Panya Yang met the Paw family when all hope seemed lost.

As a St. Paul police officer, Yang has patrolled the East Side for three years. He met the Paw family while responding to reports of a person in crisis and learned their needs ran deep: the family patriarch had died in a car accident 10 years before, and a son had died in an accident shortly after graduating college. Narcotics had compounded another son’s mental health struggles, leaving the mother to care for him and her daughter.

“To her it feels like she doesn’t have anybody to turn to,” Yang said. “It feels like she needs something to look for, to feel like somebody cares.”

That’s why Yang and law enforcement officers from across the state volunteered Saturday to deliver presents to the Paw family and others in need, as part of the Minnesota Asian Peace Officers’ Association’s Glow of Hope event.

Glow of Hope, which launched in 2008, collects and distributes gifts for struggling families. Officers submit the names of families they encounter in their work for consideration before the organization chooses those whose needs are greatest.

Last year, the association delivered gifts to five families with help from the Karen Organization of Minnesota. This year the group chose three families, allowing them to focus on the quality rather than quantity of the gifts. Donations raised throughout the year fund the gifts they distribute.

St. Paul officer Keng Her, the association’s president, said many of the members come from immigrant families themselves, which motivates them to volunteer and help with donating gifts.

“Glow of Hope is to be a shining light for the families during the holidays,” Her said. “Whatever our parents were able to scrounge to give to us, we cherished it. So knowing our community and also the people that we serve, we wanted to do the same thing back to them.”

An area shuttle service hopes to help ease Freeborn County’s health care woes by offering free rides to local hospitals.

SMART Transit, which operates in Austin, Albert Lea and Owatonna, is expanding its medical ride service for Freeborn County residents next year thanks to a $10,000 grant. The shuttle company will offer free rides to Mayo Clinic hospitals in Albert Lea and Austin for residents age 55 and up, addressing a problem for residents who’ve seen medical services in the region shrink over the years.

“We’re quite ecstatic,” said Chris Thompson, operations manager at SMART Transit. “I can’t even explain how wonderful news it is.”

Mayo Clinic Health System in Albert Lea announced service cuts in 2017, urging people to travel to Austin, about 20 minutes east, for most inpatient hospital visits. Area residents organized to get Iowa-based MercyOne to open a primary care clinic in 2022, but pandemic-related complications and financial troubles led to the clinic closing at the beginning of 2024.

A group of Albert Lea residents approached SMART Transit officials earlier this year, asking for more medical shuttle service and expanded rides to hospitals. SMART has had a free ride program for seniors in Mower County for years thanks to Mayo Clinic grants, but there wasn’t funding to duplicate the program.

Mayo officials worked with SMART staff to secure grant money through the Naeve Health Care Foundation, a local group named after the former hospital that served Albert Lea residents since 1911. The foundation grants money for local health care issues including Mayo program funding; it has donated more than $4 million for community health care.

Freeborn County isn’t alone in struggling to access health care. For decades, hospitals in greater Minnesota have largely joined up with bigger systems or closed as the state’s population shifted to metropolitan areas. Some smaller hospitals have tried banding together to save money, while others find niches in the area to offer better services.

Yet a growing population of seniors means an ever-increasing need to get them to doctor’s appointments, and rural communities are struggling to meet transportation demands. Minnesota’s senior population (age 65 and older) grew from about 680,000 residents in 2010 to almost 950,000 in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Not all of them have their own transportation.

As a photojournalism professor, R. Smith Schuneman mixed high expectations with a warm manner to launch the careers of a wide spectrum of photographers.

His students at the University of Minnesota, many of whom regarded Schuneman as a pivotal influence in their lives, went on to shoot for National Geographic, Look, Life and numerous other magazines and newspapers, as well as for corporate clients, photography studios and a wide array of film and video productions.

Then Schuneman, who went by his nickname “Smitty” and never by his given name of Raymond, embarked on a second career with the creation of Media Loft , an events and communications agency. He eventually sold the company to his employees before retiring with his wife, Pat, to a lakeside home in Okoboji, Iowa.

“Smitty could be utterly ruthless, uncompromising or unyielding in his goal of making photojournalists out of us,” wrote Richard Olsenius, a former student of Schuneman’s, in a memorial book prepared by friends. “But it was underlied with a deep-rooted concern for what is right and moral. He demanded honesty from our work.”

He died Nov. 24 at age 88 of heart problems.

Schuneman was born in 1936 in Spirit Lake, Iowa. His parents Raymond “Art” and Olive “Bunch” Schuneman ran the local newspaper in Milford, Iowa, and it was there that Schuneman began publishing photos while still in school.

He also ran a side business covering weddings, events and “whatever pictures were needed around the small town,” his wife said.

She remembers seeing Schuneman for the first time when her band director arranged for her to take drum lessons from him. She was 15 and he was 16. She later worked for him at his photo service, processing the film.