2009 International Citizen's Awards

John Stout, an officer and stockholder at Minneapolis-based law firm Fredrikson & Byron, P.A., is quick to credit the people and programs he believes are responsible for creating international links between Minnesota and the world—including his children.

“Your kids will take you to interesting places,” Stout notes. Both his son and daughter studied Mandarin Chinese at an early age and attended college in Beijing for a time. He fondly recalls chaperoning a school trip to China, and traveling to Beijing to celebrate his daughter’s 21st birthday.

“One of the things that I’ve always admired about [the Twin Cities] is that it’s been an internationally focused community for a long time,” says Stout, who was a driving force in the launch of Fredrikson & Byron’s international practice in 1991. He was finding that many of his small and midsize client companies had begun selling overseas. “I had a client that had $1 million in annual sales,” Stout recalls. “They were getting half of it from Europe, and I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. What’s going on here?’”

Stout laments that he wasn’t the ideal lawyer to head up the international practice. “The model lawyer for that job wasn’t me,” he says. “It isn’t some monolingual white guy who thinks that this is interesting and sees the need. You really need people who understand the culture who also can work in the language.” Stout suggested the firm hire Jerry Giombetti, a multilingual native of Italy, to run Fredrikson’s international practice in London. Stout also led the charge to establish his firm’s practice in Shanghai in 2007.

Locally, Stout has committed himself to helping immigrants and minorities with business opportunities in Minnesota for nearly four decades. In 1971, he cofounded the Metropolitan Economic Development Association, a nonprofit that provides assistance to minority-owned businesses in Minnesota. Twenty years later, he helped start the Milestone Growth Fund, the only Minnesota venture capital fund focused on providing equity financing to minority-owned companies. James Thomas, an African American who owned Twin Cities–area car dealer Thomas Automotive Group for 30 years before selling it in 2008, nominated Stout for the International Citizen Award.