Jay Miller has spent most of his career asking one deceptively simple question: How do you want people to feel?

As founder and Chief Creative Officer of IMAGEHAUS, the brand design firm he started in 2000, Jay has spent more than 25 years helping organizations find the ideas, words and images that tell people who they are. But some of the work he's proudest of never came with an invoice. Through IMAGEHAUS' 4C Giving Program, the firm has provided more than $4 million in creative services to nonprofit and community organizations.

For Jay, giving back has never been separate from the work. It's part of the work.

That same belief in showing up for community eventually led him to create The Porch.

Jay believes community doesn't happen simply because we share a few letters of the alphabet. It happens when we're willing to show up, listen, ask better questions and occasionally get a little uncomfortable. He created The Porch because Minnesota's LGBTQ+ community has more stories than any one platform could ever tell, and because he believes we should know more about one another than we do.

He's especially drawn to the stories hiding in plain sight: the people we haven't met yet, the history we didn't know, the perspectives that challenge our own and those wonderfully complicated conversations that don't always arrive with an easy answer.

Jay is a designer by profession, a storyteller by instinct and relentlessly curious about people. He's also a father, gardener, collector of things he probably doesn't need, believer in the power of a beautifully set table, and someone who thinks almost any problem becomes a little more manageable when people actually sit down and talk to one another.

Pull up a chair with Jay and there's really no telling where the conversation will go. But that's kind of the point.