Remarks by Susan V. Berresford at the Southern Growth Policies Board
Biloxi, Mississippi June 1, 2003
It is a great pleasure to join you today. Like so many others I have been impressed by the outstanding work of the Southern Growth Policies Board. You have rightly earned widespread respect and admiration. And who could resist your Conference theme, saying yes to Reinventing the Wheel and visionary leadership.
Much of that leadership can be found right here, among your staff, membership and supporters. Today's South, with your ideas, world-class universities, strong training systems, innovative entrepreneurs, and growing cultural diversity, is poised to be a powerful force in the global economy.
Meeting here in Mississippi reminds me of the extraordinary impact bold leadership can have on seemingly intractable problems. America is a vastly better country thanks to the brave people here and across the South who fought so hard to realize our nation's democratic promise. They fought for values like justice, equal opportunity, hard work, strong families, and caring communities of faith.
But serious challenges remain. I come here today with a sense of urgency about the core theme of your Conference. I want to share some thoughts about leadership skills that can help us meet future challenges.
Like Governor Musgrove, I want to begin with a story from a distant time and place—18th century England. It is wonderfully told in Dava Sobel's book Longitude. Longitude describes the attempts of eminent, powerful 18th century decision-makers to solve a problem that was undermining England's economic well-being.
The problem was this: in the 18th century ships at sea had no way of knowing where they were. Sailors could determine latitude, but longitude was still a mystery. Astronomers had mapped the heavens, identifying recurring astronomical phenomena to help sailors make more precise calculations of distance and time. But after several centuries, captains were still literally at sea, unable to precisely locate their positions.
Finally, after horrendous maritime disasters, in 1714 the British Parliament offered a huge cash prize for an accurate way to determine longitude. A Board was created to make research grants, judge applicants, and award the prize. Naturally, the Board was dominated by the leading lights of the prestigious Royal Society—mostly astronomers. But when the answer to the problem finally came, it was from a totally unexpected source - an unschooled village carpenter turned clockmaker named John Harrison.
John Harrison found the answer not in the stars, but in his own craft. He created a series of clocks that were virtually friction-free, rustproof, and made of parts that stayed in perfect balance no matter how violent the seas or extreme the weather. Harrison worked on his clocks for thirty years, refining them until he finally reduced his first large, heavy shipboard clock to the dimensions of an oversized pocket watch.
The scientific elites and judges fought Harrison bitterly, demanding test after test, changing the rules, even sabotaging his clocks. Harrison was never formally awarded the prize. But ultimately, his designs were copied and mass produced. Now called chronometers, they were in widespread use by ocean-going vessels by the early 1800s.
Why was Harrison put through such agonies even after his elegant solution obviously worked? Then as it may also be, in our presumably more enlightened era, people outside of established centers of power were often distrusted and marginalized. Harrison was from the wrong social class and the wrong discipline, so his ideas were ignored.
Harrison's story deserves reflection. It suggests that even today, we could risk losing jobs, destroying wealth, and harming our communities by resisting ideas coming from unexpected people and places. His story is a powerful reminder. We must engage with marginalized communities, explore unfamiliar sectors and ideas, and encourage open-minded attitudes and leaders. So Harrison's story is relevant to our concerns about regional development and quot;reinventing the leadership wheel". And it bears directly on three points about modern leadership that I want to make:
The first is that today's effective leaders see government as a co-producer of policy and service. They are able to work in partnership, leveraging the other sectors, rather than expecting government to be the solo player.
Second, effective new leaders take the high road to development by expanding labor force skills and fostering a more productive environment for small and moderate business growth with value jobs. They do not race to be best at the bottom.
Third, effective new leaders build action coalitions across diverse population groups. They broaden the engaged citizenry rather than focusing narrowly on the most advantaged or homogenous groups.
I'd like to illustrate these points drawing on the experiences of Ford and its grantees.
First, government as a co-producer rather than a solo driver of policy and service.
Many of the challenges we confront can best be resolved through cooperative action by government, the private sector, and the civic, or non-profit sector. Of those three pillars of our society, we often pay the least attention to the non-profit sector. It consists of more than a million organizations, hundreds of thousands of churches and religious congregations. It employs about 11 million people. Another six million are full-time volunteers. Non-profits employ three times the number of people in agriculture, double those in wholesale trade, 50 percent more than people in construction. So non-profits can be a basic resources for development.
For more than a decade, the Ford Foundation and the Kennedy School at Harvard have given annual awards for governmental problem solving. Five to ten awards are given annually to the best among thousands of governmental agencies that apply. Awardees must show clear evidence of effectiveness, the relevance of their problem-solving solutions to other places, and ingenuity. After several years, we studied the winners - many of them from the South. One very striking pattern was the abundance of problem-solving solutions that came from partnerships between government and non-profit organizations, volunteers, and business. Again, the lesson is not seeing government as the sole driver. Let me give you a few examples.
Buncombe County, North Carolina had a problem. Physicians didn't participate in Medicaid because of burdensome paperwork and regulations. So 15,000 uninsured low income people couldn't get health care. In response, county employees went to the local medical society and together they organized nearly all the doctors in the county with this deal: if each doctor would take on a few patients for free, and if pharmacists would give medicine at cost, the county would do all the paperwork, take over referral to hospitals and other aspects of the continuum of care. Doctors, now free of bureaucratic paperwork took on 13,000 patients of the 15,000 uninsured. Later, because studies showed that the cost of indigent care in county hospitals actually declined through Project Access, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has encouraged its replication in over 15 additional sites, serving several hundred thousand people a year.
Another winning program came from Illinois, where a simple idea cleared the backlog of supposedly unadoptable minority children in the state's adoption system. Having struggled unsuccessfully for years to do this through usual channels, a governmental agency leader asked the state's black churches to help. He called the program quot;One Church, One Child" because each church was asked to find within its own congregation, one family willing to adopt one child from the all too-long waiting list of kids. The backlog was quickly cleared.
A final example comes from Maine, where a partnership among federal and state agencies and the private sector shifted government's role from punitive coercer to cooperative partner. National OSHA and Maine's Labor Department were concerned that Maine's workplace injury and illness rates were far above the national average. They traced almost half of the problem to 200 firms that employed only 1 % of the state's workers. Instead of throwing the book at those employers, the state's Labor Department worked with them to redesign the work place and cure the problems. The result was a positive working relationship between employers and regulators. The Maine Top 200 Program, as it was called, sharply reduced governmental costs; it reduced employer costs in penalties and lost time; and it brought workers a safer workplace - a triple bottom line winner.
As these three examples show, government can be more productive when it partners with the private and the nonprofit sectors. The point I want to underscore is that skillful 21st century leaders need to be deeply familiar with all three sectors' capacities, best executives and best practices. Then they can translate this knowledge into working collaborations.
My second point concerns the need to take the high road to development. Especially in times of economic difficulties, there is a temptation to indulge in a race to the bottom, with cost-cutting, layoffs, and outbidding other jurisdictions with huge concessions to attract employers. As you know, often these measures bring temporary rewards but they can exact a terrible price by deepening already serious social and community problems. In most places, they are no substitute for long-term investment in a region's own people and businesses.
The high road to development is now well recognized—investment in education, workforce training, developing marginalized communities, and addressing social and cultural barriers. Your report, The Mercedes and the Magnolia makes this point well.
Ford supports innovative workforce development efforts. Because of our shared interest in workforce development, I've brought with me advance copies of articles that will appear in the next issue of Ford's magazine. They describe some new workforce development programs. In particular, they focus on value-added ideas for low wage work. So I won't say more about this here. I hope you find them of interest.
Now however, I want to briefly highlight two other markers of the high road - education reform and small business development. You may know that the predominant philanthropic interest of many new dot.com millionaires is K-12 school reform. That's because they know education is key to high wages in the future. They also know that the highest quality educational systems move people from kindergarten through adult technical schools or colleges. And the best integrate those educational systems into larger regional development plans.
It begins with school reforms for the least advantaged children and worst performing schools. The Ford Foundation kept out of the school reform area for many years because much of what we saw seemed to us to be small scale, boutique-like programs. They didn't seem to hold much promise for large scale significance. But we ultimately supported one such effort, Project GRAD that began in Houston, Texas years ago, under the leadership of Tenneco's then CEO, Jim Kettleson. It has now spread to states and communities around the US, because it transformed many of Houston's worst performing schools so they now produce high achieving students going on to college. Project GRAD shows dramatically increased reading and math scores that hold up over time and grade. More important, it has a powerful ongoing effect on high school graduation, college attendance and college completion. For example, GRAD schools produces 65% more high school graduates than non GRAD schools, 3 to 6 times more students entering college than non-GRAD schools and college graduation rates 62% above the national average.
What drives Project GRAD's achievements? It starts with personal leadership. Jim Kettleson and his colleagues have reinvented the wheel. They believe all children can learn. They concentrate on what they call feeder systems—the schools that naturally pass kids along from one level to the next. They ensure that kids' school experience is seamless and demanding. It includes a challenging pre-set curriculum, strong classroom management for quiet and order, and consistent support for parents. They don't go from fashion to fashion each year but rather stick with one educational approach year after year. They have business-like data systems that alert school managers to problems so they can address them quickly. Parents demand that GRAD continues, as superintendents and principals come and go. Why? Because it's results are phenomenal. But its practices are straight forward and unexceptional—just sensible, consistent reform.
All states have powerful leaders like Jim, and his educational partners. Their results-orientation and moral convictions about all children's capacities need to be harnessed for the public good.
Another part of the high road involves aligning community colleges and technical and training schools with future regional development needs. Too often leaders focus only on flagship universities and neglect their region's other resources. Flagships are important drivers of change that deserve our attention, but not to the neglect of institutions that serve the vast majority of students and workers. Neglect is often based on the mistaken notion that students in those quot;lesser" schools can't succeed. But evidence shows that they can be powerful drivers of economic development. That was the lesson of John Harrison from the 18th century.
North Carolina has some nice examples of this in Central Piedmont Community College. That college has implemented two programs with excellent results. One equips students with a support system of peer advisors, professional counselors, and subject-area advisors. The other organizes students into quot;study groups" and supplements courses with off-campus learning experiences. These reforms helped produce a 90 percent retention rate. Remarkable results, especially since most of the courses involved remedial work with poorly prepared students.
A similar approach at a Denver's community college doubled enrollment and expanded the numbers of minority students. There too, the strategies involved comprehensive counseling and integrating remedial and academic work. Linking workforce training to larger economic trends and employee needs. The result: students who began college in remedial programs proved as likely to graduate as those requiring no special assistance. There were no significant differences in graduation rates on the basis of ethnicity, age or gender. And six months after completing the Denver community college's welfare to work program, four out of five students had decent jobs.
Another part of the high road to development lies in fostering growth and adding value among small businesses not just on bringing in a big outside employer.
I recently visited rural and urban areas in Maine where a Ford Foundation grantee, Coastal Enterprises, has operated for 25 years. Coastal is a non-profit organization that works with government, banks and small businesses all over Maine, helping them add value to products, reach new markets, and expand operations. One of its most significant and large scale accomplishments came from reviving the declining fishing industry in Portland. It did so by helping the industry make its case, that the natural resource—fish—had been restored to a level that meant fishing was ok again. Coastal then helped finance and rebuild the docks, establish a modern, on-the-dock fish auction, and foster related downtown development.
At the other end of the spectrum, Coastal also makes micro-grants and loans—between $10-25,000—to help entrepreneurs open or expand businesses. Some of my favorites went to apple farmers for added value apple products like apple bits and apple syrup. The organization supports mushroom growers in similar ways, helping them reach new markets with high value items. To help larger aspiring companies grow, Coastal operates two venture capital funds with 25 private investors. They take equity positions of up to $1 million in growing Maine companies, financing their expansion. As Governor Henry said a few moments ago, Coastal and groups like it can help people negotiate the maze involved in assembling capital. Coastal also partners with other non-profits in workforce training, helping them align their programs with emerging employment trends.
Coming back to your theme of visionary leadership -Coastal has an inspired leader (incidentally a minister turned business and development leader) who created strategic partnerships with regional banks and investors, government programs, business owners and venture capitalists. Coastal's operations offer a stunning model of value-added rather than race-to-the-bottom economic development. Coastal deserves a visit on foot or on the Internet. It's yet another example of the non-profit community adding value to government effort
My third and last point is the importance of building coalitions across diverse population groups. This is essential if we want to create communities in which fairness and justice are the reality not just the promise. You and I know that people want to participate in decisions affecting their lives. Coalitions that draw them into the development process helps do that.
Despite the great strides we have made in the U.S., all regions of the nation contain neglected and marginalized people. We pay a terrible price for this marginalization in crime, violence, corrosion of our democratic ideals, and the loss of talent, creativity and human dignity. Drifting along with the same, old, limited intergroup relations simply will not do. In fact, it will do us in.
That is why the imminent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action has important implications for development. America bears the scars of past and present racial discrimination and disadvantage. I hope the Court's decision will clarify the ground rules for affirmative action programs. And while it's ruling will address college and university admission standards, it may indirectly affect other areas as well.
Successful economic and community development requires policies that create opportunities for all. That is why such a widespread group of leaders from corporations, churches, education, labor, and the military, have urged the Supreme Court to uphold affirmative action in some form, for some period. They use affirmative action. They understand that affirmative action has improved our nation's and our military's performance, that we desperately need to keep broadening the country's skill pool.
Opening opportunity is germane in the South and the rest of the nation. At one fundamental level it means doing our utmost to register all citizens, ensure access to the voting booth, and have every vote count. All across the nation admirable work is being done along those lines, much of it in the South, which has become far more diverse.
For example, with Ford's support, the National Asian and Pacific American Legal Consortium provides training to help communities translate ballots and other voting materials into Asian languages, as required by federal law. Among those being helped are Vietnamese Americans in Texas and other Asian Americans in Georgia. Virginia is re-examining the practice of denying the vote to people who have been convicted of non-violent felonies. A coalition of black organizations is working with the National Association of Secretaries of State to share information about black voters' experiences and explore ways of remedying Election Day problems. Over the next year or so we will see more coalitions of this sort as the new federal election reform law is implemented at the local level. That is all to the good.
To build coalitions across diverse population groups, leaders must understand and be comfortable in the variety and complexity of our communities. Three years ago, Ford created the Leadership for a Changing World program. It identifies leaders who have these coalition building skills and helps them consolidate and expand their work. You will be meeting one awardee, Ruth Wise, who will appear on a panel tomorrow.
I'll briefly mention a few examples of how the award Leaders operate. One is Salvador Reza, who led a campaign of Phoenix, Arizona street side taco vendors. They were threatened by a new ordinance that prevented them from operating in certain neighborhoods. Mr. Reza's ability to understand the concerns of local neighborhood associations and restaurateurs helped him develop a compromise. He developed that understanding by working patiently with people on all sides of the dispute and putting them together in carefully organized dialogues. The new ordinance allowed the vendors to sell from curbside trucks, subject to compliance with specific health code requirements. Believe it or not, his campaign wound up enlisting as allies the restaurant association and the neighborhoods that originally tried to ban the vendors.
Another example of crossing boundaries to build fruitful coalitions comes from Dale Asis of Chicago. Dale heads an organization with the unlikely name of Coalition of African, Asian, European and Latino Immigrants of Illinois. Conventional wisdom supposes these groups will be mutually antagonistic. In fact, representatives of those disparate communities work together smoothly. One observer said the key to success is Dale Asis' patience in building cross-cultural relationships and ensuring that each group is part of the decision-making process. Again, careful exploration of group concerns and mutual interests legitimate power sharing in decision-making.
Then there is Vicki Kovari, a Detroit community organizer who worked with a church organization whose acronym is MOSES (Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength). She realized that blighted inner-city communities were the results of broader state and regional policies. So she and other MOSES leaders worked over a long period to build a city-suburban coalition. It included corporate and religious leaders, suburban mayors and residents, and community leaders from across the state. Their efforts persuaded the state legislature to create the Detroit area metro regional transit authority that helps move people between formerly isolated communities and opportunities.
Three examples of visionary, pathbreaking individual leadership across sectors, nationalities, racial and ethnic groups, income groups are the future.
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To close, I hope I have given you some sense of the direction in which I see development moving in the 21st century and some of the qualities of leaders who drive those efforts. Successful new leaders develop strategies that mobilize and blend resources from government, the non-profit and business sectors. They see government as a coalition partner with those sectors. New leaders work to elevate low-skilled workers to higher value jobs and low-margin businesses to higher value enterprises. They reform education and training systems. And through a variety of methods, from affirmative action to personal persuasion and creative compromise, they bring formerly divided groups together. As Jim Clinton said earlier, we have to ask ourselves where young people will learn these skills and learn about the various sectors and communities. I believe this suggests a fresh look at various community service and internship models around the US. We need to make more of these resources.
What really distinguishes good leaders today is a moral courage to take unpopular positions. America's great leaders are personally dedicated to notions of justice and fairness. They hold to a basic optimism about the possibilities of positive social change. They are committed to work in partnership with other groups and sectors, even as they fiercely represent their constituents' core interests. And for all the fervor of their beliefs, they understand the give-and-take that is fundamental to the democratic process and to effective coalitions.
Many of you share these qualities, skills and determination. That's what brings you here. You are brave and astute as you lead change in this region. I admire your work and pray that your numbers will grow.
Let's all remember the words from the book of Proverbs: Where there is no vision, the people perish.
Thank you.