Recipe for Success: Learn from Others, Support Innovation
How do Owensboro and Daviess County build the new institutions they need to undergird an expanded regional citizenship for the 1990s?
A first and critical step for many communities is to learn—and keep on learning—from others. We were heartened to hear that Mayor Adkisson has organized community leadership visits to such other communities as Iowa City and Bloomington, Indiana. It may be even more important that the Owensboro-Daviess County Chamber of Commerce has scheduled a three-day visit for 30 business and government officials to Augusta, Georgia. For a community in which 83 percent of the people were born in the county, there’s special need—in Adkisson’s words—”to put up the periscope and look around.”
Chambers of commerce and other civic leadership groups in many of America’s smartest cities—Seattle, Charlotte (North Carolina), Louisville, Jacksonville (Florida), Greenville (South Carolina) among them—believe there’s important payoff from intercity visits in which dozens of city leaders plunge into two- to three-day briefing sessions in other communities. As Owensboro joins the cities undertaking intercity visits, it has a lot to gain.
And it’s not just that an Augusta, for example, has an ambitious riverfront development project the Owensboro crowd can learn from. “In your own city,” a Seattle government executive told us, “you have your facade, your place. Go to another place and you’re all fellow travelers in a foreign land. A different bonding takes place.”
The intercity visits have stimulated some of urban America’s most candid “show and tell” sessions. A Charlotte leader explained that delegations get both challenge and reinforcement out of the visits, stimulation from other cities’ superior models, comfort when they register the fact that other towns’ problems may be worse than their own.
Intercity visit delegations get “turned on” by the experience. Their imaginations, their competitive spirits get aroused. And when they come home, their enthusiasm easily spreads through the entire community.
It may matter as much who goes as where the group goes. “Establishment” business and government executives need to be balanced with some of the council members, journalists, and civic activists with whom they may even be at odds back home. To make the project “click” for the Owensboro region, we’d add agribusiness leaders, educators, social service leaders, African-Americans, and—as we suggested earlier—a strong contingent of women. The more people who get included on an intercity visit, the more “co-conspirators” there’ll be for getting some of the positive ideas implemented.
Blacks don’t have much to celebrate in Owensboro. True, they get honored for top performance on championship basketball, baseball, and football teams. They can point with pride to some who made it all the way to the NFL and NBA. And it’s true the premiere performance at the RiverPark Center will be about Josiah Henson, the famed liberator of thousands of black slaves who spent five years in Owensboro before his escape north. (We were impressed to hear local governments and businesses contributed $50,000 to commission the drama, designed to later become an outdoor drama—the only play with a black theme and principally black characters ever written for an outdoor stage.)
But overall, Owensboro’s African-Americans are invisible people, nonparticipants in the mainstream life of the city and county. They’re just 6 percent of the city population, and the evidence is that young blacks are increasingly leaving town. And it’s not hard to figure why.
Blacks in leadership roles are disappearing. Today there are none in public school administration, none on the faculties of either of the private colleges, only one in elected office. We heard there’s not a single black doctor or lawyer in the community. The total number of black professionals appears to have fallen by half in the last dozen years.
Most black children are assigned to a public elementary school that’s more than 40 years old, bounded by a grain company, the city’s sanitation operation, and heavy industry. Its equipment looks worn and old.
The black community believes it does not receive a fair share of funds for road improvement, utility upgrading, parks maintenance. Kendall Perkins, the only park in the west side neighborhood that has the heaviest black population, has a long, tall, forbidding wall and deteriorating shrubbery. The condition of its play equipment isn’t up to what’s found in the other city parks. There’s general neglect of the grounds and shelter. The only occasion when the park seems to become part of the city’s larger culture is each July when it hosts its “Dust Bowl” summer basketball competition and players come from across the city.
One hears of a certain passivity, quiet desperation, a disinclination in the black community to question “the way things are done.” There seems to be a matching cynicism in the larger community. When west side residents last summer complained they were being shortchanged in basic city services, the mayor and council and city manager did respond with special hearings, and the neighborhood’s condition got several days of airing in the press. There seemed reason to believe the residents’ concerns would receive a lot more attention than in the past—perhaps even that such basic changes as assignment of regular foot patrolmen would get on the city’s agenda. (It’s absurd, we’d suggest, to think it’s sufficient just to send a patrol car through a troubled or neglected neighborhood, without having police become personally acquainted with the people on an intimate, daily basis.)
Yet ongoing attention is essential for such neighborhoods. We were a touch alarmed when a longtime observer remarked almost laconically that minor protests like those of the summer of 1991 do surface every few years, but quickly subside, not to be heard again for another decade or so.
It’s certainly true the Owensboro community has been spared the racially charged turmoil other American cities have suffered. We were told Owensboro’s public housing, located on the west side, was something to avoid, to steer around. Yet when we saw it, it resembled rather well-maintained, lower-cost market-rate housing anywhere else. Compared to public housing in a Chicago, New York, or Atlanta, the Owensboro public housing stock looks like Eden on earth.
But the challenge to Owensboro goes a lot deeper than providing decent-looking public housing. Basic respect has to be built. Owensboro must acknowledge it needs its African-American citizens as productive and participating members of its future society. To ignore them isn’t fair; it’s also not smart.
One answer can be a far more conscious effort to draw blacks into civic activities, to try to open multiple gates of opportunity. The community’s new outreach to disadvantaged children ought to have a strong, positive effect in the black community. A black-based community organization, Owensboro Career Development, is trying to stem the flow of school dropouts and is having reasonable success. (In the Owensboro School District, the black dropout rate is lower than that for whites.)
But blacks themselves need to take their natural share of political power. As a local minister told the Messenger-Inquirer last July: “Blacks are overlooked because they have no political clout, because half don’t register to vote, and half of those that register don’t vote. Then when you want something, you complain to the city, but they know you can’t hurt them because you don’t vote.”
Few of Owensboro’s young blacks are going to college. We find that surprising, because in most cities where new community colleges start, there’s a rush of enrollment by minority groups that previously never made it into higher education. Indeed, community colleges have been a powerful democratizing force in higher education, a bridge over which hundreds of thousands of young blacks and Hispanics and poor whites have made the journey to a world of wider opportunity.
Yet there’s this perplexing fact: the minority enrollment in Owensboro Community College is only 2 percent, while blacks represent 5.9 percent of the city, 3.9 percent of the county population.
If the community cares enough about the quality of its future work force—and opportunities for all its citizens—this is a correctable situation. If the problem is that young blacks don’t see college as a place for them, then there could be a community effort to guarantee any graduate of its high schools at least one year of community college.
If transportation from the west and east sides of Owensboro is a problem—and of course it is, given the community college’s outlying location—then a bus or van service has to be instituted, diligently promoted, and seen as more than a passing experiment. Having chosen quite consciously to locate the community college outside of the town center, in fact at a location quite inaccessible to heavily black neighborhoods, the community has a special obligation here. Dismissing the special bus line idea for lack of interest or low fare receipts without advertising it actively and promoting the entire community college opportunity for minorities strikes us as insincere.
If some potential students have already taken on family responsibilities, lack of day care may be the biggest barrier. There are some stirrings on this front. Owensboro Community College has been considering a contract with the vocational school Kentucky Tech’s childcare program, hailed as one of the country’s best, to offer a care program on campus. We also heard talk of a communitywide center for child care, oriented to child development rather than mere warehousing of young kids while their parents work.
All the planning is encouraging, but the community has to recognize it has a near emergency on its hands. For a growing proportion of families, day care is no longer an option—it’s a necessity. If Owensboro-Daviess County can foster a set of services that are available broadly and democratically, then a lot of closed doors to college and work will swing open, especially for young women.
The sum of the strategies we’ve touched on—a Committee for Safe Growth, downtown revitalization, expanded help for kids and families, a more active senior citizen corps, and a community college that moves minorities into the mainstream—ought surely to be a stronger, more resilient community.
But even experimentation with new ideas—civic research and development work, so to speak—costs money. A community may be awash with new ideas but unable to try them for lack of modest research money. Ask any civic entrepreneur: social innovation requires some walking-around money.
Owensboro has been uniquely fortunate in the presence of Texas Gas, with its imaginative giving to community causes and pacesetting commitment of 5 percent of pretax profits for charity. With luck, this company and the banks and other corporations that follow its lead will be a feature of Owensboro life for decades to come. But in the shark-infested waters of American corporate life, nothing’s guaranteed. Across America, business giving to communities has flattened out or begun to decline. It’s time for the community to think about a backup.
Across America, hundreds of cities and regions have created, and now nourish, what are known as “community foundations.” People who may have money to give, but not enough to start a megafoundation on their own, make gifts and bequests. Indeed, a little shopping around may locate a national foundation willing to put up matching dollars to get a strong local community foundation up and running. The Mott Foundation, located in Flint, Michigan, started doing that a few years ago and since has been joined by such heavies as the Ford, MacArthur, McKnight, and Lilly foundations.
Lilly, in fact, has committed $47 million over the next 15 years to help Indiana communities get up and running on the community foundation front. It recently gave the Fort Wayne Community Foundation a challenge grant of $1.7 million. An appeal to spread a little of Lilly’s megabucks across the Ohio River might conceivably work.
We asked about private wealth in the Owensboro region and heard of more than enough names to start and maintain a healthy community foundation. The outpouring of contributions for the RiverPark Center proved the potential.
An Owensboro community foundation was begun some years ago, but it’s essentially dormant. It needs to be revived or a new effort inaugurated. Such an organization could be immensely helpful in launching the new efforts critical for regional citizenship—in providing social services, in supporting open space and the environment, in inaugurating new educational efforts, in researching governmental improvement. Look around America and you find hundreds of examples of what community foundations can do. Indiana’s Elkhart County Community Foundation, for example, is now the lead supporter of a new riverwalk project on the St. Joseph River. In Louisiana, the New Orleans Committee Foundation has a “good neighborhood fund” to provide timely interim aid for people about to become homeless. The community foundation serving both Duluth, Minnesota, and Superior, Wisconsin, sought to encourage cooperation between local governments by giving one county sheriff’s office a computerized “identi-kit” program—but only on condition it would be shared with all the neighboring jurisdictions.
In Trion, North Carolina, the Polk County Community Foundation put up money for clearly numbered and lettered green and white signs along rural county roads, so that crews responding to “911” calls can get to the scene of the emergency.
Within the next few years, we believe Owensboro may be ready to form a regional citizens organization that examines critical public issues, develops new policy directions, acts as a sounding board for sensible solutions. Such an organization could take a consistent, conscious, regionwide view—something it’s hard for elected officials, under the drumbeat of parochial constituent pressures, to do.
It’s for that kind of situation that a community foundation could be invaluable. Community foundations manage the loose change in American society. They don’t hand out huge sums of money, but their funds are the most flexible, potentially creative money around.
If the Owensboro-Daviess County community has a single big institutional goal for the early 1990s, we suggest a community foundation ought to be it. With its resources, such a foundation could enable continuing and expanded initiatives to strengthen city and county, to make proud regional citizenship a reality. And it could work to develop the informed, imaginative leadership needed to make Owensboro a flagship city among the urban centers along the Ohio.