For nearly a century, Winston-Salem, N.C. was a major hub of tobacco manufacturing. It was home to the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which employed nearly 30,000 of the city’s residents at the height of its operations in the late 1950s. But as the decades wore on, Winston-Salem’s economy began to falter. Years of medical research about the dangers of smoking had taken its toll on the tobacco industry, and the city’s traditional manufacturing base began to dissipate. By the end of the 1980s, Winston-Salem had lost close to 10,000 jobs across multiple sectors, while R.J. Reynolds downsized the majority of its local workforce by 1989.
“Everything had been going so well,” says Gayle Anderson, former president and CEO of the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce. “We really didn’t feel the need to import any businesses or import talent.”
But they don’t call Winston-Salem the City of Arts and Innovation for nothing.
Since the late ’80s, Winston-Salem has revolutionized its stagnant economy with support from local business, educational institutions and emerging artists. In 1992, the Chamber of Commerce teamed up with nearby Wake Forest University to begin renovating the abandoned R.J. Reynolds factories in its downtown district, now a thriving research and business park. Dubbed the Innovation Quarter, it is a 330-acre space that employs 3,700 people and houses 170 companies and five academic institutions.
There’s been a rebirth of the city’s arts community, too. Spearheaded by local developers like John Bryan, the city’s once-vacant downtown transformed into a cornucopia of artisan shops, restaurants, breweries and even a Muay Thai studio.
Despite these positive developments, Winston-Salem isn’t without its troubles. A 2017 study by Winston-Salem State University found the city and surrounding Forsyth County ranked third-to-last out of a total of 2,478 U.S. counties in terms of economic mobility, and many of the residents most directly impacted by a lack of economic opportunity are African-American. This inspired Goler Community Development Corporation, a local urban real-estate nonprofit, to get involved, helping ensure all residents enjoy a share of the city’s recent success.
“When you concentrate poverty on a particular part of town, you’re not going to have great outcomes,” says Michael Suggs, president of Goler CDC. “In order to have a sustainable community, you need these different incomes together.”
Watch the full documentary above to see how Winston-Salem rallied its citizens to shape the future of its economy.
Tag: the South
A Prison Sits Empty. A Nonprofit Moves In
As a social worker accustomed to prodding the minds of adjudicated youth in the juvenile justice system, Noran Sanford has long been an inquisitive kind of guy. So when he discovered that six prisons had closed within a 50-mile radius of his home in rural Laurinburg, N.C., including one in the nearby town of Wagram, he began asking questions. Lots of them. “It was in that moment that I began putting together the idea that somebody should do something with these large sites,” Sanford says.
Enter the concept behind GrowingChange. The organization launched in 2011 to help reform and empower young ex-offenders, some barely into their teens, as they work to turn the abandoned prison in Wagram into a community farm and education center. The first group of 12 participants recruited by Sanford had all been arrested, expelled from school and kicked out of their homes — a combination of risk factors that Sanford calls the “unholy trinity,” especially when living in one of North Carolina’s poorest counties.
The Wagram site, which partially opened to the public for tours in October, has worked with 18 formerly incarcerated youth since its inception, with seven active participants today. The group was able to secure the property from the state’s Department of Public Safety, who agreed to donate the land after Sanford and two of his youth leaders pitched the idea. Sanford hopes they will eventually be able to sell the soil amendments and organic produce they’ve cultivated. So far, participants have grown food for needy local families, and are working to repurpose jail cells into aquaponics tanks and guard towers into climbing walls, among other initiatives. GrowingChange also provides intensive group therapy for its youth leaders.
Analyzed over a three-year period, the prison-to-farm program was 92 percent effective in preventing recidivism among participants, Sanford says.
As the program has matured, so has its group of original participants, some of whom have stayed on to act as mentors to new recruits. Other young ex-offenders have been working to expand GrowingChange’s reach with a graphic-novel series, called Prison Flip Comics, that chronicles their troubled past; the goal is to use the comics as a learning tool distributed throughout North Carolina’s system of juvenile justice offices.
There are also teens who have embraced a more public-facing role, speaking at outside events and otherwise “sharing their stories about a personal experience of change,” says Simon Stumpf of Ashoka, which awarded Sanford a fellowship last year for his social entrepreneurship. Ashoka also provided funds to help scale GrowingChange. Sanford’s long-term goals include flipping 25 former prisons by 2025; currently, he estimates around 300 prisons sit empty across the U.S.
Despite GrowingChange’s small number of participants, other organizations have taken notice, reaching out from places as far away as the Netherlands, where Sanford traveled to present his model. And students from schools including the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have helped in areas like designing site plans and mapping the area with 3-D technology to share with the public what the site — which will eventually include housing for veterans and a counseling center — will look like once fully completed.
Sanford hopes to inspire prison authorities, government leaders, nonprofits, universities, foundations and others to think differently about unused prisons, taking an open-sourced approach by sharing what has, and hasn’t, worked at the Wagram facility. And that has him dreaming big.
“Our hope is to create a federated system of independent sites,” he says.
How a Service Year Helps Turn Four Walls Into a Home
“A home, to me, is much more than four walls and a roof,” says Adam Hunt, a site supervisor for Habitat for Humanity in Charlotte, N.C. “I try to build homes — where you have Christmas and where you have birthdays, where you come home soaking wet after a rainy day, those kinds of things. That’s home.” As a child growing up in Lynn Haven, Fla., Hunt lived in a home built by Habitat for Humanity, an organization that constructs affordable housing and promotes home ownership for low-income families. While Hunt’s house was being built, he put in a 5-year-old’s version of “sweat equity” — picking up stray nails around the property — just like every other Habitat resident.
In this episode of NationSwell’s eight-part mini documentary series on service years, watch how AmeriCorps service year corps members help increase Habitat’s ability to provide affordable housing in Charlotte.
“[Habitat] meant a great deal of stability for myself and my family,” Hunt says. “I want to be able to give other families that same opportunity.”
NationSwell asks you to join our partnership with Service Year Alliance. Watch the video above and ask Congress to support federal funding for national service. Together, we can lead a national movement to give young Americans the opportunity to help bridge the divides in our country.
5 Cities Where Successful Wage Growth Is Happening
For several years after the 2008 market crash, the economic recovery was seen only in corporate earnings statements and consistent job reports. Family paychecks, meanwhile, didn’t keep pace. Average hourly wages rose at an anemic 2 percent from 2010 to 2014 — and that’s not accounting for inflation. Worse, US workers’ pay had lagged behind other indicators for nearly a decade, the result of bloated executive salaries, global outsourcing of jobs and capital investments in mechanization.
But in the last two years, that dynamic has begun to shift. Unemployment bottomed out at 4.6 percent last year (down from a high of 10 percent in 2009), meaning businesses needed to pay more to recruit and retain employees. Last October, wage growth hit a high of 2.8 percent nationwide.
In which cities has the average worker seen the biggest comparative bump in pay, as measured by higher wages and more work hours? (Hint, three are in blue states, two in red, and not one can claim more than a million residents.) Donald Trump’s 2016 victory in the Electoral College revealed the regional inequities, between the coast and the heartland, that divide our country. As a way to bridge those separations, NationSwell dug into the data to find out what drove better pay in these metro areas, offering five methods for the next administration to consider.
5. Albuquerque, N.M.
Population:559,121
Wage growth in 2016:5.70%
Average weekly pay:$745, up from $703
Statewide, New Mexico’s economy has struggled to make a comeback. At the end of 2015, the Land of Enchantment logged 17,300 fewer non-farm jobs than in pre-recession 2007. But after taking a years-long beating (including more than a doubling in meth overdoses), the state’s biggest city, Albuquerque, is starting to show signs of progress.
Historically, the city has relied on federal spending for a slew of jobs at Sandia National Laboratories, which focuses primarily on weapons, and Kirtland Air Force Base. If President Trump pumps money into defense, the city will likely be a prime beneficiary. But reliance on public dollars “is not a growth industry,” noted Jim Peach, a New Mexico State University economics professor, last year.
To capitalize on government investment, the city is trying to establish the high desert as a hub for science and technology companies. They’re sharing technical discoveries from the national labs (and the state university’s flagship campus) with local small businesses. And they’re also hoping to attract more semiconductor manufacturers near Intel’s chip-making facilities in Rio Rancho, a half-hour drive from downtown. The high-paying jobs in those sectors could power Albuquerque back into full recovery.
4. Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minn.
Population:711,790
Wage growth in 2016:5.97%
Average weekly pay:$998, up from $938
In February 2018, Minneapolis will play host to America’s most watched televised event: the Super Bowl, to be held at U.S. Bank Stadium. (St. Paul will host an accompanying winter carnival, featuring a gigantic ice palace, to draw spectators across the river.) The NFL’s imprimatur is just the latest sign that businesses are increasingly eyeing the Twin Cities for development opportunities. “The number one thing is that people who make decisions for business now have a much more positive view of Minneapolis, and look at us for business expansion,” said Mayor Betsy Hodges, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
To prep for the crowds who’ll be streaming into town to watch football, the city is also shoring up a shopping district in the city center, which has been battered by competition from suburban malls and online retailers. At the moment, a Macy’s department store is the last remaining anchor, but a $50 million revival plan for Nicollet Mall promises to make it a “must-see destination in downtown,” said David Frank, the city’s planning and economic development director.
All that new business means more workers are making more money, thanks to a red-hot 3 percent unemployment rate and a recent change in state law. Last August, a raise in Minnesota’s minimum wage went into effect. At $9.50 an hour for large employers, the hike lands the state near the top of guaranteed minimums. And as debate over a citywide standard of $15 per hour becomes the defining issue of this year’s mayoral campaign — Mayor Hodges recently flip-flopped her position to support the wage bump — compensation seems likely to continue trending upward.
3. Charlotte, N.C.
Population:827,097
Wage growth in 2016:7.94%
Average weekly pay:$983, up from $905
If the number of new housing units rising across this Southern city is any indicator, people desperately want to move to Charlotte. At the beginning of last year, construction had begun on more than 12,300 units, and another 13,500 more were planned. The buyers? Foreign-born immigrants who’ve made a home in the New South, young millennials (including Villanova grads) who’ve found plenty of jobs to be had in Charlotte’s banking and advanced manufacturing sectors, and former exurbanites moving back to the city core.
“During the Great Recession, the sprawling developments in the exurbs ground to a halt,” Brian Leary, president of a local development firm, told Curbed. So those people moved closer to the central business district and the expanding light-rail system. “People are craving connectivity to each other and experiences, and those places that can deliver the most experiences in an accessible way can command premiums and value over time.”
Charlotte won that appeal despite the controversy over H.B. 2, the so-called “bathroom bill” that forces trans people to use facilities that match the gender on their birth certificate. The state law, which was drafted in response to a local anti-discrimination ordinance in Charlotte, led to boycotts and unknown quantities of lost revenue. A new governor could overturn the controversial legislation, which in turn could accelerate new business.
2. Nashville–Davidson, Tenn.
Population:654,610
Wage growth in 2016:10.07%
Average weekly pay:$904, up from $812
Another Southern city growing at breakneck speed, Nashville has capitalized on its reputation as a destination for creatives to attract newcomers. Seeking out the city’s robust music scene, tourists continue to stream into Nashville. For 70 months in a row, the hordes of visitors broke records for nightly hotel stays; by the end of the rush last October, Nashville set an all-time record, beating out Houston’s 59-month streak. “We have music, a cool brand, Music City Center and Opryland,” plus two convention centers, Butch Sypridon, CEO of Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp., boasted to The Tennessean.
Now that the city is expanding, officials are moving to the next checklist item they must fulfill to stay on an upward trajectory: luring high-wage employers — an important task, given that Tennessee has no statewide minimum wage. To do so, Nashville is trying to keep as many Vanderbilt alumni in town as possible, while also welcoming foreign immigrants.
The population is there to make Nashville a major economic powerhouse, if the city can attract the right firms. ”If we didn’t have 1,500 people moving to town every month, we won’t have the job growth that we’re having,” said Ralph Schulz, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce’s CEO. “Before you had to have the jobs and the population came. That’s not the case anymore. Now it’s workforce, then jobs [follow].” If job openings outpace new residents, expect wages to rocket even higher.
1. Dover, Del.
Population:37,522
Wage Growth in 2016:14.05%
Average Weekly Pay:$764, up from $656
Perhaps the most unexpected entrant on the list, the tiny town of Dover, Delaware’s state capital and second largest city, recorded the largest percentage jump in wages in the nation. The payoff is the result of a 10-year comprehensive plan Kent County officials laid out in 2007, which emphasized attracting new companies without losing the area’s farmland and rural charm.
One of the biggest boons to Dover’s economy has been the aviation industry, anchored at Dover Air Force Base. Taking advantage of the military’s need for supplies, the state is building an Air Cargo Ramp that can accommodate large civilian carriers, about the same size as four Boeing 747 planes. The city has also been aided by expansions at several factories, including bra-producer Playtex and food giant Kraft, and a surge in entrepreneurship; in 2015, the dollars loaned to small businesses statewide shot up 156 percent.
On top of that, Dover punches above its weight in attracting some 2 million tourists annually, generating half a billion in revenue countywide. Visitors are drawn by state parks, casinos, NASCAR races and music festivals, like the 80,000-attendee Firefly. “I met a fairly new resident of Kent County a few weeks ago who lives in one of our newer housing developments,” Cindy Small, Kent County’s tourism director, told the local paper. “She mentioned that out of 30 or so homes, 28 of them have been purchased by non-Delawareans. You can bet they were visitors first. They came, they experienced; they relocated.”
It should be noted that Dover’s wages at the beginning of 2016 were, by far, lowest among the top five performers, making it all the easier to notch big gains among its small population. But the town did so even after Delaware upped the state’s minimum wage to $8.25 an hour in June 2015. Even after the change, this booming town’s average pay has continued to rise, perhaps fueled by a still relatively cheap cost of living and an influx of consumer spending.
After a Devastating Scandal, Can Reformers Clean Up Atlanta’s Schools?
On April 2, 2013, wearing a pearl necklace and earrings, Atlanta’s former school superintendent Beverly Hall tilted her head for a mug shot. After a state investigation into cheating on standardized tests, a grand jury had indicted the one-time “National Superintendent of the Year,” along with 34 principals, teachers and testing coordinators, for posting illegitimate gains in struggling schools. In total, 185 educators were implicated in the scandal.
A jury eventually delivered 11 convictions on racketeering charges; Hall herself died of breast cancer before standing trial. But the sight of the district’s top employee marching into the Fulton County jail had a more immediate effect: Four young Teach for America (TFA) alumni all made bids to run in the school board race, just seven months away. The former TFA corps members included an incumbent — Courtney English, 31, a Morehouse alum who’d taught seventh-grade social studies in the same Northwest Atlanta classroom where he’d once taken the class — and three newcomers: Matt Westmoreland, 29, a high school history teacher whose father served as a county judge; Jason Esteves, 33, a lawyer from Texas running to be the board’s only Latino representative; and Eshe’ Collins, 36, also a lawyer with a passion for early childhood education.
Opponents warned of “a shadow conspiracy aimed at turning [Atlanta Public Schools] into an all-charter system,” as the city’s alt-weekly described it. Yet the fresh faces promised to fix a system that had lost its constituents’ trust. Despite only having served one term, English’s vision for comprehensive services, vocal calls for transparency during the cheating scandal and backing from TFA’s political arm won him Atlanta voters’ approval. He credits a mission of “keep[ing] it about the kids” for racking up his 23-point margin of victory. Esteves and Collins both triumphed in runoffs. (Westmoreland went unchallenged.) When the board, stacked with six new members, sat for their first meeting, a crowd of 200 admirers erupted in a standing ovation. English was unanimously selected leader — making him, at 28 years old, the youngest chairman in the district’s history. “It was a brand-new day in APS,” English recalls.
Far from the national spotlight, these four school board officials define Teach for America’s long-term strategy. The stated goal of the nonprofit, which placed 3,400 recent college grads in struggling public schools this year alone, is not to recruit career educators. (Indeed, you won’t find the word “teaching” anywhere in TFA’s mission statement.) Rather, the organization seeks to groom “future leaders” who will head a nationwide “movement for educational equity and excellence.” That coalition takes shape when former corps members, like English and Westmoreland, step away from the chalkboard and run for elected office.
The board’s decisions in Atlanta — where the newly elected seized a rare “opportunity to press the restart button on a school system,” as Esteves puts it — afford the clearest view of TFA’s mission in practice. In the South’s biggest city, the organization proved its former teachers could win elections and reshape an entire district. In 2015, the first full school year after the new board’s arrival, graduation rates shot up by 12 points. Meanwhile, charter enrollments since 2013 also increased by one-third. Whether those reforms have been effective or not will be judged by the voters in 2017.
A MOVEMENT FOR FAIRNESS
Critics regularly lob attacks against Teach for America for turnover among its ranks of new teachers. But these opponents misunderstand the purpose of the 27-year-old organization. “All you have to do is teach in today’s schools to realize we will never solve this problem [of educational inequality] from within the classrooms alone. … We actually think some of these folks have to leave,” Wendy Kopp, TFA’s founder, told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2012. “We have a whole strategy around not only providing folks with the foundational experience during their two years with us, but also then accelerating their leadership in ways that is strategic for the broader education reform movement.” If TFA members are in law firms, hedge funds and hospitals, Westmoreland explains, their classroom experience will inform their decisions, the “things they might invest time and money in,” widening the coalition of those who care about schools beyond the people directly involved, like teachers and parents.
This long-term goal is instilled in corps members from the very first week of TFA’s summer training institute. “Before you start teaching, they’re already talking about your work as alumni,” says T. Jameson Brewer, a former corps member who’s since co-authored a book critical of TFA. Brewer recalled the executive director of the Atlanta branch saying he wanted TFA alums in leadership positions at all levels, from a high percentage of new principal hires and every seat on the local school board, all the way up to a sitting Supreme Court justice. (The director asked Brewer, who’d previously managed a gubernatorial campaign, to throw his name in to the school board race. He declined.)
Brewer questions whether the experience gained with TFA qualifies a person for those roles. “The idea is that you give these folks some manufactured expertise, that being a teacher in the trenches for two years somehow makes them an expert in policy or leadership,” he says. “For most people, I think that should be very troubling.”
Despite any qualms voters might have, TFA has proved very effective at propelling a number of its teachers into leadership positions. Leveraging assets worth $440 million and a 46,000-member alumni network, TFA alums currently occupy the offices of the state superintendent in Louisiana and North Carolina, the state education board in Nevada, the school board president’s chair in Los Angeles and seats on the board in Chicago, San Jose and Stockton, Calif.
Most of that work can be traced back to TFA’s sister organization, Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE), a nonpartisan leadership-development program for former corps members founded in 2007. The nonprofit group, which is keen to note it does not endorse any specific policy prescriptions, organizes some 30,000 alums to translate their TFA experience into laws and regulations, whether it’s mobilizing voters through grassroots campaigns, attending summer fellowships, mentoring younger members or sharing policy ideas at conferences. A select few actually run themselves, and they’re supported by LEE’s donors and consultants. Nationwide, there’s now over a hundred LEE members in elected office, organizing roles and policy-making positions.
“Today, there are many children in our country not receiving the education they deserve, and for a long time a movement has been building to address this problem in a systemic way,” says Michael Buman, LEE’s executive director. “This movement is diverse in many ways; it includes students, parents, teachers, advocates, and many, many others. LEE develops the leadership of Teach for America corps members and alumni to be a part of this movement.”
In the run up to the 2013 election in Atlanta, the organization gave the equivalent of $4,300 in services to the school-board campaigns. Simultaneously, money flowed in from Arthur Rock, a venture capitalist and partner in a charter-school management company; Rebecca Ledley, whose husband Charles, a hedge-fund manager, started Democrats for Education Reform; and Joel Klein, the former head of New York City schools.
A TURNAROUND PLAN
LEE’s public support, however small the contribution, drew fierce criticism. Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University, wrote in a blog post, “At some point, TFA will be recognized as a crucial cog in the rightwing effort to destroy public education and dismantle the teaching profession,” a contention she stood by when NationSwell checked in with her recently, deriding TFA as “the workforce for charters.”
The four TFA alumni, for their part, adamantly maintained they would not bow to anyone who pulled out their checkbook. (“We’re not going to jump in there and hand over control of the school system to some for-profit charter monster,” Westmoreland told the AJC during the 2013 campaign, adding, “If they come at me with an idea that I don’t think is in the best interest of everyone in the city, I’m going to say no.”) And they took umbrage at the idea that their TFA experience automatically connects them with a pro-charter agenda. “Most people underestimate the difference of opinions in the alumni base,” Esteves says, pointing to fellow corps members who oppose school reform. “TFA does not impact whether I go one way or the other. What it does is give me that perspective that everything I do impacts kids.”
True to their word, English and Westmoreland can hardly be accused of straight up selling out the district to private managers. While the total share of Atlanta students in charters has risen, it’s largely because those approved by previous boards continue to add grades each year, Westmoreland explains. Under their watch, the total number of charter schools has actually decreased by two. The board declined to renew the contract for Intown Charter due to struggling academic performance, and it refused to bail out Atlanta Latin Academy Charter, which went belly-up after half a million went missing in a suspected theft.
But on the flip side, they’ve made it easier for future charters to set up shop in the city. In their first major decision, they hired Dr. Meria Carstarphen, who’d previously led schools in Texas, as superintendent. The turnaround plan she proposed this year included giving control of the city’s five worst schools to charter operators. She’d tried the idea once before in Austin, where she pushed for an in-district charter to take over an elementary school. Yet a single year into the plan, the charter’s contract was promptly cancelled, after parents staged a revolt and booted the experiment’s supporters from the school board.
Westmoreland says he signed on to Carstarphen’s idea after talking with fellow corps members at an LEE conference in Washington, D.C. — a gathering where TFA alums who’ve crossed over into politics share “war stories,” as English puts it. In January 2014, Westmoreland chatted with representatives from Nashville, who’d created a hybrid model of a neighborhood school managed by an outside operator in 2011. The primary criticism against charters is that they appear to achieve higher results by taking the most motivated students out of district schools, then kicking out underperfomers. (English calls it “creaming the top and skimming the bottom.”) Nashville, by forcing the charter to accept every student within a fixed attendance zone, seemed to have stumbled on a new model that prevents an operator from cooking its numbers.
Despite an outcry over the swiftness with which Carstarphen enacted her plan — “The community feels like it’s being sold out,” one parent remarked — the proposal, backed by Westmoreland, won unanimous approval from the board. Its passage marked the first time a charter was hired to run a neighborhood school in Georgia. So far, Westmoreland reports, the school’s seen better attendance and fewer disciplinary issues under its new management.
Would English like to see more charters open in the district? He won’t say. “Parents want good schools, period. If you’re a parent, you’re not thinking about the politics of education reform. You’re asking, ‘How can I help my third-grader get the best education possible?’ And I think when we speak to that, the other stuff becomes noise,” he says. “I’m not for more of one thing or the other. It is how you get more good schools faster” of any kind, he adds.
A CALLING TO HIGHER OFFICE
Next year, Atlanta’s Teach for America network will set its sights on a higher office, as both Westmoreland and English plan to run for Atlanta’s city council. In November, Westmoreland, who currently oversees programming to prevent summer learning loss at a nonprofit, will compete for an open seat, while English, now chief education officer of an ed-tech company, will duel with an incumbent councilman. Both will try to capitalize on a number of accomplishments during their school board tenure.
Westmoreland, as chair of the budget committee, is particularly proud of redirecting money away from administrators in the central office, hitting a high of 66 cents on every dollar being devoted to classroom use. He also won goodwill by providing teachers long overdue raises that had been frozen after the economic downturn in 2008.
English can also point to some big budget wins. This spring, voters approved a penny sales tax, which is expected to bring in $464 million to fund school construction. He also settled a longstanding dispute with Atlanta’s BeltLine over $162 million the school system was owed for its share of property tax diverted to funding the 22-mile loop. Another boast for English: a jump in graduation rates. When he joined the board in 2009, just over half of students graduated; in the seven years since, that number has jumped to 71 percent. (Part of this improvement resulted from doing away with exit exams as a graduation requirement; statewide, the rate increased 6 percent after the change.)
With those accomplishments under their belts, it’s a little surprising that English and Westmoreland still talk up their TFA experience, when the issue has proven polarizing. In highlighting their service, the debate becomes a referendum on Wendy Kopp’s idea; the men’s political capital rises and falls as the organization’s does. Their explanation? That TFA profoundly affected their worldview, and both now feel the obligation to give credit where it’s due.
English says TFA gave him an “opportunity to give back to the city that had given so much to me.” Westmoreland agrees. “I wouldn’t be on the school board and I wouldn’t have become a teacher if it weren’t for Teach for America. That organization and the experience I had at Carver [a public high school] and on the board really instilled in me how important this concept of equity is,” he says. “My takeaway is that if Teach for America’s idea was how to put passionate folks in the classroom, LEE’s was what we do with them if they choose to leave it. Either way, it’s how to make sure that whatever they do, they’re always thinking of equity.”
The Big Idea That’s Growing Green Business in America
After a lifetime of eating with disposable knives and forks, Michael Caballero, a 25-year-old industrial engineer at FedEx, looked the plastic cutlery in his workplace cafeteria in a new way. “I think in terms of process,” he says, tallying the environmental upheaval required to manufacture each fork — the extraction of oil from the ground, the overseas shipping, the refining and molding in a factory, the waste created by its packaging — a massive amount of pollution created for just a few minutes of usage before being tossed in a landfill.
Today, thanks to EcoTech Visions, a Miami incubator for green enterprises, Caballero’s 18-month-old company, Earthware, Inc., is building better disposable silverware. At EcoTech Visions’s current headquarters in Liberty City, Fla., Caballero is a member of a class of 26 “ecopreneurs” who receive 15 months of support and have access to office space, manufacturing equipment and other environmentally-minded folks. In the co-working space, architects and designers chat with electricians and engineers — a technical collaboration that’s rare but vital to successfully manufacture products, from battery-run motorcycles and aquaponics systems to plastic-based handbags and aloe salves.
APPLY: EcoTech Visions is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
The buzzing incubator is the vision of Dr. Pandwe Gibson, an African-American businesswoman who wanted to spark a sea change in commerce by supporting green jobs, particularly manufacturing ones. Because the consequences of environmental harm are so visible in southern Florida (as atmospheric temperatures rise, the sea levels follow, causing the Atlantic’s high tides to annually creep nearly one inch closer to the art deco real estate along Miami’s coastline), city residents are eager to embrace products that won’t further damage the Earth in the process. When Gibson first came up with EcoTech Visions three years ago, she used her iPad to share the idea with anyone who had time to listen to her elevator pitch. Since its launch, the incubator has created 15 new jobs, won grants for nine of its companies to work on prototypes and helped three other businesses obtain seed funding to kick start operations.
Last year, EcoTech was one of NBCUniversal Foundation’s 21st Century Solutions grant challenge winners, supporting progressive community solutions. “What we love is that it has the four Cs — it’s a catalyst for out-of-the-box solutions, it offers a destination for collaboration, it’s building a community for idea-creators and problem solvers and it’s driving local change by expanding small businesses and jobs,” says Beth Colleton, senior vice president of corporate social responsibility at NBCUniversal.
EcoTech Visions played a vital role in helping Earthware produce a durable alternative to the 16 billion pieces of plasticware thrown away in America each year (its cutlery is made with a corn-based resin that decomposes in just six months) and grow to its current state. Perhaps most importantly, the incubator covers the entry-level costs that can prohibit a business from entering the market — office space and manufacturing equipment — while Caballero still works at Fed-Ex to make a living. Without the support, he would have needed to front the money for Earthware’s first injection molding machine (which spits out products in the shape of pre-made molds) and a consultant to help him pick the right one; instead, Caballero pays a small rental fee to EcoTech in order to use the machine they purchased on his behalf.
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Additionally, the incubator introduced Caballero to other locals that could bolster his burgeoning enterprise, including sustainability advocates and potential customers, like the local school board, which recently put out a request for compostable cutlery bids. “The whole goal is to become a leading provider of compostable, sustainable products, using Miami as a hub into Latin America and the Caribbean,” footholds to an international expansion, Caballero says.
Clean tech and green manufacturing, as sectors, could provide the biggest hope of restoring jobs that have been lost due to the historic decline in American manufacturing (nationwide, about 5 million have disappeared since the millennium). Unlike other compostable products, which ship foreign-made cutlery to the U.S., Caballero’s eco-friendly business aims to create high-paying, manufacturing jobs right here in America; the two dozen other companies at EcoTech Visions will only add to this green wave of business. Caballero believes green industries will be most successful if others join the movement. The demand for sustainable products is already there, he notes, but supply will only match those levels if more entrepreneurs and manufacturers arrive on the scene. Even though they’ll technically be his competitors, there will be enough supply that prices will fall and consumers generally will see planet-friendly products as the new standard.
EcoTech Visions is looking to expand nationally, starting with Los Angeles next. If it achieves its goals, not only will Caballero be just one of countless American manufacturers producing environmentally-conscious items and providing jobs around the country, but the incubator could find itself leading the United States into the green industrial revolution.
EcoTech Visions is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!
Giving Mickey Mouse an Energy Boost Helps the Environment, How One Neighborhood Transformed Itself from the Country’s Worst and More
Want Power? Fire Up the Tomatoes and Potatoes, National Geographic
In Florida, scientists discovered that the tomato can be transformed from a lycopene storehouse into an electrical powerhouse. Considering that the annual surplus in South Florida could power Disney World for three months, is a new type of utility — one that’s fueled by food waste — in the state’s future?
How Cincinnati Salvaged the Nation’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood, Politico
Simply put, in 2009, Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood was the nation’s worst. When city government couldn’t provide a lifeline to the downtrodden area, a nonprofit private development company stepped in. Now, in just seven short years, the community is experiencing a blossoming transformation.
New California Law Could Keep Guns Away from People Like Omar Mateen, Reveal
After a mass shooting tragedy in 2014, the Golden State proved that it’s possible to pass sensible gun legislation. Its gun violence restraining order can prevent someone from purchasing or possessing a firearm for 21 days if law enforcement or a family member is worried they’ll turn violent.
MORE: The Surprising Second Life of Urine
Rutgers University Admits Unlikely Student Body, Journalists Use Reporting to Urge Politicians to Act and More
A University That Prioritizes the Students Who Are Often Ignored, The Atlantic
Traditionally, America’s colleges seek to attract the best and brightest to their hallowed halls. Committed to cultivating local talent regardless of status, New Jersey’s Rutgers University is bucking that trend, recruiting low-income, public-school graduates with mediocre GPAs and test scores — the very students that other schools shun.
A Plan to Flood San Francisco With News on Homelessness, New York Times
Can journalists advocate for a cause while remaining unbiased in their reporting? Next month, writers and editors from 30 Bay Area media outlets plan to do just that while collaborating on coverage focused on San Francisco’s homeless problem. The goal: To serve as a catalyst for solutions to the seemingly intractable problem.
This City Is Giving Away Super-Fast Internet to Poor Students, CNN Money
No longer are the poorest families in Chattanooga, Tenn., forced to visit a fast-food restaurant so their children can access the Internet needed to complete their homework. Two new programs are bringing citizens online in the Southern city, where 22.5 percent of the population lives in poverty.
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Can This Ambitious Plan Both Preserve History and Revitalize a City?
Infrastructure determines how we live, says Ryan Gravel, an Atlanta planner. But he’s not just talking about the tedious methods for relieving road congestion or figuring out how to efficiently transmit water, gas and electricity to every home. No, Gravel’s got something more personal in mind. Infrastructure, to him, determines how people interact and bond, children grow up, residents spend their time and communities preserve their heritage. “Infrastructure is the foundation of social life and economy and culture,” he tells NationSwell. That may sound grandiose, but thinking big hasn’t stopped Gravel before. He’s the visionary behind the mother of all urban redevelopment projects: a 22-mile metamorphosis known as the BeltLine, linking Atlanta’s unused railroad tracks and abandoned industrial zones in a gigantic loop of public transit, green parks, walking and biking trails and neighborhood revitalization.
“If we build highways and off-ramps, then guess what? We end up with a way of life that’s dominated by cars. If we build walkable communities with transit, we get something that’s entirely different,” Gravel says. “The BeltLine is catalyzing a new way of life, a new kind of infrastructure. It’s supporting something other than what Atlanta is known for, which is car dependency, and it’s working.”
By picturing what kind of city he wanted to live in, Gravel first envisioned the BeltLine in 1999 as part of his master’s thesis. Cathy Woolard, former city council member and gay rights advocate who’s readying to replace Mayor Kasim Reed (who’s in the midst of serving his second term) in 2017, provided invaluable early assistance and got the massive 25-year project up and running by 2005. Gravel personally helped oversee its rollout with a full-time role at city hall. Yet working in government bureaucracy quickly tested his nerves. He loved meeting all the different stakeholders interested in the BeltLine — from local restaurant owners to fellow urban planning wonks — but, as he told Ozy, “The politics of it got too much.” Gravel quit after five months. (He notes he continued to be involved in the BeltLine’s development through volunteer work, advocacy and private-sector work.)
A decade later, the BeltLine has generated $2.5 billion in economic development, and Gravel wrote a book about infrastructure, out last month. Recently, Gravel announced he’s rejoining the planning process from within the mayoral administration, by serving as manager of the Atlanta City Design project, a new design studio that will sketch out long-term plans for Atlanta’s growth after at least six months of public meetings at Ponce City Market. Writing in an email, he made clear that the job isn’t a long-term position: “My role … is as a consultant. And by this time next year, I’m guessing it will be over/near over.” But on the phone, he communicates enthusiasm for the project’s ambitious goal. Essentially, Gravel wants to find out what makes Atlanta tick and preserve those elements through a projected boom in population.
In January, Mayor Reed welcomed Gravel back to city hall. ”His vision to transform old railroad corridors into a 22-mile transit greenway has spurred economic development across the city, improved the quality of life for residents and led to a total transformation for Atlanta,” Reed said. Part of that renewal has been an in-migration to Atlanta’s downtown. Regarded as the capital of the South, the urban center of Atlanta dwarfs in size compared to the city’s suburbs. Fewer than one in 10 people live downtown out of the 5.7 million that claim the metro area home. Stretching out 50 miles in every direction, the outer ring of the nine-county area was once the hotspot for new growth. Now, people are pouring back into downtown. ”There’s a limit to the sprawl,” Matt Hauer, head of the University of Georgia’s Applied Demography Program, tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We’re seeing much more urban revitalization and growth in the central metro counties.”
With so much in flux, Gravel’s assessment of what defines Atlanta will be all the more important. “The purpose of City Design is to identify the things that are special about Atlanta, then embed those things in the decisions about how the city grows in the future,” Gravel says. In other words, he believes that Atlanta’s history and environment should inform every planning decision. The BeltLine, in repurposing old railroads, for instance, would get high marks for its nod to Atlanta’s beginnings and its reclaiming of industrial land. The neighborhood containing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthplace and burial site in the Historic Fourth Ward have been connected to the BeltLine via a trail and a 17-acre park, but there’s plenty of other sites from the Civil Rights Movement to safeguard and integrate.
“We have been so car-centric that you didn’t experience the city in an intimate way,” Reed explains to The New York Times. “We are changing Atlanta into a city that you can enjoy by walking and riding a bike.”
There’s not much precedent for this type of metropolitan-wide planning in North American cities. Workers within individual departments may come up with an idea for housing stock or parks and recreation, but they’re almost never joined together in one unified vision. (Gravel points to only one prior example in the United States that he can find: Chicago’s Burnham Plan in 1909.) That’s because the hardest part is getting everyone to sign off on one big plan.
By taking hundreds of thousands of people’s opinions all being taken into account, the BeltLine has run up against some major political hurdles (typical for massive government undertakings). Not surprisingly, the biggest tiffs involved money. When the stock market took a nosedive in 2008, it looked as if the BeltLine wouldn’t get built. Under then-mayor Shirley Franklin, the city set up a new process, known as tax-allocation districts in 2005, to borrow school tax revenues to fund the initial construction (to be returned upon the project’s completion), but it didn’t go into effect until a state constitutional amendment was approved in 2009. Construction resumed, but when the city missed its payments on the $162 million owed by 2030, Reed received a sharp rebuke from Atlanta’s school superintendent, including threats of a lawsuit. “Bikes or books?” one graduate student at George State University asked. “What does Atlanta support more?
This February, three years after that budget fight turned nasty, Reed brokered a deal that offered less money, but with a guarantee the schools would be paid first. He argued that funding the BeltLine would foster a more robust tax base — a $30 billion increase is hoped for by 2030 — filling both the city and the school’s coffers. The deal “will allow the Atlanta BeltLine to recover from the worst recession in 80 years. And then, when the Beltline is strong and able again, it can make payments at a higher level,” he promised. The school board unanimously agreed.
Across the rest of the city, however, individuals still questions if they will be able to cash in on the investment. Neighbors bordering the city’s new lifeline worry that gentrification will drive up rents to sky-high prices. There’s plenty of evidence in other cities to support their point. For instance, in Southern California’s Elysian Valley, proximity to the Los Angeles River redevelopment — a concrete blight that’s now a natural asset — drove up the median price per square foot 28.3 percent in one year.
Gravel hopes people see that the answer is not to leave the city as it is, without improvements, in the hopes of warding off gentrification. That’s not to say, there won’t be unintended consequences, he admits. But if anything, this is where planning is all the more important, preparing ways to keep housing affordable while sprucing up a neighborhood’s character.
Gravel looks around him for all the signs that the BeltLine’s already improving Atlanta. “It’s not just people commuting or exercising, they’re going out on dates, going to the grocery. That to me is a huge measure of success. To me, it’s changing the way that people live their lives,” he says. With more long-term planning still to come, we can expect to see a new model for urban growth born in the south in the decades ahead.
Correction: A previous version of this article referred to Atlanta City Design as a “committee.” It is a design studio. The article also said that Ryan Gravel was nervous about his new position, which was incorrect. It also stated that Mayor Reed set up the tax-allocation districts. That work was done under Mayor Shirley Franklin. NationSwell apologies for these errors.
Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America
Gazing out from the columned manor of Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, S.C., visitors can admire green gardens, footbridges over burbling canals and moss-cloaked cypress trees. When the azaleas bloom each spring, one can almost forget that these 500 acres (originally, it was 2,000 acres) of Lowcountry Field were once a working plantation where dozens of slaves toiled growing rice. Staring the brightly colored flora, it’s difficult to comprehend the majestic home hasn’t always been a place of beauty and was once a site of exploitation, whippings and sexual violence.
Out of sight from the main residence, stand four extant wood-sided cabins, painted white. Here, slaves slept and ate and prayed and sang, raising families in single rooms. Amid the lovely Southern grounds, these dwellings stand as a reminder of the captive men and women who lived and died on the land they were forced to cultivate.
Across the country, these shacks and cabins are under threat. Unlike the mansions where slaveowners displayed their wealth, these dwellings are far from magnificent. Housing fieldhands, many were built from the cheapest material available. Most resemble tool sheds, which, some might say, is effectively what they were. Among the catalog of historic homes, battlegrounds and memorials worthy of recognition, these hovels rarely make the list.
That’s why Joseph McGill, a Charleston native, began sleeping overnight in these crude shelters in 2010. Now nearing 80 overnight stays in 16 states, McGill says what started as a kind of publicity stunt to draw attention to the structures has grown into a movement. After the election of our nation’s first black president, the conversation around daily violence in urban communities and the retirement of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, McGill hopes the preservation of these makeshift homes will play a part in how America comes to terms with its racist past. Without the buildings, he argues, what’s there to remind us of the institution of slavery?
“One of the things that we need to understand is that 12 of our former presidents were slaveowners, eight of whom owned slaves while they were in office. Even those who contributed to those major documents that we live by today — you know, the Constitution’s ‘We, the people.’ It should have read, ‘We, the people,’ comma, ‘here in this room,’ because otherwise that document meant nothing to you,” McGill tells NationSwell. “Even after emancipation, there were obstacles put in place to deny those recently freed people their pursuit of happiness. Reconstruction was replaced by Jim Crow laws and white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings. We’re still being denied opportunities to pursue that happiness. We’re dealing with the residuals of that today.”
McGill always loved history. In his prior day job at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, he safeguarded America’s iconic buildings. And on weekends, he dressed up as a solider for Civil War reenactments. (As a black man and descendant of slaves, he “fought” for the Union.) But he began to notice that African-Americans’ place in history, especially antebellum history, was often glossed over. It’s undisputed in textbooks that landowners held slaves and a bloody conflict erupted over their freedoms. But outside of, say, Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, there’s little public knowledge about the everyday lives and traditions of the enslaved. Across the South, McGill felt like he had a much easier time spotting statues of Johnny Reb (a personification of Southern states) than seeing plaques about early African-American figures.
McGill slept in his first cabin — on the oak-lined Boone Hall Plantation in Mount Pleasant, S.C. — in 1999, as a way to get footage for a documentary about war reenactors. He didn’t think of the meager buildings again until 2010, when he was asked to consult on the restoration of Magnolia Plantation’s slave cabins. After his second overnight stay, he realized these places had to be preserved. “When the buildings aren’t there, it’s easier to deny the people who lived in those buildings,” he says. “The fact that they exist is an opportunity to let the world know that these people not only existed, but contributed highly to the fruits of this nation.”
McGill started contacting historic sites and preservation groups across the Palmetto State and soon, up and down the entire Eastern seaboard (including several in the North, where, we often forget, slavery persisted through the late 18th century), asking to visit their slave residences. Because of their enthusiastic responses, he created an official organization — the Slave Dwelling Project — that works to protect the homes that remain standing more than a century and a half after being erected.
Soon, people started reaching out to him (both individual families researching their lineage and established historical societies hoping to broaden their offerings), wanting to join his overnight visits. “I’m seldom sleeping in these places alone anymore.”
Putting together a group isn’t always easy. McGill has to fend off ghost hunters and treasure seekers. And some private hosts worry that descendants of slaves will knock on their door asking for what McGill calls the “r-word”: reparations. And interestingly, McGill says blacks can be hesitant to participate. “There are a lot of us, being African American, that don’t even want to set foot on a plantation,” he says, explaining that they don’t want to go to a place where their family was held as chattel. “I express to them that they are part of the problem, not the solution. As long as we continue to be afraid to even want to come to these places and have the courage to tell that story, [others] are going to tell it the way they want,” referencing tour guides who say masters were kind and treated their slaves well, calling that narrative, “junk history.” Once that message is delivered and it becomes clear that these stays are about African Americans and their history — revisiting history, not revising it — most agree to participate.
Once others started accompanying him, the project’s aims subtly shifted from an external campaign for recognition to an internal dialogue about race in America. Bringing together descendants of slaves and slaveowners in the very place where one group once shackled the other inevitably prompted soul-searching and candid discussion.
One night in Stagville, a historic North Carolina plantation, for example, young black men spoke by glinting lantern-light of the anger, fear and frustration they live with. In Mississippi, one female college student asked McGill if he had ever met a descendant of slaveowners who is proud of his family’s history. On South Carolina’s Daufuskie Island, a young black man, whose family had been enslaved there, stared at a wall built of tabby concrete, made from broken oyster shells, sand and ash. “I’m allergic to oysters,” he said. “I wonder if my ancestors were.” And in the coachman’s quarters on a Hillsborough, N.C., plantation, a 100-year-old matriarch told stories about her ancestors, who had been born into bondage on the property.
McGill’s stays are not just for African Americans; whites who want to revisit their history as a way of making amends often join him. Prinny Anderson, a leadership coach descended from Virginia slaveowners, has joined McGill on 22 stays to date — all within driving distance of her Durham, N.C., home. When descendants of slaves are sharing their family history, she’s largely silent, preferring to listen and absorb. But when the group is largely white, she says she’s an “instigator,” asking critical questions.
Anderson’s most moving trip was a visit to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s hilltop estate in Charlottesville, Va., where she has family connections. She fell asleep in the basement (where the slave workplaces were constructed, hidden from sight), thinking about her distant cousins, white and black, and what it meant to revisit their shared home.
“That really felt like getting the blessing of my ancestors. You came home and slept where your great auntie slept,” Anderson says. “Nobody who lived in the big house during that day ever came down to the [slave] quarters and slept on the floor. In that sense, it was like crossing the bridge.” Spending the night there, it was like Anderson had atoned for something.
Part of the Slave Dwelling Project is to recover slaves’ individual narratives, finding personal stories amidst the black mass in chains. “I think the general perception is that enslaved people were brought here for the ability to do grunt work or heavy lifting: the physical labor. But there’s a lot more to their skills and abilities,” McGill says. From the engineering feat of “taming those cedar swamps” to growing rice and constructing building frames, ironwork, bricks and tools, slaves were vital to the plantation’s production, arguably much more so than any master lounging in the big house.
While the conversation at these places steeped in history may be the most candid talks you’ll hear these days on the subject of race, McGill knows it’s not the only forum for the issue. If anything, he hopes the talks will overflow into guests’ neighborhoods and university dorms. And there, discussion will be led by people who are better informed of their place in the long march for racial equality.
Above all, McGill wants his guests to remember that black history does not begin at a Montgomery bus stop in 1955 and end at a Memphis hotel room in 1968. It spans lifetimes, back to the auction block and long past when Obama leaves office. The recent conflict at the University of Missouri, which ended in the president’s removal, did not begin when these students arrived on campus or even when the school was ordered to integrate by a court order in 1950. Anyone who has listened to Billie Holiday croon “Strange Fruit” knows Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance featuring dancers in Black Panther uniforms was not the first to push the envelope. These victories, whether from the Civil Rights movement or Black Lives Matter, all date back to one common source: slavery, a period we cannot forget, McGill insists.
“Historically, these are some times we have not yet overcome. There’s still things that we have not yet dealt with, rooted in the institution of slavery,” McGill says. “If we should let these buildings go away, then we are going to allow this nation to continually perpetuate that false narrative. We shouldn’t allow that to stand. We shouldn’t let that narrative carry the day. The record needs to be corrected.”
Through McGill’s work, the authentic story is now being told.
Correction: This article originally stated that Magnolia Plantation was 390 acres in size and that slaves worked in cotton fields and later on as freed sharecroppers. NationSwell apologizes for the errors.
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