Speeches

Remarks by Susan V. Berresford at the Nebraska Community Foundation's Annual Banquet

November 10, 2005 Norfolk, Nebraska

Thank you for inviting me to this important celebration of the Nebraska Community Foundation's work. It's a pleasure to be here to pay tribute to this fine institution and those who are building it. It also gives me the opportunity to hear Nebraskan's views on their past, present and future. I find that here, in the heartland of America, you have ideas that echo around the world. I suppose that is because we are all part of the human community, experiencing relentless change so common in modern life. We all express our hopes and dreams for our communities and families in these circumstances.

On the tour arranged for our visiting team from Ford and Kellogg, I met memorable people who told us that:

• They treasure what Nebraska gave them — a love of this land and its wildlife, their family's history on the land, and the community values that sprang from those roots.
• They are sad to see many young people leaving to find promising opportunities and a different lifestyle elsewhere.
• They are not sure what newcomers from overseas will bring to Nebraska's identity and daily life.

At the same time, I heard others say:

• They so treasure family and community life that they have given up more "glittery" possibilities to stay here even when only a modest opportunity is available.
• They came here from hardships overseas and are struggling and hoping for opportunity. While wary, they sense freedom they did not fully expect to find, and on which they want to build.

So I heard unease and wistfulness, but I also heard strong affirmation of what is here, and excitement about building new futures.

That is an interesting mix.

Because the Ford Foundation is a global institution, engaged worldwide with changing and challenged communities, I can say that you are not alone in these mixed sentiments. I can also assure you that in many places around the globe people have found ways to hold onto valued traditions and to create new opportunities. They have kept pace with change through innovation and entrepreneurial action.

Let me give you two examples:

In Bangladesh, a poor country in which most of the population lives in rural villages, families work the land, sell products, teach, trade and do other kinds of work. People depend on extended family and community for help in the inevitable rough patches of their lives. Unlike Nebraska, few in rural communities in Bangladesh are well-educated enough to compete easily in a modern world economy. But like Nebraskans, people are tough, independent and resourceful. Their survival depends on that.

Several decades ago, and with Ford Foundation help, a man named Muhammad Yunus created one of the very first micro-credit programs to help people in villages improve their livelihoods. At first, he created what is now known as the Grameen Bank. Many of you may know of this remarkable organization. In the beginning, it made very small loans — maybe $50 to $100 -- to individuals who had organized themselves into lending groups. The group guaranteed each group member's loan. No new member could take a loan while anyone in the group was in default. This technique of using groups of villagers to evaluate and ensure each other's loans was a brilliant innovation that is now used worldwide. Today, Grameen has a bank structure that makes half a billion dollars in loans, without collateral, to about 4.5 million poor people each year. They also have an enviable repayment rate above 90%.

Over the years, Yunus and his staff began to consider a new question: How do you help people take a bigger leap forward? If a woman successfully repaid several loans to make and sell pots or to grind mustard seeds for the oil she could sell, couldn't she take a bigger leap, even with a limited education? Among the exciting ideas they came up with was teaching rural borrowers to operate cell phones and to equip people to offer fee-based phone service to the millions of villagers without phones who need to make a call.

It was a brilliant idea, and now Grameen has cell-phone women across much of the country — sort of mobile phone providers that eliminate the need to string phone wires everywhere. Today, a new company, Grameen Phone, is a large and growing corporation, and it brings service, partly through cell-phone entrepreneurs, to millions of customers. By this and other simple marriages of striving entrepreneurial women and modern technology, Yunus helped low-income, often poorly educated rural women earn decent livings and stay in their traditional communities.

One more example, a bit closer to home than Bangladesh. Coastal Enterprises is located in Wiscasset, Maine, and its leader, Ron Phillips, is someone I admire greatly. He is quite like your leader Jeff Yost. Nearly 30 years ago, Ron moved to Wiscasset where his wife's family lived and where he expected to be a minister. He had graduated from theological seminary and then worked on economic development for two church-affiliated organizations. He anticipated a rural parish ministry as part of his life's work. But economic development became his ministry. He began with a small group of colleagues to build programs to foster economic opportunity. Like the Nebraska Community Foundation, he set out to help communities reinvent their economies. Fishing and lumbering had died out and young people were leaving for better lives elsewhere. I am sure this sounds familiar to you.

Slowly, step by step over many years, he and others built an extraordinarily successful driver of economic improvement in and beyond rural Maine. He did so by assembling pools of money, with more than half of it from governmental sources, and 85 percent of it from out of state. Unlike Nebraska, they did not try to put local money together with a community foundation to create a statewide network of donors. They brought in money from outside. Coastal Enterprises then provided grant and loan money for various types of rural development activity. Ron and his colleagues linked these efforts to local community institutions and people, ensuring that they embodied community values and needs. For example, they invested in affordable housing for workers, affordable quality day-care, and jobs that paid livable wages. They helped industries that were compatible with the state's environment and natural resources and, with farming, fishing and service traditions. They focused on value-added products such as gourmet apple items made from Maine's bountiful apple harvest.

Today, after some faltering first steps and trial and error, Coastal Enterprises in rural Wiscasset, with its population of 3,603, is a holding company with $110 million in capital under management and $54 million in assets. It is a nonprofit engine for economic development statewide. It builds services to equip the workforce, supports research that guides Coastal work, and advocates for rural concerns with public- and private-sector decision makers. Coastal has brought into the surrounding area approximately $400 million in debt and equity financing that has supported 1200 local businesses, including immigrant-owned restaurants and retail businesses, services, and affordable housing projects. It is a big player in the state.

What are the threads that link Nebraska, Bangladesh villages and coastal Maine's possibilities of preserving valued traditions, enhancing ways of making a living, and responding to inevitable change?

First and foremost, is the extraordinary value of a nonprofit social-purpose organization led by entrepreneurial and dedicated people. Just like your Nebraska Community Foundation! The leaders respect and protect tradition and respond creatively to change. Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh created the Grameen Bank. Grameen is now a household word in development circles. Its creative staff drive more and more economic development innovations to this day. Ron Phillips created Coastal Enterprises in Maine, and today it is one of the foremost models of economic and community development in rural America. In both cases, these complex and interesting organizations hold talented people in rural areas, engaged directly or indirectly in economic and social work that builds community capital. So the first thread is a simple message: outstanding leaders creating powerful, entrepreneurial "break the mold" economic development organizations can be crucial. You are one of these exemplary organizations helping Nebraska reinvent its economy. That's why Ford and Kellogg find you so interesting.

The second thread is a willingness to embrace something new with enthusiasm, including new technology and its applications, new capital for entrepreneurship, and outreach to newcomer populations. Grameen put cell phones in thousands of rural womens' hands, making them instantly new-age business persons. Coastal used new capital to spur social service systems, like daycare that helped people work, and loaned money to start-up small-scale businesses, like immigrant restaurants, call centers for buyers of elite products like Chanel clothes and perfumes, and other new ventures. In both cases the people involved overcame their skepticism about newcomers and risk. And as success occurred, they overcame their culture of modesty and began "tooting their horns" to promote a sense of positive change. They learned to be campaigners for their future. Part of success is selling your experience.

The third thread is accepting change as inevitable and managing it so the most treasured and worthwhile values aren't washed away. That's the result of inspired leadership — men and women bravely facing uncertainty and guiding new activity to reinforce local survival skills, business opportunities and local families' livelihoods. Again, people with vision and understanding of local culture in flexible, well-run organizations can do this.

Here in Nebraska you seem to have all the ingredients of these success stories. You have a community foundation in a new mold. You have superb leadership in your CEO, Jeff Yost, and the board and staff. They are imaginative, hard driving and optimistic. You also have civic leaders around the state who are the face of the foundation, and you have partners on the ground who are the face of Nebraska tomorrow. This is a very effective form of leadership development and you are making clear that America should not promote a "throw-away" culture. We value our traditions and we should build institutions that help us retain these traditions over the long term. I admire the way you are doing this. You are truly blessed to have this fabulous combination of people, organizations and long-term vision.

I also believe that you are making philanthropic history — showing a new way to create a community foundation, community leadership, community inclusion and achievement and new possibilities. When someone writes this period's history of the community foundation movement 25 years from now, you may well be featured — especially if you keep the current momentum going. At Ford, we are betting on that.

Your record will show how to build a new model and skillfully test and implement it on a statewide scale. You will have a well-deserved reputation for reasoned risk taking that offered new ideas, new kinds of economic and social prospects, and other innovations. This ability to innovate, to insist on excellence, to be Nebraska's R&D engine will have set a high standard for others.

So this celebration surely marks both your past achievements and your future direction and possibilities. At the Ford Foundation and Kellogg, we are cheering for you and learning from you.