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Member Spotlight By Sonya Steven As a Minnesota State Senator and as an Assistant Hennepin County Attorney, Jane Ranum has built an impressive professional resume that reflects her passion for public service. As a legislator, Senator Ranum is known as a committed and effective advocate with a record of taking on tough issues with the ultimate goal of reforming systems to better serve Minnesota citizens. As an Assistant Hennepin County Attorney, she has fought for justice in many arenas affecting public life: adult and juvenile prosecution, child support enforcement and mental health advocacy, child protection. She has received recognition for her work: her constituents have re-elected her, her colleagues have honored her, and numerous groups have acknowledged her with awards and commendations. But to me the thing that makes Jane Ranum stand out among the crowd is her enduring interest in and compassion for people from all walks of life. She listens with concentration, she questions, she learns. And then she acts, based on knowledge rooted in the real life experiences of her community. Jane Ranum began her professional life as a teacher. Following graduation from East Carolina University with a degree in elementary education, she taught in her home state of North Carolina and then in Germany. There she met Minnesotan Jim Ranum. They married and settled in Minneapolis, and Jane continued her teaching in Apple Valley. Law intrigued her, though, and she left teaching for Hamline Law School, receiving her J.D. in 1979. After a District Court clerkship and several years of private practice focused on family law, as a new mother she joined the Hennepin County Attorney's Office in 1982 as one of the early members of the job share program begun by County Attorney Tom Johnson. It was there that I met her and had the delight of sharing an assignment with her in Juvenile Prosecution, giving me the opportunity to personally observe some of Jane's defining characteristics: her commitment to justice, her love for her family, her tenacity, her compassion, her capacity for unstinting hard work, and her enduring optimism even in the face of incredible problems. We also both were given first-hand knowledge of some of the intractable challenges within the juvenile justice system. Jane responded to the challenges. Understanding that systems change requires support through public policy decisions made at a statewide level, she decided to run for her home Senate District 63 seat. She was elected in 1990, and has since been re-elected 4 times (1992, 1996, 2000, and 2002). Her work in the Senate reflects her ongoing concern for education, crime prevention and child welfare, as well as her concern for making a difference through effective systemic reform. As a senior member of the Senate DFL caucus, she now serves as chair of the State Government Budget Division Committee and also serves as a member of the Crime Prevention and Public Safety, Education, Finance, and Rules and Administration Committees and the Maternal and Child Health Advisory Board. Previously she has chaired the Senate Crime Prevention and Judiciary Committees. Some of the key legislation that Senator Ranum has authored and championed during the 13 years of her Senate tenure include funding for Minnesota's 911 emergency system; funding for CriMNet, our integrated criminal justice information system; the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 1994; child protection reform (the "alternative response" approach to child protection); and numerous bills to improve the judicial and social service system responses to victims of domestic violence. Her work for positive change extends beyond the legislature, too, to ongoing and diverse involvement in the community. Recently, for example, she was one of the members of the Minneapolis Police Chief Selection Committee. Other contributions include service on the WATCH Advisory Board, the Program and Appointments Committee of MWL, and the University of Minnesota's Children, Youth and Family Consortium. Additionally, during her years in the Senate, when not in legislative session, Jane has continued as an assistant county attorney, keeping actively engaged in front-line work, experiencing the challenges of real-life implementation of legislative enactments. And throughout all of this, daughter Betsy and husband Jim have provided motivation, encouragement, and grounding for her activism. As external challenges, budgetary and otherwise, have increased in recent years, Jane has had the courage and wisdom to realize that leadership must, first of all, come from within. In exploring this reality, she has taken advanced studies including the Humphrey Institute's Reflective Leadership Program and St. Thomas University's Institute for Reflective Community Leadership. Although an acknowledged extrovert, Jane Ranum is not afraid to affirm the need to go deeply inward for strength as she lives out her commitment to make a positive difference as a compassionate leader in our community. In this way as in so many others, she serves as a wonderful model for women in the legal profession.
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