updated on July 2, 2006

Helen Gunderson founded The Gilbert Gazette, an unofficial web site, in 2002. She had moved to Gilbert in 1993 and became active in local government in 1998 when a friend asked her to serve on the Gilbert Parks and Recreation Commission. In the fall of 1999, Helen was elected to the Gilbert City Council. She ran as part of a team that included two other candidates for three council seats and a successful challenger for the mayoral position.

Development issues were what had spurred them into running. Indeed, only a few months before the election, there had been serious talk on the part of the previous Gilbert mayor and other town leaders about working hand-in-glove with big-time developers from Ames to annex the Uthe farm. The land is some three miles away from Gilbert and sits on the north edge of Ames. Following some protest at a Gilbert council meeting in June of 1999, the plan was scuttled. Subsequently, the developers began to work with the City of Ames to develop the property. It is now known as Northridge Heights and is filling up with new homes.

Helen resigned from the Gilbert council in April of 2002 to protest the mayor’s controlling leadership style. She first published the Gazette in June of that year.

She continued to take an interest in city government, but she eventually felt the need to disengage from her intense level of local activism and find a new publisher for the Gazette. She was pleased when Lauris Olson, then editor of the Ames Life and Times Section of the Des Moines Register, called her in August of 2005 with a desire to take over the Gazette as part of a network of community-based news. However, that arrangement did not work out, and in December, the Gilbert Main Street Association agreed to take over the Gazette in January of 2006. The GMSA struggled in its new role, realizing it did not have the resources to publish the web site in as full of a fashion as the group had envisioned.

In June of 2006, Julie Adams of J.B. Knacker and Miles Moore of Consignment Gallery, representing the GMSA, met with Helen to discuss the situation. Julie and Miles both felt that the Gilbert community needed a vehicle of communication and did not want the life of the Gazette to come to an end. Indeed, the Gazette had proven itself as a valuable resource and had great visibility. When someone used Google to surf the Internet and find information about Gilbert, Iowa, the Gazette was at the top of the list of web sites.

Julie, Miles, and Helen developed a strategy to convert the web site. The archived section did not change much in appearance, and visitors who had links to favorite pages that they have found on the Gazette in the past few years could still use those links. The new, on-going section is intended to have a simple appearance that will evolve in aesthetics, layout design, and functionality over time.

Helen is a fourth-generation Iowan who grew up with five siblings on a farm near the small town of Rolfe in northwest Iowa. Her mother, Marion Abbott Gunderson, had grown up in Utah and and graduated from Iowa State University where she majored in applied art and met Helen's father, Deane Gunderson, who has two degrees in engineering from the school. Helen's ancestors in the Rolfe area include the Gundersons, who were farmers, and the Lighters, who owned and published the Rolfe Reveille newspaper in the early 1900s. Helen recalls a time in high school when she told classmates she wanted to major in journalism. However, she says the remark was on a whim and that she didn't really know the meaning of the word "journalism." In later years, however, she realized that her remark — one that she never took seriously as a young adult — revealed a glimmer of intuition that she would like to do the kind of work that she has done via the Gazette.

Helen received a bachelor’s degree in physical education from Iowa State in 1967, a master’s degree in instructional technology from the University of Wisconsin-Stout in 1975, and a master of divinity degree from San Francisco Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian school, in 1985.