First in Future: Where Emerging Ideas Take Flight

In honor of Independence Day, July 4th, First in Future's guest is the secretary of North Carolina Department of Military & Veterans Affairs, Larry Hall. He is responsible for taking care of the state’s obligations to a huge number of active duty and retired members of the military – in all close to 1 million residents of our state. His department helps them apply for benefits, runs job transition programs, nursing homes, even cemeteries. Listen out for his thoughts on the economic impact of the military, the changing role of active duty military across the world and the role that veterans can play as “culture carriers” in our state. He also reminds his fellow Marines, once a Marine, always a Marine and once a state senator, always a former state senator.

A scene is repeated in cities across the state, this company leaves, that plant closes or fails, and it rocks the town to it's core. Who is willing to stand up and return to fight for it after college? So imagine you are a new attorney fresh from law school, who grew up in Wilkes County, an area suffering the loss of Lowes foods and Lowes Home Improvement headquarters and NASCAR races. If you are this week's First in Future guest, Michael Cooper, the co-director of New Leaders Council of North Carolina, you move back to make a change. You go to court everyday to help your community, you join every board that you think can make a difference and you write stories and columns to inspire about what is possible.

What do you think about public schools? Do teachers get paid enough? Are there too many administrators? Do we test students too much? Not enough? Should we keep students closer to home? The past 32 years the Public School Forum has been trying to answer those questions. Our First in Future guest, the Executive Director of the Public School Forum of North Carolina, Keith Poston has been leading the organization for the past 4.5 years. Imagine it is your job to have a take on 20 contentious issues, and knowing someone disagrees with you about every opinion. The truth is we all have opinions on some of these questions. North Carolina invests 55% of its total budget on education, and 70% of the education funding is spent on K-12 education. But is that enough? Are we spending it in the right ways?

Here is a fact, North Carolina citizens are getting older. Currently, there are about 1.6 million citizens who are over 65. Over the next 20 years, one million more citizens will be added to that demographic. However, this demographic shift presents some amazing opportunities, as many of these older citizens will want to give back to the places they live. Across our state,  community foundations are busy helping North Carolinians address big community problems. This week’s First in Future guest is Elizabeth Brazas, the president and CEO of the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, located in a part of the state that will have an even larger number of citizens over 65 than state average in the upcoming years, thanks in part to Western North Carolina becoming a haven for retirees. During the podcast, you will get a lot of insights from Elizabeth—about strategic planning, the role of philanthropy, and respecting the differences between counties. You will also learn about a "mafia" that works for good, balancing permanence and fluidity in a fast-changing world and why not everybody in western North Carolina likes top 10 lists.

In order to lead other people, you need to know what you believe and why, and then bake that into the culture of your organization. You can follow the army leadership path of learning through a set of experiences and classes and determine out of millions of members who has earned the honor being a leader. Then there is the civilian path of parents who teach and mentor them while learning leadership. Then there is the convergence of both paths at the Shelton Leadership Center, where young people learn the fundamentals of values-based leadership under the direction of their director Barbara Mulkey, this week's First in Future guest.

Imaging how strange it must be to walk down the halls of your high school, the best in the state at something, and nobody knows your secret. Emmanuel Carter does it every day. Carter is a four-time high school chess champion as well as a 17-year-old Lee County High School senior. He's also one of the few young African Americans playing chess at such a top level. This week on First in Future, he talks to IEI Director Leslie Boney about his journey to becoming a chess champion, how he learned the game and how he applies its lessons to other parts of his life.

Seventy out of eighty rural North Carolina counties are described as "medical deserts", meaning they have no primary care doctors. Finding solutions to rural health care is a big, complicated problem with many experts throughout the state weighing in on possible fixes. One such expert is Dr. Robert Bashford of the Rural Initiative at the UNC School of Medicine. He is a former OB-GYN, practicing psychiatric, and the former admissions director of the UNC School of Medicine. Dr. Bashford is trying to reimagine what a new health care team could look like in rural counties, and this week on First in Future he talks to IEI Director Leslie Boney about his ideas.

How many of you are doing what you thought you would be when you graduated? That is a question that our guest asks when he is speaking to to groups and the reason is because what we need to know to be able to succeed is changing so very quickly. Careers these days are not fully planned pathways so much as a series of responses to opportunities. Our guest, Dr. Warwick Arden, is the executive vice chancellor and provost of NC State, which means he is responsible for the entire academic side of the university.

This week, we talk to Jessica Hong, a junior at Apex Friendship High School and president of her school's DECA club, an organization that prepares emerging leaders and entrepreneurs in marketing, finance, hospitality and management. As entrepreneurship becomes ever more important to the American economy, we talk to this 17-year-old—the youngest guest ever on First in Future!—about the business of business, and why young people should care.

If you make judgements about someone based on what they are wearing or how their hair looks or how they talk, you have an excellent chance of being wrong. Do southern accents work against us? What about the other dialects we speak? Do people judge us based on the words we use? The answer to all those, unfortunately is yes. What can we do about that moving forward? Well we talked with professor of linguistics at North Carolina State University and world's leading fan of North Carolina accents, Dr. Walt Wolfram about how we can get beyond being judged by the dialects we use.

Sometimes we can try to avoid looking forward, almost like if we ignore the pending changes, they won't happen. North Carolina's population is changing—it's growing—and more and more of our residents weren't born here. Our guest this week, Dr. Rebecca Tippett, the founding director of Carolina Demography at the Carolina Population Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, is a leading demographer. Demography is the science of understanding how populations grow and change, and in this First in Future episode we talk about our state's population growth is changing: where it's coming from and where it's going.

A recent survey showed that only a third of millennials consider public service an appropriate career track. The hours are unpredictable and that makes it hard to do the state's work, so maybe that is why so few of our elected officials in North Carolina are young. So a group of younger legislators are trying to change that by forming the NC Future Caucus. Our guest today are two of their members, Sen Jay Chaudhuri, a youngish Democrat from Wake County and Robeson County Republican, Danny Earl Britt. We learn about what value a caucus of young people brings to our state, and how it might represent part of the solution in getting beyond some of our bitter partisan divides.

"Tell the truth, do the right thing, and let the chips fall where they may." Those are the words that motivate North Carolina State Treasurer Dale Folwell, a man on a mission to show everyone in North Carolina just why they should care about the state's pension fund and health plan. It's an issue that may not be "sexy," but has huge implications for all the state's citizens. Our guest this week is the only former motorcycle mechanic, former legislator and former head of employment security who is currently taking care of more money than Bill Gates . . . $112 billion dollars!

In this week’s First in Future,Leslie Boney talks to Amy Strecker the Stakeholder Philanthropy Manager for DukeEnergy about what it takes to stay connected, not just to your power, but to your community. In her current job, she helps Duke Energy invests back into North Carolina and our communities. We also learn why she thinks that restoring civility might be the biggest issue we need to focus on the future and the power of the chocolate cookie.

We are good people, strong people who want to do the right thing. Let's do it! That is how our guest this week feels. Tom Campbell, the host of the nation's longest running TV shows, brings together opinionated people from across our state to take a tough look at whatever is going on in the news in a given week. We talk to him about growing up in eastern North Carolina, how he developed his reputation of being "often wrong, but never in doubt", and hear him explain why some places in the state have lost their mojo and what they need to do the future to get it back.