Jill Schramm.MDN Sophia Rammell and Jacob Thrailkill, shown March 24, commit their time in a variety of ways to making Minot a great place to live.

Community involvement comes naturally to Jacob Thrailkill and Sophia Rammell. The Minot couple maintains a busy lifestyle in pursuing their interests in projects that make Minot a better place.

Thrailkill has a special place in his heart for the Dancing with Special Stars event, held to raise support for the Special Olympics in North Dakota. However, he also has served on boards for various local nonprofits and is active in the Minot Lions Club, where he and Rammell met. Rammell had been invited to speak to Minot Lions and was recruited to join.

Rammel, whose first love is promoting education, also has immersed herself in community activity since coming to Minot a few years ago to teach Spanish at Minot State University. She and Thrailkill, a financial planner, were married a year ago.

Thrailkill graduated from Minot High School in 2011 and from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks with a degree in political science. He served in the Army National Guard before returning to Minot in 2015.

Rammell’s family moved around the country when she was growing up, but most of her youth was spent in North Carolina. She graduated from the University of North Carolina and received her master’s and doctorate from Indiana University, having studied linguistics and cognitive science. She did postdoctoral work at Duke University in North Carolina. Now in her third year at MSU, she recently became director of Interdisciplinary Studies, a program that enables students to design their own majors.

“Because we moved so much when I was growing up – probably every year or two – my mom always said that we should not say you don’t like a place. You just need to make the best of wherever you are,” Rammell said. “She always said you can be miserable or you can be happy somewhere.

“I’m so thankful she taught me that because I tried to make the best of wherever I go, and I think, because of moving so much, I learned to get involved quickly in things and to not wait for opportunities to come to me, because there wasn’t usually time if you’re moving every year or two,” she added.

Like Rammell, Thrailkill wasted no time in getting involved after returning to Minot. Upon joining the Lions, he served as its zone chairperson for a few years, coordinating local clubs. He has been Minot Lions’ membership chairperson for the past few years and was president during the time the club raised dues, lost its location, and wrote new bylaws.

“It was a wild year,” he said.

Among Lions projects, Thrailkill and Rammell have been most involved in the downtown Tri-sloth-alon, a half-kilometer slow race where running is prohibited and shenanigans are encouraged. A number of silly games are associated with the event.

Thrailkill is also involved in coordinating many of the Lions’ social events.

“I’d say the most passionate thing that I like to do in the Lions Club is be involved in the service projects, just volunteering and then growing the membership. I kind of got pushed into the membership role because I was just recruiting people left and right,” he said. “I think my only real skill is finding the right people to do the job the best way, fostering those relationships where I can lean on those people to get those things done.

“That’s what I like the most is being able to work with other people on getting shared goals done,” he added. “I have a lot of really good, talented people in my corner who help.”

The success of Minot’s Dancing with Special Stars is in part due to his talent for recruiting volunteers, who have included his wife.

In college, Thrailkill took a ballroom dance class so many times that the program promoted him to instructor. He then was asked to be a dance instructor for the Dancing with Special Stars event in Grand Forks. After he moved to Minot, Special Olympics asked him to coordinate dance instructors to bring the event to Minot. Since then, he has chaired the event.

Thrailkill also has helped teach dance styles as part of programs in MSU’s Teacher Education and Kinesiology and World Languages departments.

His desire to see youth be successful led him to work with young people in his church and to begin helping at a trap shooting program at the Minot Gun Club. Thrailkill and Rammell both took up trap shooting last year.

They also do lay ministry, traveling to area churches that are without pastors to supply pulpits.

Thrailkill serves on staff at Bethany Lutheran Church, where he also is on the church foundation board. He has been on the Lutheran Campus Ministries Board at MSU for five years. Rammell serves on the Lutheran Campus Ministries Board as faculty liaison.

Given the breadth of knowledge that boards need to have, Thrailkill said, he has learned to roll with the punches as he has increasingly gained new insights through his roles.

“If you always put other people’s interests in front of yours, the rest seems to work out,” he said.

Thrailkill recently completed a term on the North Dakota Community Endowment Foundation and six years on the Minot Public School Foundation Board.

Thrailkill credits a certain amount of his involvement to the friendship he had with the late Lowell Latimer, who was known for his community activity. It was Latimer who took him to a Lions Club meeting and persuaded him to serve on the Minot Public School Foundation Board. In exchange, Latimer honored Thrailkill’s request to get involved in Dancing with Special Stars.

Rammell separately developed her own connection with Latimer, first meeting him at a dinner for new MSU faculty. Sharing Latimer’s enthusiasm for community service, Rammell has focused on science outreach and science communication.

“Women are not historically reached in STEM fields as much and I think we’ve gotten so much better about that in 10-20 years,” she said.

For herself, she laughed, “I’m still hoping one day I’ll be an astronaut. I haven’t quite taken the steps to get there yet.”

But on a serious note, she added, “I really am passionate about connecting younger people with education and seeing what possibilities are out there because I think there’s so many things that you can look at and learn. Sometimes people don’t feel like what they’re interested in necessarily connects with education, but a lot of times it does. That’s what’s kind of cool about this Interdisciplinary Studies program is that a lot of people know what they want to do, but they don’t know how to get to that next step. We’re able to work with some of those students that have this fantastic career goal to figure out how to cater their classes.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic limited her ability to get out to schools, she turned instead to using her Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) certification to help conduct COVID testing at MSU and also worked with the North Dakota Department of Health in notifying people of test results.

Both Thrailkill and Rammell describe themselves as lifelong learners who aren’t afraid to try new things.

Last year, Thrailkill completed the North Dakota State University Extension’s Master Gardener program, which requires participants to volunteer their expertise in their communities. Thrailkill recently found another fun way to give back to the community through donating his time as an auctioneer at charity auctions.

“And he wears his cowboy hat when he does it, too. So you notice him in a crowd,” Rammell said.

Thrailkill has participated a few times as the jester in Chamber Chorale’s Renaissance feast as well.

“I like having my hands in a lot of different hobbies. Not all of them are service-related,” Thrailkill said.

He hosts and writes for Minot’s Good Night Live, a late-night talk show that is part of The Good Talk Network and airs about every other month. The Good Talk Network has partnered with the Souris Valley Animal Shelter to host “The Cost is Correct,” a “Price is Right”-themed gala on April 23.

Thrailkill has been working with UND’s Alumni Association, which looks to start a Minot chapter. He also is involved with Minot’s Christian Business Men’s Connection and the local affiliate of the National Association for Insurance and Financial Advisors. He plans to travel to Washington, D.C., in May to help lobby for the association.

Thrailkill plays bass guitar, sings vocals, and provides some keyboard in a local garage band, Night Drive, which performs classical rock and country throughout the region.

He plays in the local pool league with his family, and he golfs, although he admits his pool playing is better.

As new homeowners in Minot’s historic Eastwood Park, Thrailkill and Rammell hope to get involved in the neighborhood association. Just because they now have a small yard doesn’t mean they intend to let any grass grow under their feet, though.

“I think I’m more productive when I’m busy,” Rammell said.

“We run a really tight schedule. We have a business meeting every Sunday night to map out our entire week about who’s going to be where at what time,” Thrailkill said.

Part of their commitment to the community lies in their appreciation for Minot.

“I just have a lot of pride for what’s going on here,” Thrailkill said.

“Minot’s got such great people in really great positions. It’s not too big, where you don’t know most of the people you run into, and it’s not too small, where there isn’t any type of project that could be done here.”

Thrailkill is also motivated by a recurring theme often prevalent among young people that Minot lacks things to do.

“So I’ve always tried to champion anything new, exciting, innovative in Minot,” he said.