Alumni Profiles
Research, Art, and Advocacy: Threads That Began at CMU
25 at 25 | Jess Klassen (CMU '04)
Jess Klassen (CMU ’04) graduated with a major in International Development Studies. Now Manitoba Research Alliance Coordinator at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and a textile artist under the name Stories of Textiles, she continues to weave together curiosity, community, and creativity—threads that began at CMU.
This September, Jess Klassen co-created an art installation at Nuit Blanche, a night of art, music, and festivities that lights up Winnipeg's downtown. Along with fellow CMU alumna Chantel Mierau ('05), Klassen hosted a communal art project to dream up an alternative municipal budget in response to the one put forward by the City of Winnipeg. Up on the roof of a parkade at the Forks, participants could select a strip of cloth in a colour that corresponded with a budget category—housing, library services, and public transit were just a few—and weave it into a tapestry.
It was a project that wove together two of Klassen's passions—public policy and textiles. She works at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) Manitoba, where she coordinates the Manitoba Research Alliance, a group of academic researchers, students, and community partners producing community-based research. "We do progressive research with a focus on bridging the gap between folks who are experiencing poverty and marginalization, or are addressing it as nonprofits, and people who hold positions of power and make policy—making sure that people who are experiencing these issues can inform policy and advocate for policy change," she says.
She is also a textile artist, creating tufted fibre art and rugs under her artist moniker, Stories of Textiles (@storiesoftextiles). Klassen graduated in 2004 with a major in International Development Studies (IDS) and continued on to earn bachelor's and master's degrees in social work.
"I wanted to do something that allowed me to engage with people that were different from me," she says, of why she chose IDS. She soon realized she didn't want to live overseas, so she started working with newcomers through her CMU work-integrated learning placement at the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers. That experience got her a job at the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba, after which she worked with numerous community organizations in Winnipeg's central neighbourhoods. She was also Director of Research Grants at CMU for a few years, during which she travelled to Zimbabwe and helped start the LINCZ program.
Klassen remembers the culture of CMU being inquisitive. They interrogated everything—questions about how your choices reflect your politics, how you live out your values and the values of your community. "Everyone lived such an examined life," she says. "We rarely talked about answers, and I think that posture in the world is rare." That her path ultimately led to a career in research is fitting. "We ask lots of questions," she laughs.
"I was just a baby learning about the world when I went to CMU. CMU really, in a good way, exploded my world in terms of... who I had relationships with, what I thought about, who I thought about, what was important to me—that all really came into focus at CMU."
The thing that made this time of discovery so special was that "we did it as a group," she says. "It's one thing to do it on your own, but to be learning about this and doing that in all of our flawed ways... we were exploring the world."
She's still figuring out life's questions with those same people. "My main group of friends since 20 plus years ago are still my CMU friends, which is wild but beautiful." Together, they're raising their children, marking life's big moments, and "imagining sending our kids to CMU, which is a really special thing."
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