [Presenter] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, (lively music continuing) and by the members of Prairie Public.

(dramatic music)