Jesse Phenow ’14 Receives 4 Under 40 Achievement Award

When Jesse Phenow ’14 signed up to volunteer with a refugee resettlement organization in 2011, he didn’t know it would shape his future. He was majoring in relational communication studies at Bethel, and the volunteer hours were a course requirement. But what began with weekly meetings with a family who was resettling in Minnesota evolved into so much more. 

The family of nine was K'nyaw (also known as Karen), a minority group from Myanmar, and was resettling in Minnesota after fleeing violence and oppression. Phenow and a classmate would spend Sunday afternoons with the family: hanging out with the seven sons, taking them to the grocery store, going to the park, flipping through the mail. Despite language barriers, they formed a bond, and organically their once-a-week hangouts became more frequent. They’d pick the family up to go see a movie on a Tuesday night or take them to dinner in Monson Dining Center. The family would visit Bethel for Saturday football games to watch Phenow, the Royals' running back, play—and then after the games, Phenow would spend time with his biological family and his K'nyaw family together. 

Phenow says he initially approached that first volunteer opportunity thinking he was going to be a helper—but he quickly realized he was the one being helped. “This community had absolutely no need for me, no reason to welcome me,” Phenow says. “The level of hospitality that they have extended has marked my life forever.”   

After about a year of spending time with his K'nyaw family, Phenow used his senior thesis as an opportunity to learn more about the history of the K'nyaw people. Then upon graduation, he spent the summer working and saving money so he could travel to Thailand, which borders Myanmar. Thailand provides temporary shelter to the thousands of refugees throughout its seven refugee camps, but the country has also become a place of more permanent residence for some K'nyaw people as well. “I bought a ticket and went to Thailand with the intention of learning more about this family’s story,” Phenow says. “I wanted to see the places and spaces they had occupied and to learn more about the reality of the situation.” 

Phenow spent much of his time in Mae Sot, Thailand, which is occupied by many K'nyaw and Burmese people. Phenow describes Mae Sot as the hub of the resistance to Myanmar’s long-held military regime, under which minority groups, like the K'nyaw, have faced violence and oppression. 

While in Thailand, Phenow visited Mae La, Thailand’s largest refugee camp, which was occupied by nearly 60,000 people at the time. He witnessed the daily life of people who’d been displaced by violence and grew in his understanding of the crisis. In Mae Sot, Phenow connected with various resistance groups and aid organizations, and over the span of several months got to know a group of K'nyaw men who were similar to him in age. They became friends, and one of them invited Phenow to stay in his village in the Karen State in Myanmar, where he witnessed the daily life of K'nyaw people in a village context. “That, in a way, rounded out the experience. I had experienced and witnessed life in a village, life in a refugee camp, and life in a third-country after resettlement,” Phenow says. “I got these glimpses into different parts of my family’s story. I by no means shared their experience, but I got to witness snapshots of it. I started to understand more of the cultural context, and that ultimately made our relationship closer.” 

Collectively, Phenow spent just less than a year in Thailand and Myanmar, and then upon returning to Minnesota, he began his first full-time job as a mental health practitioner within St. Paul’s K'nyaw and Karenni communities, both groups that have fled Myanmar. He visited the homes of people who were experiencing post-traumatic stress after what they had seen and experienced in their homeland or the refugee camps. At the time, Phenow lived with his parents in Richfield, but he continued to spend time with his K'nyaw family in St. Paul as well. There were many nights he’d hang out with the family, stay the night at their place, and then go to work the next day. “We were pretty consistently hanging out and operating as family,” Phenow says. They went on to purchase a home together, where Phenow lived with the family until he got married last fall. 

In 2016, Phenow’s K'nyaw family found out some of their relatives would be coming to Minnesota to resettle. It was the mother’s brother, along with his wife and six children. The children grew up in the same refugee camp as the seven boys Phenow had gotten to know so well. He affectionately calls this family “the cousins.”

In the first weeks of the cousins' resettlement in Minnesota, Phenow found it challenging to be there as much as he wanted to—and so he started to see this as an opportunity for someone else to join this family during their acclimation to Minnesota. “It seemed like an opportunity for someone other than me to not just gain a beautiful kinship but to really learn and experience a lot of the things that I had gotten to experience with my family,” Phenow says. He started a small literacy program with his family, the cousins, and several other K'nyaw families—and then he invited several other Bethel alumni and friends to get involved. “I chose people who I felt would walk into that space in the right way, get to know the families, and really seek to understand.” Over time, Luke ’14 and Tessa Buttenhoff ’16 developed a relationship with the cousins, similar to the kinship Phenow had formed with his family, eventually purchasing a home near theirs.  

Phenow continued to run “unofficial” programming in partnership with the K'nyaw community, until 2019 when, with the support of the Buttenhoffs, he and some of his K'nyaw family and friends founded an organization they called The Urban Village. “I had witnessed that village culture, and the others that I worked with to start the organization had personally experienced the village mentality, where you look out for one another, raise each other’s kids, and help people when they need help,” Phenow explains. “We wanted to create a place modeled after those values in an urban setting.” 

The Urban Village had humble beginnings. Phenow says they had little money and he didn’t know how to run a nonprofit. But to him, the most important thing was that they were listening to what the community said it needed. “That’s something I feel very passionately about. Even though I’ve had this incredibly intimate vantage point to understand the K'nyaw refugee experience in Minnesota, it gives me no right to decide what the needs of the community are and what to do about the needs,” Phenow says. “But what it does give me is an opportunity to ask questions, to use my experience to dig deeper, and to lean on the connections that I have created to get at some of those answers.” 

Today, the work of The Urban Village revolves around its mission to accompany K'nyaw and Karenni youth as they connect with their cultural heritage and history, heal from both past and present traumas of displacement, and launch as future leaders in the community and beyond. “We’re not expecting to create the path or lead kids anywhere. This generation of K'nyaw and Karenni youth are on their own journey, and we just want to be a part of it,” Phenow says. “The reality is, they’ve experienced really difficult circumstances. Those circumstances don’t go away after resettlement. K'nyaw and Karenni people have fled violence in their homeland. They’ve experienced disenfranchisement, oppression, and degradation of their people in the refugee camps. Those things don’t necessarily stop when you get on a plane. They just evolve.”  

Practically speaking, The Urban Village provides a community space, programming, and resources for youth throughout their developmental years. Their biggest programmatic offering in recent months was their summer camp series. More than 100 kids attended the K'nyaw Camp at Sibley State Park, and nearly 60 attended the Karenni Camp in Amery, Wisconsin. Through reflective sessions on cultural history, language, and traditions, attendees had the opportunity to further connect with both their own cultural identity and each other. In addition to the K'nyaw and Karenni camps, Phenow also accompanied a smaller group of young leaders on a Boundary Waters camping trip. 

In recent years, The Urban Village has seen an increasing number of K'nyaw and Karenni youth interested in attending Bethel for their undergraduate degrees, and so Phenow approached the university about creating a one-for-one match scholarship to reduce the financial barriers K'nyaw and Karenni students face. The Urban Village had secured initial funding from Fight For Something, a local nonprofit run by Bethel alumnus Mitch Reaume ’13, and Bethel was able to offer a two-for-one match. For each $3,500 contributed, Bethel would contribute $7,000. Together, they created the Fight For Something scholarship. Bethel and The Urban Village hope to be able to offer the scholarship to ten new students each year. 

As a community, The Urban Village also works to support K'nyaw and Karenni individuals who are still living within the borders of Myanmar as violence continues to escalate. Phenow has made several trips back to Myanmar, alongside K'nyaw and Karenni community members, to deliver supplies to people who have been forced to flee. Many members of the K'nyaw and Karenni communities in the Twin Cities still have family in Myanmar, so for them—and for Bethel’s growing community of K'nyaw and Karenni students—this humanitarian crisis isn’t merely a memory. It’s a present reality.  

“It’s a deeply seeded belief in my soul that we can’t be free until we’re all free,” Phenow says. “Being close to this community has shown me that I am not free because of their continued marginalization and oppression, not just in their homeland, but here as well.” 

While Phenow feels specifically called to his work with The Urban Village, he feels passionately that as Christians we all have a responsibility on behalf of people who are marginalized. “As people who say we follow someone as radical as Jesus, it requires us to adhere to some of those teachings with a little bit of sweat and blood,” he says, “to really move into the reality and the precedent that he set around what committing life to love and justice looks like.” 

Looking ahead to next year, Phenow will be co-leading a three-week study abroad experience in Thailand, with Ripley Smith, professor of media communication and co-chair of the communication studies department. “I’m super excited. We’re taking 25 students, and a number of them are K'nyaw,” Phenow says. The K'nyaw students will serve as student-leaders on the trip which will focus on learning about what’s happening along the Thailand-Myanmar border in terms of displacement and humanitarian assistance. “We’re going to have access to some of the most prominent people in the resistance movement. The students are going to get a pretty amazing experience and opportunity to learn from peacemakers who are entrenched in a revolution.” 

Nominate the next 4 Under 40 recipients!

Bethel University’s National Alumni Board annually seeks and accepts nominations for the 4 Under 40 Alumni Achievement Award. The selection is made from Bethel University graduates 40 years of age or younger who have had outstanding achievements in their career, public service, or volunteer activities.

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