The list of things Les and Katrina Garner have done for the community of Mount Vernon and Lisbon is long. Les was president of Cornell College for 16 year. The couple supported the formation of the Munt Vernon Area Arts Council, Chalk the Walk festival, and the Lincoln Highway Arts festival. Most recently, the couple started forming community betterment funds to support arts, culture and non-profits in Mount Vernon.

Those contributions didn’t go unnoticed, and Mount Vernon-Lisbon Community Development Group named them the citizens of the year for 2023.

“It’s a great honor to be recognized by a community that means so much to me,” Les said to the Sun while he and Katrina were on vacation to Chautauqua County, New York.

“Mount Vernon has been such a big part of our lives, and we’re extremely grateful,” Katrina said.

Katrina said it was still a surprise they were named this year for this honor, as there are a lot of volunteers and others in the community who have been more involved in many of the festivals.

“The people involved in the arts in Mount Vernon are just plain fun,” Katrina said. “They’re a bunch of real dreamers and if they dream it, it becomes a reality.”

Katrina remembers Joe Jennison presenting the idea of Chalk the Walk that first year to the Mount Vernon Area Arts Council and it was a fun idea then.

“We never thought it would grow to be as big as it has become,” Katrina said. “It’s really a lot of fun, that festival, and seeing where it went from that first year to now has been great.”

She said the only festival she had a hard time with was when they did the Wizard of Oz and she dressed up as Dorothy.

“The Ruby red slippers I had for the day were about a size and a half too small for me,” Katrina said. “So by the end of the day, my feet were killing me. But it was such a wonderful thing to have so many kids come up and ask to pet Toto and make that memory for them at a festival.”

Les said their love of Mount Vernon came about with how welcoming the community was when they first arrived from North Carolina.

“The people in this community have always been so warm and welcoming to us,” Les said. “The schools opened so many opportunities for our sons and gave them a great education.”

Katrina said whoever was responsible for Ann Boots and Ginger Hansen being the welcoming committee for her succeeded at their job, as she fell in love with those ladies immediately.

“I remember we were registering the kids for school and I had left my purse in Ginger’s car and was worried something was going to happen to it,” Katrina said. “She reiterated that it would be okay in the car because we’re here in Mount Vernon.”

Les served as Cornell College’s president for 16 years. He said that was one of the highlights of his career before moving on to help at the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation.

“When I started with the foundation, the area was just recovering from the flood of 2008,” Les said. “That recovery opened a lot of ideas in the broader community that was innovative on how to support the rebuilding and resilience in the area.”

For Les, both as president of Cornell and working with the GCRCF, has pointed out the power of philanthropy to make a huge difference in these communities. He saw that transformative work even in the smaller grants distributed by the community foundation.

That was one of the reasons the couple made the first gifts to those community betterment funds.

Katrina said being involved in the arts scene in Mount Vernon, even if it is one of her hobbies, has meant the world to her.

“The artists are so creative and it reiterates how important the arts are to our lives,” Katrina said. “Art enriches so many lives. There are just too many arts events in Mount Vernon and Lisbon, from poetry readings, Chalk the Walk, guest speakers.”

For Les, the thing he has loved most about the arts in Mount Vernon has been how the many artists capture the beauty of the town.

“Be that in watercolor, pastels, oil, pottery, they capture the real beauty of Mount Vernon in what they do,” Les said.

Both Katrina and Les said they plan on staying in Mount Vernon. There are a few more trips they want to make while they’re physically able, like the one they’ve made to Chautauqua, N.Y.

Katrina said this vacation has been all about the transformative power of the arts and given ideas for other projects that might work in the Cedar Rapids corridor or Mount Vernon.

“This festival and vacation has helped me feel proud to call myself an artist,” Katrina said.

Les said he is looking forward to continuing to read his detective mysteries and continuing work on woodworking projects as well.

“We might build a few more free little public libraries for the community as a joint product,” Les said.