Chief Park Ranger
While attending Macalester College in the mid 1970s, Dan became enthralled with the food co-op movement as a constructive way to work for a better world and left to help establish the cooperative distributor DANCe Warehouse in 1975. Over the next 10 years he and other collective members pioneered principles of democratic management and built DANCe into a profitable distribution company serving over 150 food co-ops in the five state area around Minnesota. Dan’s principle job was managing the trucking department and, as was the style of worker/managed businesses, logged lots of miles and pounds doing deliveries.
When he left in 1985, he got one of those early Macintoshes and started a fledgling desktop-publishing business in his basement. As his view of the outside world but not his future was framed by a basement window, he called it MicroHorizons Graphics. Gratefully, the work was fun and rewarding as his network of co-ops and nonprofits were doing good for the world—and so by extension, was he. Who needed money?
Eventually, several very talented people took notice and joined him in his quest to design for a better world. In 1996 the business moved to offices with a lovely view of a park in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis that became our namesake. There were other reasons why Triangle Park was chosen, but no one can quite remember what they were.
Dan thinks he’s a pretty lucky guy. “I learned long ago doing soul satisfying work satisfies the soul. Is there something else we should be doing? Our group gets a kick out of helping our clients create a more economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable world (ah, there’s the triangle thing).
Today, Dan manages Triangle Park’s various networks, drums up new business, does the accounting, and all the other things a Chief Park Ranger would do in a way that is consistent with the values that were installed in him early on working in cooperative enterprises.
Dan still enthralled with cooperatives. He serves on the amazing Seward Community Co-op board of directors, (14 years now), and is defacto general manager of the food co-op trade association Cooperative Grocer Network.
In 2009 he was a proud recipient of the Cooperative Development Foundation’s Howard Bowers Award for Cooperative Service.
Phone: (612) 436-9177 | Email: dan@triangleparkcreative.com