First in Future: Where Emerging Ideas Take Flight

Today’s show starts in an unusual place. With a question: why do bad things happen to good people? The writers of the Bible were probably the first to try to answer that question on paper – in the story of Job. In 1981, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a best-selling book about the question. He called it, not surprisingly, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” Others have followed. In 2003, I wrote my own play on the subject. My conclusion was probably much the same as others. We don’t—and we can’t—know why these things happen. But an equally important question for all of us is what do we do AFTER bad things happen? What do we do NEXT? Today’s guest, Nation Hahn, faced down the worst kind of tragedy. In today’s episode, he talks about how he is getting through that pain, and finding hope for our state’s future. Nation Hahn is the Board President and Co-Founder of the Jamie Kirk Hahn Foundation, the Chief Growth Officer for EdNC.org, and Digital Director for Blueprint for Athletes. This installment of First in Future is part of a special TV series produced in collaboration with UNC-TV, and recorded in UNC-TV’s Legislative Studio in downtown Raleigh. Taped segments will air on the North Carolina Channel. Visit www.ncchannel.org/schedule/ for specific air dates.

It is the middle of August, and ridiculously hot these days. It’s the time of year Reverend Richard Joyner hated, growing up in Pitt County. For him and his 12 brothers and sisters, it meant another back-breaking day after another, in the fields with his sharecropping parents. The only thing he was sure of then was that he would never be in the fields when he grew up. Nowadays, he runs an award-winning ministry based in the fields – and loves every minute of it. As you listen to this week’s interview, I hope you’ll think of something you may have been considering doing, but avoiding. It could be just the thing you were called to do. Rev. Joyner is the pastor at Conetone Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, and founder of Conetone Family Center. This installment of First in Future is part of a special TV series produced in collaboration with UNC-TV, and recorded in UNC-TV’s Legislative Studio in downtown Raleigh. Taped segments will air on the North Carolina Channel. Visit www.ncchannel.org/schedule/ for specific air dates. Watch the UNC-TV broadcast version via online streaming here!

Tomorrow, about 34,000 students, 2,300 faculty and 6,700 staff will run into each other at North Carolina State University, the start of another year for the state’s largest university. Full disclosure – I work there, along with the staff of the Institute for Emerging Issues, and the start of every year is about as exciting as it gets. These are good times for NC State. This year’s entering freshmen have the highest ACT and SAT scores ever. Last year’s students graduated at the highest rate ever. Faculty at the university are winning more research grants than ever. And they rank #2 in the country on turning the stuff they discover into something of commercial value. Presiding over all that for the past seven years is Chancellor Randy Woodson, our guest interview this week. If you’re a leader of an enterprise, large or small, I hope you’ll appreciate his thoughts on the importance of saying “no.” We also talk about the grand challenges of the world, what he calls “cluster hires,” what universities are learning from industry, the biggest challenges our state is facing, and why North Carolina is like a Belgian beer. This installment of First in Future is part of a special TV series produced in collaboration with UNC-TV, and recorded in UNC-TV’s Legislative Studio in downtown Raleigh. Taped segments will air on the North Carolina Channel. Visit www.ncchannel.org/schedule/ for specific air dates.

Why is it that anybody gives something to someone else? Today’s guest, Jennifer Tolle Whiteside, has asked herself that question more than maybe anyone else in North Carolina. As president and CEO of the North Carolina Community Foundation, she talks every day with people who are setting up funds in their communities to do something useful. Across the state, a group of community foundations takes the bureaucracy out of giving. By giving through a community foundation, someone else handles the administrative details so you get to focus on what you want your money to be used for. Join us as we talk about beekeepers and books, economic mobility and the nobility of a cafeteria worker, and about what people get from giving. This installment of First in Future is part of a special TV series produced in collaboration with UNC-TV, and recorded in UNC-TV’s Legislative Studio in downtown Raleigh. Taped segments will air on the North Carolina Channel. Visit www.ncchannel.org/schedule/ for specific air dates.

Three years ago, the state of North Carolina launched a new approach to economic development. Essentially, we bet that we would have a better chance of recruiting jobs and bringing in tourists if we had a public-private corporation doing the marketing. The Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina was launched. When it survived the transition of administrations, Gov. Cooper appointed a new chair for the organization, Charlotte attorney Frank Emory. He’s our guest this week. Why would you pick an attorney to head up the board of an economic development partnership? Well, Frank’s asked himself that. But as you listen, I think you’ll hear why. Besides his having an impressive track record as a community leader, there’s some value to the sorts of questions Frank’s learned to ask as an attorney. As he puts it, he’s trained to dispassionately analyze knotty problems and figure out a way to resolve them. That’s not a bad summary of the sort of challenge we need to work on. In our conversation, we talked about purple cows, the different perspectives pigs and chickens have on breakfast, where Charlotte’s workforce comes from, why God gave us two ears and only one mouth, and what he learned growing up in a one-industry town that had to reinvent itself. This installment is part of a special 13-segment series produced in collaboration with UNC-TV, and recorded in UNC-TV’s Legislative Studio in downtown Raleigh. We are excited to share the First in Future podcast via traditional means and via taped segments to air on the North Carolina Channel! Visit www.ncchannel.org/schedule/ for specific air dates.

Across the state, North Carolina’s community colleges pop up like beautifully spaced dots on a map, and if you put all 58 of them—plus their satellite campuses, together—every citizen wanting to connect to one can drive or get a ride to one just a few minutes. Once they get there, they can enroll in one of hundreds of two-year degree programs. They can learn to breed cattle, clone seeds, search deeds. Or they can learn to read. This week we talk with North Carolina Community College System President Jimmie Williamson about the future of higher education, why he decided to move to North Carolina, and what he has in common with legendary jazz musician, Dizzy Gillespie. This installment is part of a special 13-segment series produced in collaboration with UNC-TV, and recorded in UNC-TV’s Legislative Studio in downtown Raleigh. We are excited to share the First in Future podcast via traditional means and via taped segments to air on the North Carolina Channel! Visit www.ncchannel.org/schedule/ for specific air dates.

Why is it that some communities take off, and others, even if they appear to have the same kinds of assets, don’t. Today’s guest says it all comes down to one thing—LEADERSHIP. The communities that are better able to weather storms and chart a course for the future have people in place who can get others to join them in moving forward. That’s why it’s a great thing that at this moment in time, Abdul Rasheed is heading up the William C. Friday Fellowship for Human Relations, a program designed to identify and equip the next generation of leaders. Named after long-time UNC System president Bill Friday, the fellowship honors his spirit by emphasizing the important role that leaders must play in their communities in finding common ground. This installment is part of a special 13-segment series produced in collaboration with UNC-TV, and recorded in UNC-TV’s Legislative Studio in downtown Raleigh. We are excited to share the First in Future podcast via traditional means and via taped segments to air on the North Carolina Channel! Visit http://www.ncchannel.org/schedule/ for specific air dates.

This week, our guest isn’t just a community builder, he’s also a community listener. We talk with Andy Fox, a landscape architect from NC State University’s College of Design and co-founder of the Coastal Dynamics Design Lab, about how listening is critical to providing design solutions for large-scale social, environmental and economic issues. Andy goes into communities with an interdisciplinary team of architects, engineers, river specialists, and even social scientists, and does something very strange—he listens. Lately, he’s been listening to people in southeastern North Carolina from places like Fair Bluff, Princeville and Windsor, as those places try to figure out how to recover from Hurricane Matthew.

For most of us listening, becoming a citizen was an involuntary act—we were born here, so we were citizens. But, for about 750,000 people per year, becoming a United States citizen is a choice. They wait, they apply, they study, they take a test—and, only if they pass do they get in. Mor Aframian moved from Israel to Charlotte with her family as a child. She went to NC State University; got a bachelor’s and master’s degrees; started two companies; and then, she had a choice. Where did she belong? Did she want to be a citizen here? She chose the U.S. and North Carolina. On this Fourth of July episode, I think you’ll be interested in why she chose the U.S., how stressful an hard the citizenship test is, what it felt like to vote for the first time, and how this citizen “thing” is going for her, five years in. This installment is part of a special 13-segment series produced in collaboration with UNC-TV, and recorded in UNC-TV’s Legislative Studio in downtown Raleigh. We are excited to share the First in Future podcast via traditional means and via taped segments to air on the North Carolina Channel! Check back soon for specific air dates.

If you had to pick out the most outspoken critic of higher education in North Carolina, it wouldn’t take you long to find the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. For the past 14 years, the Martin Center has been putting a spotlight on higher education, sharing frustration and outrage about the quality of education, its cost, its substance. Center staff have written about courses they see as frivolous, faculty they see as spending too much time on writing and not enough time in the classroom, facilities that see as wasteful, administrators they see as too plentiful. It’s a really important set of criticisms, one that higher ed needs to be aware of and in conversation about. This week, we talk with Martin Center President Jenna Robinson about her love-hate relationship with the current state of higher education. _____________________________ This installment is part of a special 13-segment series produced in collaboration with UNC-TV, and recorded in UNC-TV’s Legislative Studio in downtown Raleigh. We are excited to share the First in Future podcast via traditional means and via taped segments to air on the North Carolina Channel! Check back soon for specific air dates.

A few years ago, some people in Charlotte got ticked off by a number – 39. Just 39 percent of third graders in Charlotte were reading at grade level. In some places people might have said, well that’s about average for the state—which it is. In some places they might have noticed that other cities were doing even worse—which they are. In some places they might have said “I guess there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s too hard.” But this being Charlotte, they took the opposite approach, rallying together a coalition of Belks, banks, foundations, and community leaders to form Read Charlotte. They set a goal of doubling the percentage of 3rd graders reading proficiently by 2025. Then they hired a Rhodes Scholar to run it. This week we talk with Read Charlotte Executive Director Munro Richardson about his approach to tackling big challenges, the importance of relentless networking, and the true home of good barbeque.

At the Emerging Issues Forum on Innovation a couple of years ago, one of the clear findings was that outside of the Triangle and Charlotte, there wasn’t a really a fully developed structure in other cities and towns in North Carolina, to nurture people who wanted to start new, innovative businesses – we hadn’t built an entrepreneurial ecosystem. After the Forum, Anita Brown-Graham, the long-time head of the Institute for Emerging Issues, and Forward Communities CEO Christopher Gergen came up with an idea to jumpstart innovation nodes in other parts of the state. Eighteen communities applied to be part of the effort, and in the end, only five were selected. For the past two years, those cities—Greensboro, Asheville, Wilmington/Carolina Coast, Wilson and Pembroke—have all formed local teams. They have been meeting together regularly to share ideas to figure out how to build off of local assets so that a more diversity of people in those communities are creating businesses, and so that once those businesses get launched, they can get the kind of support they need to be successful. Each of the communities have developed a plan for going forward, and they want to help other communities. With the support of RTI International, the NC Department of Commerce's Office of Science, Technology & Innovation, Forward Communities, and the Institute for Emerging Issues, they’ve applied some of their learnings to a tool that other communities can use to assess what they have, and begin the process of figuring out to get more innovative. Visit InnovateNC.org to download the tool, and put it to work in your town or community. This week, we talk with Rodger Lentz, City of Wilson’s Chief Planning and Development Officer who heads up the innovative work that Wilson is doing, and IEI Policy Manager Sarah Langer Hall who planned and designed the InnovateNC program for IEI.

On the one hand, who could have predicted it? Laura Gerald grew up in Robeson County, went to Harvard and Johns Hopkins for her medical degree, then ignored the myriad of opportunities available to her, returning to her hometown to serve her community as a pediatrician instead. On the other hand, it seems almost blindingly obvious that she would now be heading up the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust. Their biggest priorities are rural health and care for children in their earliest years – exactly what Laura spent a lifetime training for. This week, Dr. Laura Gerald, president of Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, discusses her journey along the way, what philanthropy can AND can’t do, her favorite cookbook, and the realization in her later years that she had grown up poor.

If you're trying to imagine a new future for your town, or your county, or your region, or your state, or even your company, you need to have perspective. In an ideal world, you'd be talking to a lot of different, smart people; you'd step outside of your situation and see how other people are imagining their future; you'd want to know what assets you have to build on; you'd want to know what context you were working in; and if you were trying to advise people who were trying to plan for the future of a state, it would be hard to be better positioned than this week's guest, Ted Abernathy. He grew up in a small town in North Carolina, and worked on a county level, worked on a regional level, worked on a multistate level. So naturally, when we sat down with him at the UNC-TV studios in Raleigh, we asked him to help us to imagine our state's future.

A couple of years ago, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a bill making it the official policy of the state that every student should read at or above grade level by the end of third grade. The logic makes sense—if you can't read by the end of third grade, you're more likely to need remedial education; you're less likely to graduate; and you're less likely to get a job after graduation. Needless to say, the fewer children who read by the end of third grade, the less likely we are as a state to be first in future. To help address this concern, there are various national, statewide, regional and local groups, plus a grassroots effort called Reach Out and Read Carolinas. Reach Out and Read Carolinas gets to more than 300,000 kids each year in an unexpected place: the doctor's office (or a clinic, or a hospital). Think about it—more than 90 percent of children visit the doctor every year, and when they get there, they see someone they trust. At each of the 400 Reach Out and Read sites in North and South Carolina, the medical professional hands the child the book and then engages them - and their parents - in a conversation about reading. This week, we talk with Callee Boulware, executive director of Reach Out and Read Carolinas, about why the program seems to make a difference in helping meet that objective.