A public servant in a small Tennessee town, Kirsten Ert Acuff knows positive change doesn’t always come in grand speeches or dramatic moments. In her town, “if a tree falls, the neighbor shows up with the chainsaw and helps,” she says.
Born in Halle, East Germany, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ert Acuff’s first brush with government was watching her father build the city’s transit system in a post-communist economy. At a time of uncertainty, she watched her father put reliability back into people’s lives, which taught her that “normal people can do great things,” she says.
Ert Acuff remembers going to school with lots of refugees, whether from the Kosovo War or the fall of the Soviet Union. Once, she came face-to-face with that history in her own hometown, when former president of the Soviet Union Gorbachev, with the architect of Germany’s reunification, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, stopped for ice cream in her bustling town square.
Two years into college in Germany, she decided that she wanted to venture out and see the world, so she followed her former boyfriend to Hawaii and enrolled in the university there. “My classroom was full of native Hawaiians and Polynesian kids — people who had lived there for generations,” she says. “That was a new experience, but it was a really cool one.”