Meet Honorary Consul Kirsten Baesler of North Dakota
Meet our honorary consuls! Welcome to our series introducing the honorary consuls working with the Consulate General of Finland in New York. Honorary consuls are private individuals who play an important role in promoting Finland and supporting Finnish citizens and companies in their respective regions. They help strengthen Finland’s diplomatic, economic, and cultural ties locally. We are pleased to introduce Kirsten Baesler, our honorary consul in North Dakota.
With a long background in educational leadership, Kirsten Baesler has been the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in North Dakota since 2012. As an elected official, she oversees the operation of the state’s public school system. She first paid a visit to Finland in October 2023, when the Hunt Institute – a public education center affiliated with Duke University in North Carolina – helped organize a trip for elected officials to learn about Finnish culture and its world-renowned education system. The group spent almost a week in Helsinki and throughout the country, meeting with students, educators, the Finnish government, and even the Minister of Education.
In that spirit, the delegation also welcomed Finnish health, wellness and education startups looking to expand their operations in the U.S. Baesler saw immediately just how greatly her state could benefit from the well-rounded Finnish idea of support for students. “We’re just starting to break into that idea - - that the whole child needs to be cared for in order for them to be good students and good learners,” she says. Besides education-related exports meeting preexisting demand, Baesler shares that she has only grown more excited about the potential for collaboration between North Dakota and Finland since speaking with Consul General Jarmo Sareva about her posting in late 2023. “Very few people know that we have a lot of Finnish residents in North Dakota,” she says. “And so, how do we capture that culture? And how do we grow that?”
For Baesler, one starting point is leveraging technology for social improvement, as North Dakota is looking to cultivate itself as the next technology capital and learn from Finland’s leadership in caring for its citizens “from ages zero to 95”. Research collaboration and the exchange of ideas also plays a pivotal role in facilitating innovation. Baesler mentions the University of North Dakota’s Center for Innovation as one example of such an incubator. The university is one of the country’s leading research hubs for unmanned aircraft systems. “Once you’ve incubated those ideas and you’ve found that they are successful, our state government plays a very unique role in helping scale that to all corners of our state,” she says. “My goals are to build relationships and cultivate opportunities that are beneficial to both Finland and the U.S., and particularly North Dakota, and then scale those successes.”
Baesler believes that the values and culture of North Dakota and Finland align particularly tightly in the direct and hardworking character of their citizens. “I describe North Dakota as one community with a really long main street,” she says about her state with less than 800,000 inhabitants. “You don’t have to go through six or seven layers of bureaucracy to talk to somebody that’s going to be able to give you a proposal or have a conversation about a tax break, or whatever it might be. We could call the Secretary of State and have him personally walk through the red tape.” Located on the Canadian border between Montana and Minnesota and a less than 2-hour flight from Chicago, North Dakota’s top industries include agriculture, energy, and technology.
As one of Finland’s new Honorary Consul in the U.S., Kirsten Baesler is excited to learn more about Finland, helping its citizens find mutually beneficial business, cultural and educational exchange opportunities in North Dakota.
You can find information about all of Finland’s honorary consulates across the U.S. on our website: https://finlandabroad.fi/web/usa/honorary-consulates.
