Bush Foundation Selects 2025 Bush Fellows
By Sami Banat
The Bush Foundation announced the 2025 Bush Fellows – individuals whose bold vision and leadership are shaping communities in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and the 23 Native nations that share the same geography.
Fellows are working on a wide range of issues such as decreasing stigma and increasing supports for people with autism, advocating for the rights and needs of amputees, providing doula care to people with cancer and building low-cost housing that considers our changing climate and environment.
They all have plans to help them think bigger and think differently about what is possible, including learning from work around the globe to bring wisdom back to the region. This includes learning about language preservation efforts in Scandinavia to understanding school discipline in Japan.
One of the 29 winners is Maychee Mua from Cottage Grove, MN. Maychee Mua is reimagining autism advocacy through a culturally attuned and healing-centered lens. A first-generation Hmong Chinese American and mother of neurodivergent children, she helped establish Minnesota’s Medicaid autism program for children under 21 and created the state’s first cultural competency training for autism providers. Her work dismantles barriers with empathy, cultural fluency and deep systems knowledge. With her Bush Fellowship, she will reconnect with her cultural roots, design holistic healing frameworks and develop resources that bridge Southeast Asian traditions with Western systems of care.
About The Bush Fellowship
The Bush Fellowship is a self-designed leadership program that gives individuals the flexibility they need to develop their own capacity to lead effectively. Bush Fellows are at a point in their lives where they know what they need to do become a stronger leader, and they have a plan for how to do it. The Fellowship provides them with the time and resources needed.
Up to 30 Bush Fellows are selected each year to receive up to $150,000 to support their self-designed leadership plan. Fellows can come from any sector – including business, nonprofit and government. What sets them apart is their bold vision for what is possible and their commitment to making it real.
About The Bush Foundation
The Bush Foundation works to inspire and support creative problem solving – within and across sectors – to make the region better for everyone. We do this by investing in great ideas and the people who power them in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and the 23 Native nations that share this geography.
Bush works through open grantmaking programs to develop, test and spread great ideas to make our region better, and to inspire, equip and connect people to lead change effectively. The lives of Archie and Edyth Bush, who created the Bush Foundation in 1953, continue to inspire Bush’s work today.
Images courtesy the Bush Foundation.
