Max and Melissa Otto (contributed/Odney)
BISMARCK, N.D. (NORTH DAKOTA MONITOR) – Some move away for school, or a job, or to stay with their partner.
Some vow never to move back to North Dakota. Until they do.
“We had Thanksgiving with our family for the first time in years … the simple things like that have really been a blessing,” said Max Otto, a North Dakota native who moved away for a five-year medical residency, but moved back to the Peace Garden State with his wife and newborn daughter in August.
North Dakota’s Find The Good Life campaign is hoping family members around the state can lure their out-of-state family members to move back to North Dakota this holiday season.
The advertising and workforce program, administered through the Department of Commerce, is geared toward promoting North Dakota’s main industries to address workforce shortages, but also showing former residents what they are missing.
Sara Otte Coleman, director of the tourism and marketing team for the Department of Commerce, said the program’s goal is to create a national talent attraction program through advertising and a website assistance portal that helps with moves to the state. The program targets young families, new college graduates, veterans and boomerang residents — people who previously lived in the state that could potentially be drawn back.
“I know a lot of boomerangs and my kids are kind of at that age,” Otte Coleman said. She added her daughter and some of her friends moved back to North Dakota after living out of state. A lot of those people who move away realize that it’s harder to get away when grandparents aren’t there to help out with the kids, Otte Coleman said, and the cost of living outside of North Dakota can be eye-opening.
Max and Melissa Otto grew up in North Dakota, but decided to move to Michigan in 2018 so Max could complete his medical residency. They also moved to Salt Lake City during a one-year fellowship as part of his training.
“It was a discussion,” Max Otto said. “When I left, I had no intention of coming back to North Dakota.”
But the family’s thinking evolved over their six years away from the state, they said. After much consideration, the Ottos decided they missed their families, friends and the state’s outdoor recreation opportunities and moved back to North Dakota, where Max took a job at Sanford Health in Bismarck as a colorectal and general trauma surgeon.
“For us, we had to love a place enough to be far away from family and I feel like we never really found that,” Melissa Otto said. “That was the thing we kept coming back to.”
Max Otto said they were thinking about moving back to Michigan once his fellowship ended in Utah, but they realized they were missing too many family moments back home. The couple also wanted to raise their daughter among the smiling faces of grandparents.
“When we finally told everybody we were taking the job here, our family was so ecstatic,” Max Otto said. “It was hilarious.”
Melissa Otto said North Dakota sunsets were something she missed during her time away.
Max Otto said he missed the outdoors, but also the people and the culture of North Dakota. He added that Michigan was very friendly and welcoming, but it wasn’t “North Dakota nice.”
“Nowhere else I’ve lived could I drive five minutes and be out of town and be hunting or going fishing, or something like that,” he said. “It’s just so easy to go and access the peacefulness of the outdoors here.”
With many families gearing up for large family gatherings during the holidays, Otte Coleman said it might be a good time to have some conversations.
“Just because there’s so many people that do come home over the holidays, it’s a good time to start the conversation. Get them thinking about it when they are in-state,” Otte Coleman said.
She said the Find The Good Life program is designed in a way that creates different ways to connect with the website’s help desk and the program’s community champions.
“Ultimately, we think we’re going to have more of a chance of getting them to move to North Dakota if we have more connection points,” Otte Coleman said.
In total, the Find The Good Life program received $12 million from the 2023-25 budget, which was split evenly between the department’s workforce and tourism/marketing divisions, she said.
Since the program launched in its current form in 2022, the campaign has spent about $2.2 million in advertising through television, audio, digital and print media, according to a Department of Commerce fact sheet. Those ads created more than 120 million impressions across the country and netted more than 4,100 engagements with the program’s help desk. One person can have multiple impressions across a range of electronic devices and media.
Of those help desk engagements, nearly 2,400 people entered the program’s candidate marketplace, which led to more than 1,300 people connecting with a community champion. Ultimately, the department reported 43 people completed the process all the way through and made moves to North Dakota. The new arrivals relocated into 17 different communities over the past two years.
However, Otte Coleman said those totals can be misleading because they don’t track the number of people who received information from the help desk and then used those resources to complete the process of securing a job and moving to the state on their own.
Brooke Leno in her store, Out of Town Clothing, after moving back to North Dakota upon graduating from college.
Brooke Leno grew up in Dickinson and then moved to the Twin Cities to attend the University of Minnesota. She was interested in pursuing a career in the fashion industry and interned for a time in New York.
“I was one of the people that were like, ‘I gotta get out of here. This place sucks.’ But being away, I think you just really realize how great North Dakota is,” Leno said. She moved back to Dickinson in 2011.
Leno believed the oil boom in northwest North Dakota was bringing a lot of people and capital into the state, so when her father and some other investors wanted to open a clothing business, she jumped at the opportunity to run it.
The exterior of Out of Town Clothing, owned by Brooke Leno who returned to North Dakota to start her business upon graduating college.
“I always wanted my own clothing store,” she said. “That was kind of my dream all along.”
In the years that followed, she made the store her own and bought out her investors to become the sole owner of Out of Town Clothing. She has since opened a second location in Bismarck.
“I think when you’re young, being in a city, all that sounds really appealing … but once you think about settling down, having a family, and I have two little boys, and I just can’t even imagine not raising them in North Dakota,” Leno said.
Otte Coleman said she hopes Gov.-elect Kelly Armstrong and lawmakers will continue to fund the program when they craft their 2025-27 budget next year because many employers are still looking for workers.
“The number of people that moved isn’t as big as we necessarily liked, but we also know it’s impossible to know how many other people were influenced by the marketing,” Otte Coleman said. “We know that 10,000 additional individuals are employed in North Dakota since the program launched and can we say how many of those were attributable to Find The Good Life? No. But we do believe based on the tremendous marketing metrics and the number of people that have seen our spots … we believe it’s making an impact.”
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