First in Future: Where Emerging Ideas Take Flight

To celebrate the Fourth of July, First in Future brings you a special conversation with an American history scholar. Dr. Craig Friend is an NC State Professor of Public History, specializing in the Revolutionary War period. He first caught the bicentennial bug growing up near Kings Mountain, NC, the site of the first major patriot victory after the British invasion of Charleston. In this week's episode, Dr. Friend gives us some perspective on the Declaration of Independence, what it meant to the colonists and soldiers, what women and slaves would have thought about the phrase “all men are created equal,” and how the holiday has evolved over time.

Think about these five guiding leadership principles: family first, health impact, people and culture, learning, and joy in work, that is what this week's First in Future guest, Dr. Patrick Conway, President and CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina strives towards. He recently had a conversation with a 75 year old woman, who appreciated BCBS for being with her through the high and low points of her entire life. It reminded him that health care has a lasting effect on the lives of all North Carolinians. In the conversation we had with him, we talked about opioid addiction prevention, affordable housing, food insecurity and why some health care companies are building trails and investing in free gym memberships. Dr. Conway is also launching a plan to prevent and cure diabetes. If he gets it right, it could make a difference in the lives of more than 10,000 people.

One of the most exciting public policy projects going on in North Carolina is the report of the My Future NC Commission. It is a report setting an “attainment goal” for our state of how many people we think we need to have at what level of education if our state is going to be successful. The dramatic increase in our attainment rate goal is not going to just happen, but will take our 58 community college organizations across the state that are within easy reach of just about everybody. This week’s First in Future guest Audrey Jaeger, the head of the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research at NC State, talks about how the community college presidents are able to listen carefully to the specific needs of their communities and form the real partnerships to make a difference. She works with their leaders daily on how they will help NC achieve the attainment goal from the report of reaching 67% of the adult population equipped with more than a high school degree in the next 10 years.

In 2016, the Institute for Emerging Issues looked at the future economy and tried to figure out the kinds and numbers of jobs that were likely to go away over the next 20 years in every corner of the state and the answer appears to be 25% overall. That is one in every four jobs in North Carolina that is likely to disappear by 2040, as technology and artificial intelligence replaces the jobs humans used to be able to do. As IEI noted in our FurtureWork report, that means the way we educate people is going to need to change if they are going to find the next set of jobs. That is why we are talking to this week’s First in Future guest, Dan Gonzalez, the co-founder of District C. It is a new education-focused startup that focuses on helping high school students, our future workforce, discover how to work together on diverse teams to solve complex problems for businesses in the Triangle. Rather than teach students how to do better on getting a single answer on a test, he tries to equip them for the world of problems where there is no obvious answer. Those are the kinds of problems humans, working in teams, may be uniquely qualified to solve.

State of NC community college presidents met recently to work through some of the details of what community colleges could do to help address a huge challenge of meeting the needs of employers between now and 2030. North Carolina is going to need 2 million more people with some sort of education that is more than just a high school degree. It could be a four year degree or a two year degree. If we do nothing, we are going to come up 700,000 people short, so a lot of people are looking for ways to build a pipeline of young folks to meet some of that need. This week’s First in Future guest, Peter Hans, president of the State of NC Community College System knows with absolute certainty that the community colleges will play a critical role with their continuing education and curriculum programs to help address this employment education need and other challenges. The Institute for Emerging Issues is going to be looking at what we can do to help more adults get that additional level of education at our next Emerging Issues Forum, coming up October 15 in Charlotte. IEI is looking for inspirational examples from employers, support organizations and educational entities who are getting our adult workers the credentials they need in time to get ready for their next job.

Research shows that more than half of us don’t seek out people whose views are different from ours and we are nearly four times as likely to ignore information that doesn’t support our pre-existing views. If we want better solutions to public policy challenges we face, we would consciously seek out people whose views are different than are own. The Institute for Emerging Issues is launching a project called “Civic Conversations” where we are trying to change that conversation issue. Last week on First in Future, we talked about one part of the project, a call for communities across the state to convene conversations where they bring together people across lines of race or class or political party to try to get new ideas about big problems facing their communities. This week First in Future wanted to tell you about another part of the project, one that is bringing together state political leaders from across the state. On this week’s episode we highlight a past interview with Republican State Senator Danny Earl Britt and Democratic Senator Jay Chaudhuri, in which they talked about how they have learned to have civil conversations with each other, take each other seriously, treat each other as human beings, and are starting to learn something from each other. For more information on our Civic Conversations effort, please go to our website, emergingissues.org.

Last year we talked with Pearce Godwin, a North Carolina native who had an experience on a bus ride in Uganda that changed his life forever. He started a national effort called Listen First designed to bring people who disagree with each other into conversation with each other. As the Institute for Emerging Issues continues its efforts to “reconnect NC,” we are launching a statewide effort called Civic Conversations. After listening to this week’s “throwback” episode with Pearce, we hope you’ll be inspired to go to our website at emergingissues.org/civic-conversations and commit to hosting a civic conversation of your own.

The growing economy is causing business challenges across the state as communities scramble to attract talented people from other places to work there, and to make sure the people who grow up there have the skills they need to do the work that needs to be done. The Statesville Chamber of Commerce surveyed its members last year and the members told them the same thing a lot of businesses all across the state are saying, please help us find great employees. Chambers, like any organization, need to grow and adapt in a digital age, but this week’s First in Future guest, Statesville Chamber of Commerce president Shannon Viera, says that what shouldn’t change is their efforts to bring people together for the kind of face to face, spontaneous conversations and discoveries that you wouldn’t get if you just interacted digitally or online.

The years since 2000 have been particularly challenging for Christian churches in the US, the Presbyterian church has lost more than 1 million members, the Episcopal Church is down about 400,000. The Disciples of Christ are down about 280,000, and in a single year the United Methodist Church lost 116,000 members, that is the equivalent of losing a 300 member church every day. In rural areas, the challenges are even bigger, as populations get older and many areas lose population, some churches have to figure out either how to how to pay the bills with fewer members or whether they should shut down. For the past four years, the Institute for Emerging Issues has been working with The Duke Endowment as part of a big project they have underway. Our part is called Rural Faith Communities as Anchor Institutions, and it focuses on how churches can take a look at the challenges their communities face, and come to the community table to help. In some places these institutions are the most important and enduring assets a community has. Leading the effort for the Institute for Emerging Issues is this week’s First in Future guest, Kylie Foley, the Rural Faith Communities Program Manager. As you’ll hear, she is focused and passionate about the possibilities, enough so that she moved here from South Florida to join the effort.

There was a recent description of a modern librarian as “equal parts caregiver, local hero and geek squad member.” So the way we learn and access information is changing and you may not be aware of what is happening at your local library to accomplish this task. The change means that this week’s First in Future guest, Greg Raschke, NC State’s Senior Vice Provost and Director of Libraries, needed to adapt, as well as every library and librarian. We now have more access to more information than any people at any time in the history of the world and the amount of information we can access is doubling about every 18 months. The real questions we have to figure out now are how we find what we need to know when we need to know it, and how we make sense of it. Librarians may just be our secret weapon. So hug your librarian today, and then ask them for help.

Last week we heard from Yvette Holmes, the Vice President for Resource Development and Partnerships at DHIC, which has built about 2,300 affordable housing units in the Triangle region so far. We learned about the number of people that need housing and the “why” of affordable housing that is gaining attention from elected officials and faith communities. This week on First in Future, we talk about the more human side of affordable housing. How it has so many more benefits like, personal safety, health, education and employment.

Rural areas can not get enough quality housing built. Urban areas have trouble finding land affordable enough in neighborhoods safe enough. An easy solution from a price point is to locate housing on the cheapest land possible, but studies have shown that creating neighborhoods that blend people of different incomes leads to better results for lower income people. This week’s First in Future guest, Yvette Holmes is the Vice President for Resource Development and Partnerships at DHIC, a Triangle based nonprofit that supports individuals, families, and seniors by providing homes and opportunities that promote the financial, physical, and mental well-being of people and communities. Yvette has been advocating for and building affordable housing for more than 40 years. This week we talk about the “why” of affordable housing and when she first discovered that she had grown up in “affordable housing”. Next week we will learn about some bigger issues and why she does the work that she does.

Twenty years ago, three Latino couples, made up of an engineer, a scientist, an IT professional and three teachers, took a look at what was going on with Latino education in the state, and didn’t like what they saw. About half of the students were dropping out of high school and they saw that was going to cause big problems for them, and the state. That is when this week’s First in Future guest Marco Zarate, his wife and others stepped up and assisted in forming the North Carolina Society of Hispanic Professionals, a nonprofit focused on “promoting education among Hispanic youth,” with a special focus on increasing high school graduation rates. Nearly 17,000 students have come to an annual education summit, while another 175,000 have gotten information through their “stay in school” campaign. North Carolina Society of Hispanic Professionals have raised corporate contributions, brought in members and volunteers, and through it all Marco has stayed with the organization, as president on a voluntary basis. Marco Zarate grew up in Tampico Mexico, then in Mexico City before going to one of the best universities in the country, Monterrey Tech, to study engineering. His connection to North Carolina began with a graduate program at NC State more than 30 years ago.

In 1985, the state of North Carolina jumped way ahead of most of the rest of the country. They asked a fledgling organization called the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina, or MCNC, to connect up NC State, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, NC A&T, UNC Charlotte and the Research Triangle Institute so they could share research and ideas over a safe network. Today MCNC is part of the most complicated project yet, figuring out how to get high speed access to every home in North Carolina. Everybody wants someone to find a simple, single, elegant solution. According to this week’s First in Future guest, Jean Davis, CEO and President of MCNC, that is not going to happen. At every stage of the state’s efforts to connect the state, somewhere in that mix has be MCNC. They have been adapting, sizing up the landscape, assessing what isn’t getting done, then figuring out how they can play in the changing landscape. It’s a perfect role for Jean Davis, a former IBM’er, Department of Commerce staffer and tech entrepreneur.

A new word to learn is agglomeration; the trend toward increasing concentration of people and jobs in more centralized regions. North Carolina is seeing this as the major metropolitan areas, in general, are growing more quickly than the average rural areas. It’s a cause of concern for some people, but it can also be an advantage when big regions work together. That is what this week’s First in Future guest is working towards. Stan Kelly is the Chief Executive Officer and President of the Piedmont Triad Partnership, which helps market the Triad and the surrounding counties to big companies seeking to relocate. The PTP is helping to lead a group of 4 gigantic industrial sites and the counties that surround them in a joint marketing effort called Carolina Core. Stan Kelly’s position is that in the competition for very big industrial projects, size matters, and if counties can band together, “A win for one is a win for all.”