Jim was born in Jackson, Michigan and moved with his family to Minnesota in the early 1960s and as such considers the Twin Cities area his home. Jim graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and started with 3M in 1984 in Prairie du Chien WI. In his nearly 30 year career at 3M, he has held a wide variety of positions including Process Engineer, Production and Materials Control, Customer Service, Warehousing and Transportation, Distributor Relations, Economic Forecasting and Strategic Planning.
Jim is married to Deb Lauer, an ESL teacher in the Mahtomedi School District. They have two sons, Luke, who was a Rotary Foreign Exchange student to Turkey, graduated with a degree in Economics and currently lives and works in Minneapolis. Eric graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering and is based in Minnesota. Jim and Deb unofficially adopted a Costa Rican foreign exchange student, Gerardo, who lived with them for seven years and in 2013 returned to Costa Rica to teach band.
The Rotary connection started in 1990 when Jim was invited to join the Prairie du Chien Rotary club. When he relocated to the Twin Cities in 1992, he immediately transferred his membership to the White Bear Lake Rotary club. Jim served as club president in 2003-2004. In the 2008-’09 year, Jim was selected as GSE team leader to South Central India where he spent most of the month of January 2009 seeing Rotary in action in the Hyderabad area. He initiated two Rotary matching grant projects that resulted in 177 wells being drilled in District 3150 to provide fresh drinking water for 45,000 individuals. Jim joined the district grants subcommittee in 2009 and has been serving as a grants mentor for the past five years. He has also served as GSE / VTT chairperson for D5960 from 2009-2013 during which time he coordinated three in-bound GSE and two in-bound VTT teams.
The International focus of Rotary has led Jim to be involved in several projects with the White Bear Lake Rotary club which has resulted in two trips to Costa Rica, the month in India with GSE, a visit to Krasnoyarsk, Russia and two International Conventions. Over the past couple of years, Jim has become involved with the District Fast For Hope Initiative, visiting Nicaragua in 2011 as a member of a cultural delegation and returning as the team leader for a delegation in 2012. In 2013, he became a member of the FFH steering committee.
Jim has been active in his community, being a founding member of the Mahtomedi Environmental Commission where he served as a commissioner for five years from 2009 through 2013. He has been a local election judge since 2009 and in 2012 became Head Election Judge for his precinct.
Jim and Deb are both active outdoors people, enjoying biking, camping, kayaking, hiking, skiing (both cross country and downhill) and sailing. Jim is also an avid woodworker.
