A Wider Role for Everyone—Including Women
We believe the people of Owensboro and Daviess County have a remarkable opportunity to define and practice a powerful, exemplary regional citizenship for the 1990s.
Every urban area in America faces a challenge to its old ways of doing things. Downtown power elites find their decisions don’t get respected any more. Old-fashioned county politics is discredited. All sorts of groups can block any new idea; few can make things happen.
The successful communities of the 1990s will be those that transform splintered power into shared power. They’ll be those that consciously include all groups, learn to be mutually supportive, to work cooperatively on shared problems. They’ll create all sorts of imaginative mechanisms (a countywide child support program, a downtown management district, for example). They’ll have an open spirit about new ideas. Job recruitment will be important—but only as a means to the larger goal of developing the civic, spiritual, and economic potential of all the region’s people.
Owensboro-Daviess County may have a better shot than many American communities at the new regional citizenship because its problems are of manageable scale. Another plus: despite what seemed a divisively bitter fight over city-county merger here in 1990, the best of the new city and county leadership that emerged in the 1980s has laid a foundation for creative regionwide approaches.
What about governmental reorganization issues of tax and spending fairness, efficiency of services? We heard a great deal of discussion about how government might be made more rational, tax bases distributed more fairly, services combined for delivery on a countywide basis.
And we heard some constructive short-term suggestions for building better city-county relationships. One example: joint sessions of the City Commission and Fiscal Court, perhaps monthly at first, and beginning with uncontroversial, “apple pie” issues. If that worked, touchier issues (taxes, for example) might be addressed later.
To us, such careful, incremental steps are the wise way to go. On merits alone, merger made a lot of sense. But the results proved the community wasn’t ready. It’s probably fruitless to try for changed systems of government until a sounder base of shared interests and mutual trust can be built. Merger or some variant may come some day, but only when the entire community sees it as a “win-win” scenario.
In the meantime, regional citizenship can be built by multiple strategies designed to create trust relationships across the city and county. Today’s lack of trust is disturbing. So are the contradictory ways Owensborans talk about their community. On the one hand they boast about life in their prosperous, serene, comfortable, solid middle-class American community. “I wouldn’t want to live any other place,” person after person seemed to be saying. “This is a good community. I never moved anyone here who didn’t love it or who wanted to leave,” a prominent agribusiness leader told us.
But there’s another Owensboro-Daviess County mind-set. It’s rife with deeply held suspicions—urban-rural, white-black, privileged elites versus regular folks.
We heard that folks in Owensboro-Daviess County have great love for stability, resist any kind of unproven change. But a thin line separates what’s stable from what’s stale. Ask leaders of this community about its downside and they often reach for such words as stubbornness, complacency, and resignation. We heard echoes of the all-American quotient of selfishness and shortsightedness—”I got mine, you get your own.”
Yet in Owensboro today, there are ripples on the still waters—stirrings of outreach, the beginnings of new connections. They suggest to us that city and county people may be ready to grasp the strands of opportunity on every front, from enriching young children’s lives to shared leadership visits aimed at learning how other communities address their problems.
Nearly everything the Owensboro-Daviess County community needs to do to achieve full regional cooperation and citizenship exists already, at least in fledgling, embryonic form. The secret of the future is really quite simple. It is to take these efforts, broaden and diversify them, until they’re stretched to their full potential and translate into major advantage from Whitesville to the west end, English Park to Thorobred Acres.
Working for its children is perhaps the best test of whether a community is looking forward, shaking off short-term expediency, concerned about its most critical resource—its people—in the 21st century. We were fascinated to hear of the variety and vigor of programs operating across the city and county to reach kids, especially very young ones.
The leadership seems to be coming from various organizations. Owensboro got on this wave length—well ahead of many communities—when then-Superintendent J. Frank Yeager addressed a meeting of community leaders to warn of an alarming rise of poverty among the Owensboro school district’s children. Half the kids, he said, come from families eligible for subsidized lunches—more than twice the national average.
So there’s been a committee for children in need, appointed by Mayor Adkisson. A foundation for children was founded by Larry and Frankie Hager, with initial funding of $1 million. The Audubon Area Community Services is in on the act with a broadening of its services for children. The idea of citywide preschool for all children—”Kiddy Tech”—has been raised. The Owensboro Citizens Committee on Education has a subcommittee discussing at-risk youth, alternative schools, mentoring, self-esteem efforts, and a community awareness effort targeting potential dropouts.
And a critical role has been played by the United Way, which has determined to provide “venture grants,” to put a heavy emphasis on preventive programs and less, comparatively, on after-the-fact remedial efforts. (If you’ve watched other United Ways around America, you know that’s a tough drill—risking heated reaction from existing agencies likely to receive less if a creative new strategy gets adopted.)
Yet with United Way encouragement, a consortium of 16 local agencies has agreed to work as a team on a pilot basis in a single school, coordinating a full range of services for children from kindergarten through the third grade. Critically important is the fact that the families are to be involved, too. United Way hopes it’s developing with charitable dollars a program that public dollars can pick up and broaden, as the Kentucky Education Reform Act kicks in with a full program of parent resource centers and a dramatic broadening of early childhood education. (Right now Head Start is reaching just 21 percent of eligible children in Daviess County; if KERA money flows as planned, 50 percent could be covered.)
We see in all this an extraordinary start at getting special help to children—especially those from poor families—so that they’ll be ready for school and able to succeed once they get there.
Experience around the country proves that quality, early help means that kids are much more apt to stay in school, less likely to get pregnant, more likely to end up in college than in jail. Eventually, kids who get this kind of an early lift stand a much better chance to live fulfilling rather than frustrating lives, to become taxpayers rather than tax-eaters.
It’s hard to think of a more imaginative investment a community can make in its future. But the test for Owensboro-Daviess County remains: can the early childhood/family programs cover the entire community, all families in need? Pilot programs and committee studies are great but don’t accomplish much unless they lead to across-the-community action and results.
At the other end of the age spectrum, the community’s most valuable untapped resource today may be its retired and elderly citizens. And they’re an expanding resource. Figures show Daviess County people 65 and older increasing in number more rapidly than any other population segment.
Most communities have programs to take care of senior citizens; what impressed us most in Owensboro was mention of programs to reach out to senior citizens, capture their skills and wisdom for multiple volunteer tasks waiting for attention across the community.
As a very senior citizen of Owensboro told us: “With company policies shoving people out at 65, or early retirement programs, we end up with people with vast experience and vast ability doing nothing but playing golf or—in the case of men—having their wives say ‘Get out of the house.’”
We suggest the mobilization of senior power needs to go a critical step further—to retirees themselves organizing to serve the community. Today’s seniors are the most “helped” generation of our history on every front from Social Security to Medicare to Medicaid. Most enjoy a health and vigor no generation older than 65 ever has before.
And they represent a resource too valuable to waste. Nowhere is that resource so needed as in multiple efforts to help children—particularly in a time of shrinking public budgets for social service workers, teachers’ aides, childcare workers, park and recreation workers and supervisors. Each seniors’ organization in the community should decide on the role it could play and then start scheduling its members to work with the schools and parks and social agencies and neighborhood centers.
As seniors organize themselves, we believe respect for them will escalate. Reengaged in the community, they’ll be more fulfilled as individuals and will add to the substance of the new regional citizenship. These kinds of dividends are already being recognized in Asheville, North Carolina, where 1,500 retirees are participating in multiple activities—ranging from career counseling for college students to helping hospitals to running discussion groups for adults in rural communities. There’s a seven-week Leadership Asheville Seniors training course in which leaders from the schools, government, and education brief retirees about the community’s needs. Work in the local schools has become a special focus of the program.
What about woman power—and potential? Owensboro-Daviess County has a dismal record in tapping it. We were shocked to hear that of the 47 elected positions in Owensboro and Daviess County, only one is held by a woman—the vice-chair of a school board.
“The political culture here is mostly good-ole-boy, male-dominated politics,” one veteran—a male—noted. No woman, for example, has been elected to county office since 1961.
We found that record almost incomprehensible. Consider just cities in and around Kentucky that have elected woman mayors in recent years. The list includes Charlotte, North Carolina; West Lafayette, Indiana; Rock Hill, South Carolina; and Little Rock, Arkansas (which has actually elected two women as mayor). In big, manly Texas, the cities of Houston, Dallas, El Paso, Austin, and Fort Worth have all seen fit to elect women as mayor in recent years. Up near Washington, D.C., the chairman of the board of supervisors in Fairfax County is a woman. Both the mayor and city manager of Alexandria, Virginia, are women.
So why the virtual blackout of women in political posts in Owensboro and Daviess County? Why aren’t women encouraged to run, given support when they do? We didn’t get any clear answers. But one thing’s clear. If a community fails to regard women as serious leaders, it writes off half its potential leadership pool. It loses the distinctive leadership qualities that only women may contribute. That may have been an affordable luxury in the 1920s or even the 1950s; it isn’t in the 1990s.