About Patrick

I was born and raised in Mankato and I’m a proud product of the Mankato Area Public Schools. I’m also the proud father to two daughters ages three and one and my wife is a teacher at Mankato West High School. I received a bachelor’s degree from Concordia College in Moorhead, MN and a graduate certificate in public management from George Mason University in Virginia.

I’ve been blessed with a professional career that has offered me the opportunity to work deeply in education policy at the federal, state and local levels and play a servant leadership role in the Greater Mankato area. My first professional role was with the National Governors Association in Washington D.C. where I represented the views of the nation’s governors on federal education policy. From there, I returned to Mankato to serve as Greater Mankato Growth’s first Director of Government & Institutional Affairs and later served as the organization’s Vice President. In these positions I played a leading role in advancing key organizational and community priorities to help make Greater Mankato an attractive place to live, work and play. In 2020, I moved into a new role leading education and workforce policy for nine states in the upper Midwest, including Minnesota, for Western Governors University (WGU), the largest nonprofit university in the country.