The Center for International Education

THE WHOLE SHEBANG

This will be our very last pitch, friends.

On September 7, 2025, the board of The Center for International Education (THE CIE) unanimously voted to sunset our nonprofit.

The Center is the micro-nonprofit where Mike Hazard (yours truly) has been artist in residence for 50 years. Since 1975 we have been creating an array of multimedia, multicultural projects with people of all ages for audiences of all ages all over the world. Our activities are divided into three parts: videos, art projects, and teaching artist residencies.

The headline is, and why we are asking for one last donation to support our mission, the Elmer L. Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota has collected our life’s work.

Sixty-nine boxes of videos, photos, books, and journals were picked up on Monday, October 6.

The whole shebang.

We will celebrate the life of THE CIE in the Library from 6-8:30pm on Tuesday, June 30, 2026. SAVE THE DATE!

The Ask

Your totally tax deductible contribution will help migrate our computer files, curate the whole shebang, pay our final expenses (for things like the lawyer handling the dissolution of the corporation), and celebrate.

Donate if you can, please. Ua tsaug. Danke. Gracias. Mahadsanid. Pidamaya. Miigwech. Arigato. Tak. Merci. Thank you.

Will and Savannah helped box our collection for pick up by the library. It felt like good karma when Brandon, poet and filmmaker, was one of the movers who picked up our collection. Serendipity!

What We Did

We created over 250 videos which have been seen by 478,472 viewers so far on YouTube and about two million viewers on public television. 

Jim Northrup starred in our documentary portrait, With Reservations. It was broadcast nationally on PBS, along with eight of our other productions. 

We taught several thousand people of all ages from three to 103 to express themselves with cameras. 

Vi made a photograph of the stained glass window in her church for a letter she wrote to her twin sister. She participated in one of the many workshops we conducted using cameras and writing with people of all ages.

I’ll always treasure the fifth grader in my first residency who when asked what he learned said, “I realized when I looked through the viewfinder of the camera that I was the first person in the world to watch our movie.”

Our ten year project photographing and filming the Hmong American Farmers Association farm became an exhibition that travelled to six locations around Minnesota. “All the farmers love you,” said Pakou Hang, one of the cofounders of the farm. "Your pictures, your art is how my nephew Mason is going to tell his grandchildren about the farm.” Boom.

As an artist in residence, I also created 40 artist books which I like to call paper movies. They are montages of text and image. Seen is a spread from Bring Back the Snakes, a paper movie about the artist’s Irish ancestry.

Donate if you can, please. Ua tsaug. Danke. Gracias. Mahadsanid. Pidamaya. Miigwech. Arigato. Tak. Merci. Thank you.