Family

• Rebecca lives with her husband Shawn and their son Jake near Marine on St. Croix.

• Her husband Shawn is a filmmaker who wrote and co-produced the DreamWorks movie about tolerance and empathy, House of Sand and Fog, and is the writer and director of an upcoming movie about the war in Iraq called Dreams of a Dying Heart.  Her son Jake is a boy scout, a pianist, and a great student.

• Her parents are concert violinists.

• She is descended from activists who fought in the American revolution, and her family tree includes Miles Standish, who came over on the Mayflower and was the military captain of the Pilgrims. 

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Business Owner

• Rebecca and Shawn founded and built a successful 50-employee business. 

• Rebecca was CFO and President of the business for several years until she decided to work to make a difference in the community and became a public school teacher.

• Rebecca still manages some of the Ottos' property management concerns.

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"Good policy is not about ideology.  It's about people                         and community." - Rebecca Otto

Community Activist

and Volunteer
 

• Rebecca is an experienced State Representative and was named New Legislator of the Year.

• She served on the Forest Lake Area School Board.

• She chaired a heavily fought but successful bi-partisan school levy campaign, beating the Taxpayers League of MN, who worked to defeat it.

• She organized & moderated the first bi-partisan budget forum with former finance commissioners Republican John Gunyou and Democrat Jay Kiedrowski, because Minnesotans weren't getting the truth from the government.  The forum then traveled around the state of Minnesota in 2004.

• Rebecca volunteered as a Big Sister.

• She coached soccer for Forest Lake schools.

• She was an officer on her area school's PTO board.

• She's a former board member of the DFL Education Foundation.

• She was a volunteer activist for SEE and lobbied for education at the state legislature.
 

• She served on the area school district's curriculum & finance committees.

• She has organized and moderated numerous well-attended community forums on public policy.

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Rebecca as a volunteer trail guide

Environmentalist
 

• Rebecca taught life science and environmental science for 5 years.

• She drives and promotes hybrid cars because of their reduced emissions. 

• Her family lives in a passive solar, wind-powered home she and her husband designed and built with their own hands.  They host regular open houses and guest lecture on environmental design.

• Rebecca has used the home as a teaching tool and it has been featured in regional and national publications as an example of how being good to the environment doesn't require radical lifestyle changes - just responsibility & smart planning.

• As a policy maker she's worked to protect fragile ecosystems, to limit brain-damaging mercury emissions, to understand the possible link between atrazine and mutation, to protect groundwater, to promote the further development of commercial wind power, and to ban the use of bladder, skin and lung cancer-causing arsenic-treated wood when building school playgrounds.

• She served on the board of the St Croix Scenic Coalition.

• She volunteered as a trail guide for Warner Nature Center.  

• She was a volunteer in the Bluebird Recovery Program.

• A pond on the Ottos' land serves as one of Minnesota's cleanest and best producing walleye rearing ponds.

• As a teacher, she taught the critical importance of wildlife management through hunting. 

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Rebecca taught science for 5 years in MN public schools

Educator

• Rebecca has a Master's of Education in science from the U of M and a Bachelor's in biology from Macalester College.

• She taught in Minnesota public schools for 5 years.

• Rebecca became involved in her son Jake's school's PTO, working to raise money to provide basic necessities.

• She served on the Forest Lake area school board where she worked to solve the school funding crisis. She helped steer the district out of statutory operating debt, and reduced costs while improving service.

• Rebecca was a leader in the district finance and curriculum committees.

• She chaired and delivered a successful bi-partisan levy campaign, beating the Taxpayer's League.
 

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The Gilfillan Estate

Farm Life

• Rebecca and her family live on a hay and horse farm.

• She bales her own hay.

• A family forefather was CD Gilfillan, a Minnesota pioneer and state legislator who built St Paul's waterworks and founded the MN Republican Party largely out of his opposition to slavery and mistreatment of Indians.  He later became a farming innovator and The Gilfillan Estate, the family farm in Gilfillan, MN, is now the site of Minnesota FarmFest.