First in Future: Where Emerging Ideas Take Flight: Recent Episodes
Institute for Emerging Issues
In every emerging issue lies an opportunity. The Institute for Emerging Issues is here to find North Carolina's opportunities. You can help.
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In this episode, we focus on "After the Flood Waters Recede" with guests Jim Fox, former Director of NEMAC; Mayor Zeb Smathers of Canton NC; Jeff Howell, Yancey EMC; and NC House of Representatives Majority Leader, John Bell.
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In this episode, we focus on the "Power of Local Support of Educational Attainment" with guests Dale Jenkins, former CEO Curi and co-chair, myFutureNC Commission; Dr. Laura Leatherwood, President Blue Ridge Community College; Rev. James Gailliard, Senior Pastor Word Tabernacle and member, NC House of Representatives.
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In this episode, we focus on the "Power of Affordability In Increasing Attainment" with guests Toni Blount - Regional Impact Manager, myFutureNC; Abdur-Raqib Gant - NCA&T student, and Martha Quillin - News and Observer reporter. Find this also on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube.
In this episode, we focus on the "Power of Sports" with guests David Joyner of the Rocky Mount Events Center, Hill Carrow of the 2027 World University Games and Gabbi Cunningham - NCSU Alum and 100M Hurdles Olympian. Find this also on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube.
In this episode, we focus on the "Power of STEM" with guests Peter Harries - Dean of NCSU Graduate School, Jamila Simpson of NCSU College of Science and Thomas Redd of NCA&T State. Find this also on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube.
In this episode, we focus on the "Power of Historical Fiction" with guests Carole Boston Weatherford, Authorof “Freedom on The Menu”; John Hood, Author of “Mountain Folk”, and A.J. Mayhew, Author of “Tomorrow's Bread”. Find this also on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube.
In this episode, we focus on the "Role of Counties in Recovery" with guests Rep. Dean Arp, R-Union; Kevin Leonard, Exec. Dir. NCACC; Paige Worsham, Assoc. General Council, NCACC. Pandemic financial relief is coming from the federal government. We discuss about how do we make sure we use it wisely to make a full recovery, and possibly even come back stronger than we were before the pandemic? Find this also on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube.
In this episode, we focus on "Back to Business: The NC Small Business Recovery" with guests Byron Hicks of the Small Business and Technology Development Center, Dr. Henry McKoy of NC Central University and Kevin Price of National Institute of Minority Economic Development. Find this also on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube.
In this First in Future episode, we focus on the return to school resembling something normal, and how do we get our kids back on track and recover from what they lost? Our guests are Michael Maher, Executive Director of the Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration at the state Department of Public Instruction, and Rev. Dr. Dawn Baldwin Gibson, Superintendent of the Peletah Center for Academic Excellence in eastern NC.
The Institute for Emerging Issues, in a four part series, will be focusing on the state’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities – a group of 10 colleges and universities stretching across the state formed to ensure that African Americans had access to higher education. This episode is with Dr. Johnson Akinleye and Dr. Deepak Kumar of North Carolina Central University.
The Institute for Emerging Issues, in a four part series, will be focusing on the state’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities – a group of 10 colleges and universities stretching across the state formed to ensure that African Americans had access to higher education. This episode is with Dr. Paulette Dillard, President of Shaw University and Suzanne Walsh, President of Bennett College.
The Institute for Emerging Issues, in a four part series, will be focusing on the state’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities – a group of 10 colleges and universities stretching across the state formed to ensure that African Americans had access to higher education. This episode is with Dr. Karrie Dixon and Dr. Kuldeep Rawat of Elizabeth City State University.
The Institute for Emerging Issues, in a four part series, will be focusing on the state’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities – a group of 10 colleges and universities stretching across the state formed to ensure that African Americans had access to higher education. This episode is with Dr. Harold L. Martin Sr., Chancellor of NC A&T State University.
In this First in Future episode, our guests represent two different groups that have been looking at reforms to make our justice systems work better. First the co-chairs of a task force appointed by the Governor, the “Task Force on Racial Equity in Criminal Justice,” Associate Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls and Attorney General Josh Stein, and next the co-chair of the House Select Committee on Community Relations, Law Enforcement and Justice, Rep. John Szoka.
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 episode’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. 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.
Last year, we did a two part First in Future series called “the lost speeches of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr,” focusing on two speeches Dr. King gave in North Carolina. Both stories involve NC State Professor of English Dr. Jason Miller, to whom we revisit the conversation. This First in Future episode we hear a different story about the second speech, which is remarkable, because we know almost nothing about what he said. Coming up soon we are going to convert First in Future to a live format show featured on YouTube and Facebook live!
A year ago we did a two part First in Future series called “the lost speeches of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr,” focusing on two speeches Dr. King gave in North Carolina. The first was remarkable because we only recently discovered what he said, the other was remarkable because we know almost nothing about what he said. Both stories involve NC State Professor of English Dr. Jason Miller, to whom we revisit the conversation. This First in Future episode, “King’s first dream”, tells the story of the first time Dr. King used the phrase I have a dream – in Rocky Mount in 1962. We now know exactly what he said that day because, believe it or not, of Dr. Millers long time obsession with African American poet Langston Hughes.
February is Black History Month, a month where you hear more than you normally do about some of the bridgebuilders in the African American community, people you may not know enough about. This episode of First in Future, we revisit our conversation with Dr. Rupert Nacoste. He is the author of several books and his latest is "To Live Woke: Thoughts to Carry in our struggle to Save the Soul of America". Dr. Nacoste is retiring this year after 32 years as a professor of psychology at NC State, but he has also lived some important parts of Black History.
The pandemic is affecting everyone in our country. Almost any indicator you look at, the impacts have been greater on people of color in the state. The infection rates are 3x higher among African Americans than whites, and death rates are 6x higher. According to CDC data, COVID hospitalization rates are 5 x higher for American Indians and African Americans and 4x higher in the LatinX community. So you would think that when it comes to vaccinations, people of color might be receiving priority treatment. Not initially, says our First in Future guest, Dr. Jim Johnson. He looked at data from six states that are reporting COVID vaccination rates by race, and found that North Carolina has the widest gap in race and ethnic disparity.
In this episode of First in Future, we have the first five time guest, Sarah Langer Hall, the Institute for Emerging Issues Senior Policy and Program Manager. We talk with her about the 35th Emerging Issues Forum, which happens virtual over four days with a range of exciting guests. We learn how she pulls it all together, what she has learned along the way and attending this forum, what will we come away with.
The percentage of people showing “empathy” has nosedived over the past 40 years – down 48%. Four years ago, a group in Transylvania County decided to do something about it. Project Empathy has led to tough conversations about guns, racial equity, rural urban divides and other topics. Two years ago, IEI lifted up the program as one of five state examples of how to “connect rural and urban.” Project manager Mark Burrows talks with us about what he has learned, and is learning, about the power of empathy.
A little more than a year ago a report that was in many ways 25 years in the making came out. Over the course of 287 pages, it recommends a series of changes that the state of North Carolina needs to make to ensure that it meets its constitutional obligation to provide each child a sound basic education. In this episode of First in Future, we are joined by two members of the Governor's Commission on access to sound basic education, Patrick Miller and Brad Wilson, to discuss the report and actions needed going forward.
This episode of First in Future features Paula Henderson of SAS. We get to hear about growing up on a farm in rural eastern North Carolina and how it has shaped her approach to working with people. She talks about make the world a better place through analytics and how it is solving healthcare finance issues and her thoughts on developing more woman in technology.
Recently, the US has been getting more serious about an idea that European countries have been doing for a long time, apprenticeships. What happens when you connect apprenticeships to a fast-growing career field. The answer is great things happen! Our First in Future guest on this episode is Tony Marshall, president and CEO of Innovative Systems Group. We hear about how hard a sell apprenticeships are in the tech world and his pitch for apprenticeship as an approach for companies.
North Carolina lost a really important citizen, Kel Landis. Kel was a North Carolina zealot. Someone who lived a life where, as our farmers would say, he “plowed to the end of the row.” He was, in a very real way, a doer. He was CEO of Centura Bank, cofounded the Foundation of Renewal for Eastern North Carolina, Trustee of UNC Chapel Hill and ECSU, NC Community Foundation, and Golden LEAF Foundation. We wanted to replay our First in Future interview we did with him on UNCTV back in October 2017. In it we focused on his life, his thoughts about the future of small town North Carolina, and on a book he had just written. He called it “The Little Book of Do.”
This episode of First in Future we hear from Dan Barkin of Business NC. As the former managing editor of The News & Observer, he has great insight and institutional knowledge about the rapid development of North Carolina, and we hear about his thoughts on broadband, which is a key issue on many minds these days.
Starting in 1998 and with over 1,000 shows, North Carolina's longest running show came to close at the end of 2020. This episode of First in Future we feature the host of NC Spin, Tom Campbell. Tom brought together opinionated people from across our state to take a tough look at whatever is going on in the news in a given week. We get to hear how it all started and why.
When the pandemic hit, calls to United Way NC's 211 line for assistance tripled. Now the organization has taken a close look at what is happening to families across the state during the pandemic. No surprise there are a lot of people that are hurting. We talk with Laura Marx and Anita Barker about some of the surprising findings of their new survey and how people across the state can help respond to the needs.
In the final part of our three-part series on NC’s political center, we talk with Chris Fitzsimon, Director and Publisher of The Newsroom and John Hood, President of the John William Pope Foundation, both two long-time political observers who see the state from the left and right. Are the two major political parties too far apart to get anything done? Are people in the center a dwindling minority or a silent majority?
North Carolina’s fastest growing group of voters are “unaffiliated.” About 1/3 of those registered don’t register with any party. That should mean that there’s a big group of voters open-minded, and ready to vote on issues, not politics, or for the person vs. the party, or for candidates running closer to the “center." Right? Well, based on the experience of Page Lemel and Mike Hawkins, two long-time elected officials from Transylvania County, maybe not. This is part 2 of our First in Future series “Doughnut Hole: Is NC’s Center Disappearing?”
NC has a long history of governing from something more or less resembling a middle. But this election season the state appeared to divide people more extremely into one party camp vs. the other. What came out of it was what looks like divided government for the foreseeable future. Our three part series looks at a question from three different angles, with a series called “Doughnut Hole: Is NC’s Center Disappearing?” In Part 1, First In Future talks with Education NC CEO Mebane Rash. Is what she calls “relationship-based politics” the way forward? Or is it coffee?
This episode of First in Future, we hear from North Carolina's Poet Laureate, Jaki Shelton Green. She speaks to our hearts with a message about our personal power to connect to something important within ourselves and to the power we have in common cause with each other. She noted that historically pandemics have been times for radical change and a chance to move through a gateway to new kinds of thinking. We wanted you to hear her words with the message that she called "harvesting light and grace", as you go over the river and through the woods for the holidays or even if you're staying at home. This holiday season. These are words of healing and hope.
This is part three of a three episode series of First in Future, where we focus on community, specifically what people and places in North Carolina are doing to make the places we live special. In the final part of our special focus on what transforms a place we live into a true community, we talk with Zach Barricklow of Wilkes Community College about the regional approach Wilkes, Ashe and Alleghany counties are taking to build off of their collective assets (especially high speed internet) to hold on to young people, retrain adults and attract new residents to the area.
This is part of a three episode series of First in Future, where we want to focus on community, specifically what people and places in North Carolina are doing to make the places we live special. Small towns everywhere complain about "brain drain", young educated people who move away for college and don't come back. In the second part of our series on what makes the places we live special, we talk with Dante Pittman, who chose to move back home to Wilson, NC, with the help of a new effort called "Lead for North Carolina." And we explore the question: how do we retain and retrain and stop brain drain?
This is part of a three episode series of First in Future, where we want to focus on community, specifically what people and places in North Carolina are doing to make the places we live special. This episode starts with the story of Hayesville, NC, in the far western corner of the state, and we talk with Caroline Parker of Education NC about her new series, "Anchored in Hayesville," about how the people in that community are working together to maintain their uniqueness and strength in a town that is "two hours from everywhere."
There is a pretty good consensus that online learning is better this fall than it was last spring for K-12 students. But there’s also a pretty good consensus that it is not going great, and everyone agrees that learning face-to-face would be better. One thought is to get students more 1-1 help. That’s the idea behind the North Carolina Education Corps, an effort just launched by the State Board of Education, designed to get hands-on assistance to struggling students. This First in Future episode's guests are, two people who are leading the thinking behind that effort. Mike Ward is the former state superintendent of public instruction and chair of the steering committee for the NC Education Corps. Deanna Townsend-Smith is director of operations and policy for the State Board of Education.
The latest surveys from the CDC show 41% of survey respondents report mental health issues, three times the number at the same time last year. Mental health is the topic of the third and final part of the Institute for Emerging Issues fall webinar series, which is titled ReCONNECT to Move Forward. It is a three hour conversation, focused on mental health and well-being and what we can do to address the crisis. It is coming up October 29, 8:30-11:30 am. This First in Future episode guest is Alicia James, Institute for Emerging Issues Program and Policy Manager, who is leading our thinking on this topic. She talks about the topics you are able to learn about and participate in the ReCONNECT to Move Forward discussion.
Recently, many have been trying to help our kids with digital homework, or our local government officials have been trying to figure out how to make our community more accessible or competitive in this digital world. This First in Future episode's guest is the Institute for Emerging Issues' own Maggie Woods, Policy and Program Manager, who is looking at the idea of "digital inclusion." She explores what a difference it can make for our state to take full advantage of high speed internet.
One of the most complicated challenges the Coronavirus has been the need for more broadband. It has been a challenge that the Institute for Emerging Issues has been working on for awhile. We have been working with the state Broadband Infrastructure Office to get grants out to school systems, nonprofits, and communities. Our First in Future guest this episode is Jess George, who represents one of the critical private investors in infrastructure, Google Fiber. Jess is their government and community affairs representative.
As of April this year, 45% of people were self-reporting that their mental health had declined. A survey found 70% of people were screening for mental health challenges, with the highest increases among the 18-44 year olds. Our First in Future guest on this episode is Dr. Lindsey Haynes-Maslow. She has written a remarkable first-person summary of her ongoing battle with bulimia, an eating disorder, and what it has been like for her during this pandemic. Dr. Maslow is an associate professor and extension specialist at NC State in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in the Department of Ag and Human Sciences.
Three years ago myFutureNC looked at NC’s future economy and came to the conclusion that to meet the needs of the future, we need more people with some sort of meaningful credential beyond high school. The Institute for Emerging Issues has been looking at this issue over the past few months, and we’re bringing together a big discussion of all those issues in a few days. This episode features the head of the nonprofit myFutureNC, Cecilia Holden and their research director, Jeni Corn.
myFutureNC looked at NC’s future economy and came to the conclusion that to meet the needs of the future, we need 2 million more people in our state in the next decade with some sort of meaningful credential beyond high school. And that if we do nothing, we will fall 300,000 people short of that goal. The pandemic has caused 1.2 million North Carolinians to be laid off, disproportionately those without high school degrees. They may need to come back to college, but how can they afford it? The Institute for Emerging Issues has been looking at this issue over the past few months, and we’re bringing together a big discussion of all those issues in a few days. This episode features IEI Senior Policy and Program Manager Sarah Hall, who’s been putting together the webinar and expounds on what we will be hearing from and the sessions we will have.
Host Leslie Boney, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, talks with special guests William Lassiter (Deputy Secretary, Juvenile Justice, NCDPS), Dave Richard (Deputy Secretary for NC Medicaid) and Elizabeth Simpson (Associate Director, Emancipate NC).
This First in Future episode features Dr. Rupert Nacoste, author of the new book "To Live Woke: Thoughts to Carry in Our Struggle to Save the Soul of America". Dr. Nacoste is a native of Louisiana, but for the past 32 years has been a professor of psychology at NC State. Dr. Nacoste’s research and public service efforts have focused on developing a systematic understanding of the social psychology of social change, and using that scholarly understanding to help people manage the social changes that are influencing their everyday lives.
In celebration of 19th amendment that secured all women the right to vote over 100 years ago, this episode of First in Future, we are joined by Dr. Katherine Mellen Charron, Associate Professor of history at NC State. We explore what the amendment meant and did not mean and about how Tennessee passed it and NC did not.
The Institute for Emerging Issues is hosting a series of conversations around early childhood learning focused on how we develop stronger systems in the midst of ongoing uncertainty. This episode (COVID-19 and Child Trauma: Where do we go from here?) with guest host Patrick Cronin (IEI Assistant Director) and guests Sharon Hirsch (President & CEO, Prevent Child Abuse North Carolina), Jennie Kristiansen (Director, Department of Social Services, Chatham County) and Dr. Charlene Wong (Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Public Policy, Duke University).
Wit Tuttell is Executive Director of Visit NC and VP of Tourism and Marketing for EDPNC
Back to school is back, but this year it is complicated. Universities are trying to have at least face-to-face classes, but it’s not clear that’s going to work out. About 70% of public school students are starting their year totally online. It’s been a rollercoaster few months for folks across the world, around the country and throughout North Carolina, as we ask them to figure out how to move big chunks of their lives online from their homes. Figure out how you can take care of your health from home. Figure out how you can work from home. Figure out how you can learn from home. Our guests on this episode are two people working on two very different parts of the problem. Amy Huffman is the Digital Inclusion Manager for the state Broadband Infrastructure Office. Her job is to figure out how to overcome the challenges we have getting every student, every adult worker, every senior citizen online. Dr. Dawn Gibson is the founder of Peletah Ministries in Craven County. Among a lot of other projects, she’s trying to figure out how to get individuals able to take full advantage of the Internet.
Host Leslie Boney, Director, Institute for Emerging Issues, talks with special guests Eric Davis (Chair, State Board of Education), Eliz Colbert, Ed.D., (Executive Director, NC Virtual Public Schools), Terry Stoops, Ph.D., (Director of Education Studies, John Locke Foundation) and Tabari Wallace (Principal, West Craven High School and NC 2018 Principal of the Year) as they discuss the current state of learning within the K-12 space and what will need to happen to ensure students are receiving a high quality education this fall, despite some of the obvious challenges.
The rural part of our state were already facing a broad range of challenges before the pandemic with shaky economies and health care challenges. Our First in Future guests on this episode is Calvin Allen, the first Rural Forward NC director and we hear his thoughts on these issues and so much more.
The Institute for Emerging Issues is hosting a series of conversations around early childhood learning focused on how we develop stronger systems in the midst of ongoing uncertainty. This episode (From Crisis to Opportunity in Child Care) with guest host Patrick Cronin (IEI Assistant Director) and guests Sheila Arias (Campaign Associate, MomsRising), Marsha Basloe (President, Child Care Services Association), Rhonda Rivers (Regional Director of Curriculum and Training, LeafSpring Schools - Charlotte), and Sepi Saidi (President/CEO, SEPI, Inc.)
Leslie Boney, the Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, hosts a special virtual conversations discussing "Racial Equity in Criminal Justice" with guests Justice Anita Earls and Attorney General Josh Stein.
The Institute for Emerging Issues is spending a lot of time focusing on the future of education and work. That is the main focus of the interview with this episode's guest, Tom Looney. Tom Looney solved a huge challenge in the early 2000s—how to help a Chinese company called Lenovo set up a new global headquarters in RTP and take over IBM’s PC business. Since then he has retired and become a mega volunteer, serving as board chair for the NC School of Science and Math and on board of Coastal Federation and EDPNC. We hear about his idea called CS4NC, computer science for NC. CS4NC, with support from NCDPI, NC School Districts, NCSU’s Friday Institute, Career and Technical Education, wants to raise up 3,200 more computer science teachers throughout North Carolina.
The Institute for Emerging Issues is hosting a series of conversations around early childhood learning focused on how we develop stronger systems in the midst of ongoing uncertainty. This episode (Parenting Education Beyond COVID-19) is with guest host Patrick Cronin (IEI Assistant Director) and guests safiyah jackson (early childhood systems director, North Carolina Partnership for Children), Cindy Boger (Lead Parent Educator, Parents as Teachers, Hickory City Schools) and LaKeisha Ross-Johnson (Minister of Music, Arts and Worship, Mt. Zion Baptist Church and Chief Financial Officer, Young People of Integrity).
Our US colleges and learning institutions are in unique situations with the uncertain times with safety and quality of education. Our First in Future guests on this episode is Buck Goldstein, University Entrepreneur in Residence and a Professor of the Practice at UNC in Chapel Hill. He is looking at it all from the outside and the inside as a entrepreneur, author and a university professor.
African Americans make up 22% of the state's population, but have 24% of the COVID cases and 33% of the deaths. Ten percent of the state's population are Latinx, but Latinx people have 46% of the COVID cases. What is going on and why, and what can we do about this? Our First in Future guests on this episode to address this are Dr. Deepak Kumar, Director of Julius L. Chambers Biomedical/Biotechnology Research Institute of NCCU, and Juvencio Rocha Peralta, Executive Director of the Association of Mexicans in North Carolina (AMEXCAN).
Leslie Boney, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, hosts a series of virtual conversations discussing the impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) and some of the ways our state is responding. As we begin to reopen the economy, we start a series called Jumpstarting NC. Each week we’ll be talking with those responsible for jumpstarting critical parts of North Carolina. Join us for this episode (Jumpstarting K-12 Learning) with guests Dr. Evan Lefsky (Director of Education Consulting, Public Consulting Group), Dr. Lynn Moody (Superintendent, Rowan-Salisbury Schools), Dr. Steve Ellis (Superintendent, Nash-Rocky Mount Schools) and Amy Jones (VP Leadership, Wake PTA Council).
To celebrate the Fourth of July, First in Future revisits 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 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.
Join us for this episode, Jumpstart Connectivity: Eliminating the Digital Divide in North Carolina’s Cities and Towns. How cities and towns across the state are addressing the digital divide and emerging from the pandemic with key strategies to increase digital access and skills. Join guest host Maggie Woods (IEI Policy and Program Manager) and guests Veronica Creech (City of Raleigh), Seth Ervin (Charlotte Mecklenburg Library), Michael Abensour (Kramden Institute) and Sherrell Dorsey (Build the Good).
Juneteenth or sometimes called Freedom Day, is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Our First in Future guests on this episode is Rev. James White, Pastor Christ Our King Community Church and Executive Vice President, Organizational Relations at the YMCA of the Triangle. We have the opportunity to hear more about the holiday and learn what it means at this time in our world.
Leslie Boney, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, hosts a series of virtual conversations discussing the impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) and some of the ways our state is responding. As we begin to reopen the economy, we start a series called Jumpstarting NC. Each week we’ll be talking with those responsible for jumpstarting critical parts of North Carolina. Join us for this episode (Jumpstarting Local Government) with guests Avril Pinder (Buncombe County Manager), Paige Worsham (NC Association of County Commissioners), and Gloristine Brown (Mayor of Bethel and Chair, NC Mayors Association).
So far this year only a little over half of NC households have self-responded to the Census, and we lag behind other states and behind where we were this time last Census. The idea of the Census was to count every person living in the United States, and every decade since 1790. This is a Census year, but COVID-19 is making it tough to get accurate numbers. Our First in Future guests on this episode want to talk to you about that, and they are Rebecca Tippett, founding director of Carolina Demography, part of the Carolina Population Center at UNC-Chapel Hill (and chair of the NC Counts Coalition), and Stacey Carless, an attorney and Executive Director of the NC Counts Coalition.
Leslie Boney, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, hosts a series of virtual conversations discussing the impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) and some of the ways our state is responding. As we begin to reopen the economy, we start a series called Jumpstarting NC. Each week we’ll be talking with those responsible for jumpstarting critical parts of North Carolina. Join us for this episode (Jumpstarting Tourism) with guests Bill Cecil (President and CEO of Biltmore Estate), Duarte Morais (Associate Professor of Equitable and Sustainable Tourism at NC State University), Wit Tuttell (Executive Director of Visit NC) and Jeff Eidson (Explore Elkin).
In a time when we are desperate for local news and are slowly being offered less of it due to downsizing and internet-based operations, how do we find out what is going on in our community? In this First in Future episode, we had the opportunity to talk with two individuals working on solutions for local news: Lizzy Hazeltine, the coordinator of the North Carolina Local News Fund, and Melanie Sill, journalist veteran and former news executive, who is leading the North Carolina Local News Workshop at Elon University.
IEI are hosting conversations around the issues of parenting, policing and systemic racism that the people of our state and nation are grappling with right now. This episodes guests are Troy Johnson (founder of Young Men 4 Christ Enterprises (YM4C), which works with young men aged 8-17), Tonya Lynch (founder of Black Light Project, mother of 5 sons and 3 daughters) and Tony Godwin (retired Cary Police Chief, co-founder of Building Bridges, a partnership between African-American pastors, community members and Cary PD).
The COVID-19 pandemic has generated more attention for telemedicine. As more people access health care through their phones and computers, the John Locke Foundation and Brookings Institution have prepared a new telemedicine report. In this First in Future episode, we had the opportunity to talk with Jordan Roberts, Health Care Policy Analyst at the John Locke Foundation and co-author of that report. We hear about the interesting path of recent increase in telehealth and how it advanced 10 years in just a couple of months.
Leslie Boney, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, hosts a series of virtual conversations discussing the impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) and some of the ways our state is responding. Join us for this episode (Civic Conversations in Time of Pandemic) with guests Pearce Godwin (Listen First Project), Cyrus Rad (Class of 2021 Caldwell Fellow at NC State University), L.B. Prevette (Forward Wilkes) and Tru Pettigrew (Tru Access).
A new series of reports from the Urban Institute at UNC Charlotte took a closer look at who has wealth in the Charlotte region and who doesn’t. The series of reports tried to understand where the wealth gap came from, taking a look at bank lending policies, transportation policy, housing policy, business ownership, and savings to try to understand how we got to where we are. In this First in Future episode, we are joined by two people who played a key role in the reports, James Ford, former NC Teacher of the Year and currently executive director of the Center for Racial Equity in Education and Dr. Lori Thomas, the Director of Research and Faculty Engagement at the Urban Institute and Director of the Institute for Social Capital.
Leslie Boney, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, hosts a series of virtual conversations discussing the impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) and some of the ways our state is responding. Join us for this episode (The Way Back from Unemployment: Jobs, School and Service) with guests US Rep. David Price (NC 4th District), Jeff Frederick (President, NC Association of Workforce Development Boards) and Dr. Laura Leatherwood (President, Blue Ridge Community College).
First in Future Remembers Andrea Harris North Carolina lost a really good citizen on May 20. Andrea Harris died in her home in Vance County at the age of 72. Andrea spent 50 years standing up for the elderly, fighting for affordable housing, helping minorities in our state get businesses started, and advocating for the essential role of historically black colleges and universities. As we re-air our July 10, 2018, with IEI National Advisory Board member Andrea Harris, we pause to remember her life long commitment to serving our state and communities. #LegacyOfMsAndreaHarris
This First in Future episode features Jonathan Feldman, CIO of the City of Asheville, columnist for InformationWeek, author of "Beyond Transparency" and technology speaker with a sense of humor. We learn why technology is easy and people are hard, especially during the mass conversion to the WFH model we have experienced, and why in technology we laugh so we don't cry over the complexity.
Leslie Boney, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, hosts a series of virtual conversations discussing the impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) and some of the ways our state is responding. Join us for this episode (COVID-19 and Mental Health) with guests Dr. Carrie Brown, M.D., MPH (CMO, Behavioral Health and IDD, DHHS), Dr. Kate Hobbs Knutson, M.D., MPH (Chief of Behavioral Health, Blue Cross Blue Shield NC) and Marc Grimmett, Ph.D. (Associate Professor of Counselor Education, College of Education at NC State University and Co-Director, NC State Community Counseling, Education, and Research Center).
This episode of First in Future is the second part of our conversation with Carl Ryden, a business innovator of some amazing companies. Carl is a native of Lenoir County with a humble background, who went on to the NC School of Science and Math and then MIT and onto Bain Consulting before founding PrecisionLender. We divided his interview into two parts—in the first part, we learned where he came from and how it shaped his ideas on the education system. This episode we explore his companies and career and hear about the most fascinating teaching assistant.
Leslie Boney, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, hosts a series of virtual conversations discussing the impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) and some of the ways our state is responding. Join us for this episode (COVID-19 impact on law enforcement and the courts) with guests Cheri Beasley (Chief Justice, NC Supreme Court), Col. Glenn McNeill (Commander, State Highway Patrol) and Fred Forrer (Vice President for Technology, Public Consulting Group).
This episode of First in Future, our guest is Carl Ryden, a business innovator of some amazing companies. Carl is a native of Lenoir County with a humble background. It was a fluke of luck that he made it to the NC School of Science and Math, which launched him into his career. We have divided his interview into two parts, starting with where he came from and how it shaped his ideas on the education system. The second part of the episode explores his companies and career.
Leslie Boney, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, hosts a series of virtual conversations discussing the impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) and some of the ways our state is responding. Join us on this episode of the series with guests Thom Ruhe (President and CEO, NC IDEA), Noah Wilson (Program Director of Growing Outdoors Partnership, Mountain BizWorks), and Donald Thompson (CEO, Walk West) as they discuss entrepreneurship in the time of COVID-19.
On this First in Future episode, we talk with Scott Hamilton, president of the Golden LEAF Foundation. They have been in the news lately, working with the North Carolina Rural Center to jumpstart what they call the "Rapid Recovery Loan Program" to react to the needs of small businesses in the wake of the pandemic. Scott was in economic development for decades with a group called Advantage West of Western North Carolina. Then he led the Appalachian Regional Commission from DC, and now he is back in North Carolina.
Leslie Boney, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, hosts a series of virtual conversations discussing the impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) and some of the ways our state is responding. Join us for the next episode of the series with guests US Rep. G.K. Butterfield (NC 1st District), NC Rep. Josh Dobson (District 85), Angela Siefer (Executive Director, National Digital Inclusion Alliance) and Amy Huffman (Digital Inclusion and Policy Manager, NC Broadband Infrastructure Office) as they discuss how to close the homework (and work) gap during the crisis.
This week's First in Future guest is NC Representative Rev. James Gailliard, and with all that is going on, a message of faith and hope might be welcomed. We hear his advice about when we get overwhelmed— "just start with one thing and take it from there." We also discuss how churches are coping with being the church when they can't be together physically.
Join us for part five of the series with guests Mike Darrow (Executive Director, Feeding the Carolinas) Tessa Thraves (Farm to School Coordinator, NC State University Center for Environmental Farming Systems) and Sarah Blacklin (Program Director for NC Choices, NC State University Center for Environmental Farming Systems) as we discuss food and hunger in North Carolina during the crisis.
In August, the New York Times Magazine launched a project designed to try to understand the consequences of a system they traced back to 1619. That’s when the first group of people enslaved by British merchants were unloaded from a boat in Point Comfort, Virginia. The “1619 Project” looks at how that decision impacts health care, housing, jobs, wealth and music today. That is why we need historians like NC State’s Dr. Blair Kelley, this week's First in Future guest. Dr. Kelley helps us understand what happened, the extent to which the consequences of slavery still plague us, and the progress we’ve made.
First in Future: Connecting in Crisis (Who's not getting the message?) Join us for part four of the series with Juvencio Rocha-Peralta (Executive Director, AMEXCAN), Jeanne Tedrow (President and CEO of the NC Center for Nonprofits) and Doug Urland (North Carolina Institute for Public Health at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC-Chapel Hill) as they discuss who may not be getting the message.
Leslie Boney, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, hosts a series of virtual conversations discussing the impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) and some of the ways our state is responding. Joining us for part three of the series with State Sen. Jay Chaudhuri (D-Wake), State Rep. Stephen Ross (R-Alamance), Kevin Price (President/CEO of The Institute NC), and Kit Cramer (President/CEO of Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce) as they discuss the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses around the state.
The Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, Leslie Boney, will be hosting a series of virtual conversations discussing the impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) and some of the ways our state is responding. In this episode he talks with Keith Sutton, the chair of Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) school board, Jeff Cox, president of Wilkes Community College (WCC), and Hope Williams, president of North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities (NCICU). The guests discussed how schools at K-12, community college & university levels are dealing with transitioning learning online almost overnight. This episode of First in Future was recorded on Thursday, March 26, and reflects information that was up-to-date at that time.
The Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, Leslie Boney, will be hosting a series of virtual conversations discussing the impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) and some of the ways our state is responding over the next few weeks. Joining us this week for part one of the series with our special guests: Jeffrey Sural (Director of the Broadband Infrastructure Office under NC Department of Information Technology), Mebane Rash (CEO of EducationNC), and Rev. James Gailliard (Senior Pastor of Word Tabernacle Church and Representative of Nash county in the NC General Assembly). This episode of First in Future was recorded on Thursday, March 19, and reflects information that was up-to-date at that time.
Coming up on Thursday, the Institute for Emerging Issues is going to be focusing on what some really creative North Carolina leaders are doing to respond to the Coronavirus. We hope you’ll check in on our website emergingissues.org about noon this Thursday for our special program. What are the most insightful strategies small businesses are using to deal with this unprecedented time? What are county agencies and school systems doing too make sure they deliver core services effectively and equitably? Is North Carolina’s broadband infrastructure ready for its biggest test yet? Are North Carolina educators and faculty ready for a fully online curriculum? How can a church be a church in a time of social distancing? Please join us, and tell your friends to tune in as well, just go to our website, Emergingissues.org to find out more.
Poets can sometimes tell us something we haven’t thought of before, force us to confront a truth we’d rather avoid or help us see something in a way we hadn’t seen it. We wondered what would happen if a poet came to our most recent Institute for Emerging Issues forum on digital inclusion and turned some of what he heard into poetry. We invited Chris Vitiello, “the Poetry Fox,” to do just this and he is our First in Future guest for the second of two episodes. This episode we are letting him share some of the remarkable poems he created at our Emerging Issues Forum, ReCONNECT to Technological Opportunity, to do a little showcase about what it means to have a poet’s eye and ear listening in on a discussion of public policy.
Traditionally when you think of poets, they sit in a quiet room and produce distilled wisdom on paper to an internal beat. Those poets have more visible cousins these days, folks who perform in public and that you hear on the street or at poetry slams. And if you live in North Carolina, you may see one of them dressed up in a giant fox costume, creating poetry on demand. Chris Vitiello is “the Poetry Fox,” and he is our First in Future guest for the next two episodes. First we will hear about the role of poetry in our state today and looking forward into the future. Next episode we will let him share some of the remarkable poems he created at our most recent Emerging Issues Forum, ReCONNECT to Technological Opportunity, to do a little showcase about what it means to have a poet’s eye and ear listening in on a discussion of public policy.
This year, the Raleigh-based nonprofit Public School Forum has identified its top education issues to address, to take "immediate and intentional actions to provide each child a sound basic education." This is a response to a lingering legal decision on education and the state government identification of areas of improvement like new schools being built, existing schools maintained, better trained teachers and principals, and new accountability systems. This week's First in Future guest is the State Board of Education Chair, Eric Davis, who discusses his thoughts on making the ROI argument that if we invest now it will pay off later.
At our ReCONNECT to Technological Opportunity Forum, we heard story after story of people who have access to broadband and how they're doing amazing things with it. We also heard stories of people struggling to take full advantage of it. This week’s First in Future guest is Kevin Austin, the president of the state association of county commissioners. We talked with him about the biggest priorities of the association, including broadband and what it’s like to be on the front lines of making day-to-day decisions that affect everyone’s life, knowing they can second guess you on everything.
We all know people in our hometowns or neighborhoods who have a way of bringing people and ideas together in a community, big or small. Some may call them "connectors" or "weavers". They can see what their community might look like and start working on ideas like threads and weave them in a tapestry. This week's First in Future guest, LB Prevette, is one of those people. She is leading her community of Wilkes County to be more open about its problems and its ability to find solutions. They like to introduce themselves, not with their title or credentials, but where they are from, their community and how they are building it up.
If you are in a business trying to expand markets, on a farm trying to boost yields, helping your kids with homework or a local government official trying to figure out how to make your community more competitive, you need to be in Raleigh on February 10th. That is our ReCONNECT to Technological Opportunity forum. This week's First in Future guest is Maggie Woods, the Policy and Program Manager looking at the idea of "digital inclusion". She explores what a difference it can make for our state to take full advantage of high speed internet.
So what is the story of the work you are doing? How can you tell it in a way that will get other people excited about moving it forward? If you can tell a good story to show people why they should care, you’re more likely to get your work greenlighted. That is what this week's First in Future guest, Jeff Polish realized one day—the power of good stories. Now he's the founder and executive director of the Monti, which works on how to use simple principles of storytelling to communicate effectively. He has been working with us at the Institute for Emerging Issues helping community leaders across the state tell their stories to help them rally support for their work.
North Carolina has been a long-time leader in making internet available to people across the state, and we were the first place to have every K-12 classroom wired with high speed internet. The internet is also a critical tool if the rural communities are going to be able to compete in the 21st century. That is what this week's First in Future guest, Senator Harry Brown, has been working on for the past 16 years in our state. He has focused on getting private internet service providers to work with electric co-ops and other local partners to make internet available sooner in more places. But a tool doesn’t matter if people don’t know how to use it. That is a topic of our February 10 forum, Reconnect to Technological Opportunity in Raleigh. We hope you will join us to talk about how and why we need to make sure that everyone in our state can take full advantage of high speed data services.
In continued honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Institute for Emerging Issues presents the second part of our fascinating conversation with Dr. Jason Miller of NC State's Department of English. We will learn more about the connection between Dr. King and North Carolina in the two different speeches from 1962 and 1966. In 1966 Dr. King was already an international figure, having won a Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. King was due to speak at Reynolds Coliseum in Raleigh, but little is known about that speech due to the protests surrounding the event. In the second part of First in Future's MLK Day episode, we gain even more insight based on Dr. Miller's research into these moments of NC history.
In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Institute for Emerging Issues wanted to present the fascinating conversation we had with this week's First in Future guest, Dr. Jason Miller of NC State's Department of English. He has discovered a connection between Dr. King and North Carolina in two different speeches in 1962 and 1966. In 1962, Dr. King visited Rocky Mount, and you will hear a part of that speech that contained language from his famous "I have a dream" speech. We will hear Dr. Miller's insight based on his research into these moments of NC history.
Artificial intelligence will soon be making decisions about who gets jobs, whether you get a loan, and what sort of diagnosis you get for a condition. That is why you should join us for our February 10 Emerging Issues Forum in Raleigh, when we will look at what we need to be doing now to make sure all the people across the state have the access and skills needed to compete in an AI-driven world. That is also why we are talking to this week's First in Future guest, Phaedra Boinodiris, IBM Global Lead for Serious Games and a serial entrepreneur, founder of womengamers.com, recipient of six patents, and author of the book "Serious Games for Business." She is on a mission to change the way we teach technology in our schools, and how we make our way in a world increasingly driven by artificial intelligence.
North Carolina has lost a great citizen. Dr. Robert Bashford was an NC State graduate, OB/GYN, and Director of Admissions at UNC Medical School. His great passion was finding ways to address the health care shortage in rural North Carolina with the Office of Rural Initiatives. He appeared on First in Future in the spring of 2018, and we wanted to play back that interview to remind you of who this man was and how his inspiring mind worked.
We revisit an inspiring conversation we had with Rev. Richard Joyner, to start our new year of First in Future. Growing up in Pitt County, Rev. Richard Joyner hated the land of eastern North Carolina, because that’s where he and his 12 brothers and sisters had to spend their summers, working alongside their sharecropping parents. Through the Conetoe Family Life Center, he has brought together Baptist, Muslims, and Unitarians. The Conetoe Center has gone from one congregation in one small town to 21 places in four counties, helping people eat better, provide for their families, learn and understand the math of agriculture (how much they can save for themselves and how much they need to sell.) He also teaches and preaches resilience and optimism to those within the program.
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 the state and it 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. 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.
North Carolina's tech industry is booming, with more than 250,000 workers at 20,000 firms and a growth of 21 percent over the past five years. As President and CEO of NC TECH Association, our guest this week, Brooks Raiford, is always looking for ways to improve the industry. We hear his thoughts on the challenge of getting broadband for everyone in the state and the critical role of middle school teachers in raising up future techies.
At our upcoming forum in February, IEI will explore strategies to ensure that people across North Carolina can take full advantage of broadband, the digital economy and new technology. This week's First in Future guest is one of the 50 most powerful women in technology, as recognized by the National Diversity Council. Oita Coleman, a vice president with SAS Institute in Cary, shares with us her optimistic perspective on the future of tech.
A recent study says that 62% of business are having trouble filling skilled trades positions; and 74% expect to have trouble in the future. The problem is not pay, the pay is good. It is aging and lack of interest. 53% of those in the skilled trades in the US are 45 or older, and in some areas close to 40% of workers are over 55. This week’s First in Future guest is Michael Mitchell, the Sr. Director of Trade Skills and Learning Innovation at Lowe's Companies, who is heading up a national effort called “Generation T.” It is an effort to inspire a generation, and let tens of thousands of young people know that building, welding, wiring and machining keep America going, and pay pretty well too.
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, for this week’s First in Future we are talking about turkeys. North Carolina is #2 in the nation for turkey production, to the tune of 33 million turkeys a year, yielding about 1.2 billion pounds of meat. It adds up to about a $1 billion a year industry in the state. That is why we are talking to Sandra Garner of Rainbow Meadow Farms in Greene County near Snow Hill. She is a small-scale turkey farmer who comes from a family that’s been farming for 273 years.
NC State strives to think about how students, faculty, and staff can do more to work with the communities that surround us. Early on, NC State had extension offices across the state where people could walk in and get advice on problems—originally agriculture problems. Over time, the university added extension faculty in the different colleges, and then centers and institutes like the Institute for Emerging Issues that look for ways to share knowledge with people well beyond the campus borders. This week’s First in Future guest is Dr. Kwesi Brookins, an Associate Professor of community psychology at NC State. He talks about how universities can work with communities, the projects he has worked on both locally and across the state, and how a kid from Chicago realized he could be a university scholar.
Being a mayor is hard. How do you deal with a bypass that diverts traffic around your city? Will improvements to a struggling part of town affect property values and nudge out low-income people? Small town mayors have to deal with these challenges, so when you want to talk about a pothole, start with a thank you for their time. This week's First in Future guest is Mayor Sherri Allgood, who is the newest mayor for Troy, NC, after replacing a 19-term mayor of 38 years. Listen in as she gives her advice on being a voice for something you care about and believe in. If more of us start to be a voice for what we care about and believe in, then North Carolina will be first in future.
One hundred years ago, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, President Woodrow Wilson announced the first observance of what has become known as Veteran’s Day, a celebration of the critical role those who have served in our military play in the life of our country.
At the Institute for Emerging Issues, we give special thanks for their service and urge you to reach out to the veterans you know to thank them.
Every year, about 30,000 military personnel stationed in North Carolina move out of the service and start looking for jobs. Across the US, the total is 200,000. These folks have a remarkable breadth of skills, including a common set of habits that can be helpful in improving the culture of an organization.
This week’s First in Future guest is Randy Nelson, a former Navy Lieutenant and an entrepreneur. We talked with him about how he decided to serve in the military, what skills it gave him for later life, the habits of mind an entrepreneur needs, how he is coping with a strange kind of addiction he has, and what it might take for North Carolina to be first in future in convincing more transitioning military personnel to stay or move here.
If you’re any kind of business or policy enthusiast and live in the Carolinas, chances are you’ve watched the Carolina Business Review. It’s been on the air since 1991 and is getting close to 1,500 shows. Each week on the show, there are guests from North and South Carolina talking business, education, or public policy with its host Chris William. Over the past 29 years from his perch at the host’s desk for the Carolina Business Review and his day job with Wells Fargo, Chris has seen explosive growth in the Carolinas. On this week’s episode, we talk to him about getting ready for continued growth, the coming recession, what he’s learned from talking to thousands of successful people and how to improve the quality of our public dialogue.
In 2017 and 2018, the Institute for Emerging Issues spent a lot of time focusing on the economics of early childhood development in North Carolina. The emerging theme of all that work was probably no surprise: it really did seem like, now more than ever, it takes a village to raise a healthy child with providers, politicians, parents, employers, planners, professional development and lots of people all working together.
This week’s guests are members of the Inspired Randolph initiative, an effort led by the Randolph Partnership for Children. Their particular focus: rallying more support for infant and toddler care in their county.
In today’s job market, there’s a gap between the number of available jobs and the number of employees with skills for those jobs. It’s what employers call a “skills gap” – and there’s an organization in North Carolina working on bridging that gap. The Capital Area Workforce Development Board helps connect people to training and education so they can get jobs that become careers. Pat Sturdivant is not only the head of this board—she’s also president of the state association of workforce boards. In this week’s episode of First in Future, Pat talks about how workforce boards create a pool of qualified candidates for North Carolina’s growing industries.
The best estimate of the My Future NC Commission for the number of people in North Carolina who started college but then dropped out is 905,000. In many ways, they have the worst of both worlds: they’ve spent money on college and often had to take out loans, but they don’t have the benefit that comes with a degree. Finding those folks and convincing them to come back to school again is a challenge that a lot of people are working on. You’ll hear about efforts at community colleges and public universities, but you might not have heard about the work of Charlotte’s Johnson C. Smith University. Our First in Future guest this week is Dr. Laura Colson McLean, Dean of JCSU Metropolitan College. She works very intentionally with working age adults to get them the skills and education they need to move to the next level in their careers.
The next Emerging Issues Forum, ReCONNECT to Economic Opportunity, is coming up on October 15 in Charlotte. It’s going to be a day focused on the people at the core of our economy—adult workers and their future. We will talk with people who have good ideas for helping them move up and forward.
Before we look forward, we think it’s useful to examine our history. This week on First in Future, our guest is Dr. Karl Campbell of Appalachian State University’s History department. He talks to us about our state’s history in segregation, Governor Hodges and Senator Ervin during that time period, and how to look to what our past can tell us about our future. Lastly, he tells us the interesting origin of our state’s many nicknames.
At IEI, we’re getting ready for our next Emerging Issues Forum, ReCONNECT to Economic Opportunity, coming up on October 15 in Charlotte. It’s going to be a day focused on the people at the core of our economy—adult workers. Once they begin their working careers, we tend to turn our attention away. But many of those workers are struggling to advance. On October 15, we’ll talk with people who have good ideas for helping them move up. This week on First in Future, our guest is our very own Policy and Programs Manager Alicia James. As the lead planner for the forum, she’s been thinking about this issue for the past year. She tells us about why it’s important to our state’s future, what Charlotte and other communities are doing to help, and what you’ll learn if you register to attend the forum in October.
The people that keep our society running—electricians, laborers, technicians, and more—are getting older and nearing retirement. It’s a global issue, as dozens of countries around the world report their biggest labor shortages in skilled trades. Wake County is trying to move more people into those jobs. This week on First in Future, we talk with Wake County Commissioner Matt Calabria about the unusual partnership between the county and Wake Technical Community College to help solve the shortage.
Across North Carolina, our 58 community colleges are designed to be within a few minutes’ drive of every person in the state. They have a broad core suite of services: degree programs, technical training, ESL, high school degree completion, and continuing education. They send some people out ready to transfer to four-year schools and accept some people back from four-year schools to get additional skills. Community colleges are a critical part of our state’s retraining challenge. If you’ve been paying attention to the work of the My Future NC Commission, that challenge involves raising up an additional 400,000 adults by 2030 with an education credential beyond high school. That is the kind of challenge Dr. Kandi Deitemeyer, President of Central Piedmont Community College, has been thinking about for most of her adult life. She has worked in community colleges in Florida and Kentucky, and before moving to CPCC, she worked in three smaller community colleges in North Carolina—Davidson, Moore and Pasquotank counties. What do all those places have in common? A responsibility to get people in their area the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.
If you were making a shortlist of family names associated with Charlotte, “Belk” would have to be near the top. Beginning in 1888, the Belk’s started a small retail chain in Monroe that grew bigger and then spread throughout the southeast.
John M. Belk once said, “The more you do for mankind, the better you’ll like life. Whether it’s a company or a city or state, you’ve got to leave it better for the next generation.”
The Belk family continues to try to find ways to leave it better. Today’s First in Future guest MC Belk Pilon is the President and Board Chair of the John M. Belk Endowment, whose mission is to transform postsecondary educational opportunities to meet North Carolina’s evolving workforce needs. As you listen to her thought process, you can hear the origins of the My Future NC Commission.
As you look around Charlotte, one of the things you’ll notice is how diverse it is. Mecklenburg County is diverse racially, with 51% of its citizens nonwhite. It’s diverse geographically – 57% of its residents were born outside of the state of North Carolina. And 1 in 7 of its residents was born outside of the U.S. Today’s First in Future guest Reinaldo Panico Peres chair of the Centralina Workforce Board was born in Brazil and moved to the Charlotte region when he relocated a Brazilian company there. These days, he assists other international firms locating to the Charlotte region, and he is on a mission to get the Charlotte region workforce to give up its old habits and reinvent itself.
A 2015 report on economic mobility in the U.S. caught Charlotte’s attention. The report looked at the likelihood that someone whose parents’ income ranked in the bottom 20% would grow up to make enough money to be in the top 20% of earners. In Charlotte, there was a 4.8% chance of moving into the top 20% if you were born into the bottom 20%. This made Charlotte 50th out of 50 cities in the report. Today’s First in Future guest is Charlotte mayor Vi Lyles. She talks about the report, how the city responded to it, and how other places in the state might approach similar issues. We also hear about millennials, potholes, and how Charlotte is dealing with being the fastest-growing city in the country.
Charlotte is a bigger city than Atlanta or Raleigh. It's the 16th largest metro area in the country. It is the fastest growing city in the country for millennials and has the state’s only real municipal public transit. Charlotte is taking on issues of race and class, economic mobility, affordable housing and quality of life in a very intentional way. Today’s First in Future guest Jeff Michael, the Director of UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, is looking at the greater Charlotte region and the connections between the rural and urban. The Urban Institute locates the data that the region needs to make decisions. They explain it in a way that people can get. And they have the humility to let people decide what to do with it. Jeff is a native of Stanly County, a first generation college student who left to get degrees in business, law and regional planning, and then went back.
The best estimate of the My Future NC Commission for the number of people in North Carolina who started college but then dropped out is 905,000. In many ways, they have the worst of both worlds: they’ve spent money on college and often had to take out loans, but they don’t have the benefit that comes with a degree. Finding those folks and convincing them to come back to school again is a challenge that a lot of people are working on. You’ll hear about efforts at community colleges and public universities, but you might not have heard about the work of Charlotte’s Johnson C. Smith University. Our First in Future guest this week is Dr. Laura Colson McLean, Dean of JCSU Metropolitan College. She works very intentionally with working age adults to get them the skills and education they need to move to the next level in their careers.
The Institute for Emerging Issues recently provided a series of workshops at the state’s biggest gathering of underappreciated elected officials—the annual meeting of the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners. The conference brought together most of the state’s 587 county commissioners and 100 county managers for three days to work through some of the biggest issues our state is facing—health care, education, jobs, opioid addiction and taxes.
This week’s First in Future guest is Kevin Austin, the president of the state association of county commissioners. For the past 11 years, he has been a Yadkin County commissioner. We talked with him about the biggest priorities of the association, how to balance public service and a day job, and what it’s like to be on the front lines of making day-to-day decisions that affect everyone’s life, knowing they can second guess you on everything.
We are living in strange economic times. Right now we have a greater number of jobs in the US – 7 million – than we have people officially looking for work. That’s the biggest surplus ever. Figuring out how to make the match between job seekers and jobs is the mission of the Workforce Development Boards across the state. On this episode of First in Future, Leslie Boney talks with the director of the Mountain Area Workforce Board, Nathan Ramsey, and rediscovers the value of "connections" in job success.
Many people in NC think we've forgotten how to talk to each other. That's why the Institute for Emerging Issues is taking part in the Civic Conversations Project with Leadership North Carolina. We're encouraging people from across the state to talk about issues that divide them and get beyond the rhetoric. This week on First in Future, we talk to two people who have just participated in civic conversation—Mat Dull, Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at Appalachian State, and Ged Moody, active entrepreneur, and we hear their thoughts on the conversation.
In the old days, getting a master’s degree or a PhD meant you’d likely go into academia. The focus was to get students ready for research and teaching higher education. But as competition for academic jobs has increased, students need to look elsewhere for jobs. Enter the Accelerate to Industry program, or A2i, at NC State University’s Graduate School. This week on First in Future, the Assistant Dean for Professional Development Laura Demarse tells us about how this unique program is giving grad students the skills they need to land a job.
Dr. Pat Mitchell has spent her career thinking about how to make NC a better state. She has been an economic developer, a county manager, head of rural development for the state, and a university professor. She’s currently the president of the NC Economic Development Association. What does she see as critical to the future of economic development in NC? The younger generation and thinking beyond county lines. This week on First in Future, we’ll learn from Dr. Mitchell about the importance of rural development and blending classroom learning with hands-on practice.
How can you get a degree without going into debt, get paid while you learn, and end up with a high-skilled job? In North Carolina, you could get an apprenticeship in health care, manufacturing, construction, IT, energy, and more. This week’s First in Future guest Kathryn Castelloes, Director of ApprenticeshipNC in the state community college system, talks about why this idea has so much potential.
In today’s job market, there’s a gap between the number of available jobs and the number of employees with skills for those jobs. It’s what employers call a “skills gap” – and there’s an organization in North Carolina working on bridging that gap. The Capital Area Workforce Development Board helps connect people to training and education so they can get jobs that become careers. Pat Sturdivant is not only the head of this board—she’s also president of the state association of workforce boards. In this week’s episode of First in Future, Pat talks about how workforce boards create a pool of qualified candidates for North Carolina’s growing industries.
Which is better – a fence at the top of a cliff or an ambulance in the valley below? Our world today seems to invest more in reactive solutions (ambulances) than it does in preventative ones (fences). But that’s starting to change. In southeastern NC, District Attorney Ben David is focused on stopping crime before it begins. The Prosecutorial District office for New Hanover and Pender counties works with the larger community to create pathways for people so they don’t turn to crime. The office helps prevent dropouts, provides food for kids during the summer and helps people with criminal records find jobs. In this week’s episode, Ben talks about the root causes of crime and how we can provide opportunities for everyone to succeed.
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.”
This week’s First in Future guest, John Chaffee has a lifetime of stories about recruiting outside companies to relocate in eastern North Carolina. That’s what any economic developer does. He is the president and CEO of the NC East Alliance, a nonprofit representing 28 counties in the central east and northeastern parts of the state and he spends a good portion of his time these days focused on some unique challenges to Eastern North Carolina. Some challenges he faces has gotten him much closer to the world of what is called “workforce development” – working with schools and colleges and companies to make sure folks have the skills and abilities they need to compete for today’s jobs. And he has to figure out a way to do it across a big swath of counties with different challenges, different assets and different histories. If the North Carolina East Alliance does its work, a whole generation of people from eastern North Carolina will rise up and lead the region into a new prosperity. And if the people are ready, the economic development side of things will take care of itself.
In 1982, a revolution began very very quietly, when somebody figured out how to connect a drink machine to the then-fledgling Internet. The drink machine was able to signal – one machine to another – that it was almost out of bottles, so that somebody could restock it. The name for this machine to machine communication was coined – “the Internet of things.” There’s no question that “the Internet of things” is making our lives more convenient – we can track our packages better, keep up with inventory in our factories more effectively. We can read messages or keep up with our exercise through our watches. And there are new applications everyday, in eldercare, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, even home appliances. This week’s First in Future guest is Sarah Glova, who grew up in Greenville, got her undergraduate degree at UNCW, then her masters and PhD at NC State. She now serves as Director of Growth and Communications for a Raleigh-based nonprofit called RIoT “Raleigh Internet of Things”. Her job there is to try to keep up with an industry that is dealing with crazy amounts of growth, with almost daily breakthroughs in sensors, data analysis or networks, while wrestling with serious questions about privacy, as they try to determine how companies should handle all the data they are capturing.
In 1980, Juvencio Rocha Peralta became frustrated by the job opportunities in Veracruz Mexico, a town of about 500 people, so he took a big chance. At the age of 16, he moved to Duplin County, where he worked in agriculture. He wanted more, so he started studying and eventually moved into a new career. He came to love this area, set down roots, and in 1986, became a citizen. This week’s First in Future guest, Juvencio Rocha Peralta, is the Executive Director of AMEXCAN (The Association of Mexicans in North Carolina), an agency that tries to do two different things: help Mexicans and other members of the LatinX community figure out how to be fully-participating members of the towns they live in, and also to help the long-time members of their communities appreciate the importance of the new residents. On today’s show we talk with Juvencio about his AMEXCAN work, and his pathway from working in the fields to being recognized as part of the Academy of Community Engaged Scholars. We hear his thoughts on current immigration policy and some critical health care challenges the LatinX community are facing.
As part of our ReCONNECT NC series, the Institute for Emerging Issues is identifying groups of communities where something remarkable is happening. The challenge for all of the communities is working on civic participation with people who have lost a sense of working across boundaries. This week’s First in Future guest is Russ Haddad, the Director of Community and Economic Engagement at Elizabeth City State University, and he is heading up one of the communities that the Institute for Emerging Issues is working with, that is focused on getting a excited group of students called Viking Volunteer Corps working on the challenges in their community. We learn from Russ about the responsibility that a university has to be part of the community it serves, the importance of asset-based community development, and why students are so excited about their work in the community.
Today’s First in Future podcast guests Sophie Paulos, Graham County, economic development director and Noah Wilson, Project Manager, Growing Outdoors, Mountain BizWorks are all about changing the way you think when you approach a problem. For example, the traditional approach for economic developers is to look outside of the county to big companies who you can lure into your backyard. Some people call this the buffalo hunt; others the search for the great whale. Sophie Paulos, made a slightly different argument when she went to work as the Graham County economic developer. She joined The Growing Outdoor Partnership which is an alliance of counties, companies and organizations across western North Carolina that were willing to take a chance on a slightly different approach called Asset-Based Community Development. This approach assesses what each partner brings to the table and why it makes sense for them to work together rather than apart. Sophie works with our other First in Future guest, Noah Wilson, who is at the center of making The Growing Outdoors Partnership a success. Noah, Sophie and other members of the partnership are working on innovative ways to bring rural and urban areas together for their mutual benefit. Their product – the great outdoors.
Research shows that whenever a new economic development project is announced as bringing in jobs to a country, less than half of those jobs go to residents of that county and less the 2% of the jobs go to people who are unemployed in that county. The governmental and personal benefit of jobs is largely regional. This week’s First in Future guest, Dr. Mitch Renkow of NCSU talks about this research and commuting patterns connected with those jobs. If you want to learn more about those commuting patterns and what is happening in your home county. Go to emergingissues.org and check out the “NC County Snapshot” on the resources page to see what percentage of workers in your home county leave each day and what percentage of workers are coming in from other places.
None of us exists as islands and as individuals we depend on friends and family, but also on a range of people we don’t know. The same goes for the units we live in, our neighborhoods and counties exist in regions, and our success or failure depends on their success or failure. Figuring out how to balance our individual autonomy with our collective responsibility requires one of the ongoing pieces of work we need to do as part of this state and this country. This week’s First in Future guest has come to that conclusion after a few decades, crossing two countries and four states, working in local government, nonprofit think tanks and universities. Brian Dabson with the University of North Carolina School of Government, has headed up two national nonprofits, The Corporation for Enterprise Development (now called Prosperity Now) is the nation’s leading organization on helping Americans save and accumulate wealth more effectively and The Rural Policy Research Institute, the nation’s leading think tank on rural policy. In this Podcast we hear his thoughts about the interdependencies of rural and urban, relocating state government services out of Raleigh, and the new social contract. Brian will be one of the speakers at the Institute for Emerging Issues February 11 Forum called Reconnect Rural and Urban, and to learn more, please visit emergingissues.org
“When an urban area wins, it ends up being a victory for the entire state, when a rural area struggles, it is a concern for the whole state”. That is what this week’s guest has observed. Lee Worsley is the Executive Director of the Triangle J Council of Governments, which covers 7 counties across central North Carolina. So how does the Triangle J Council of Governments influence 43 other units of government? They quietly encourage local units of government to get beyond city and county bounds and work on regional projects that make sense. That is what we will be talking about at the Institute for Emerging Issues upcoming forum on reconnecting Rural and Urban on the 11th of February in Raleigh. Want to learn more and register, go to EmergingIssues.org.
he ReCONNECT to Community Impact Report provides a synopsis of the ReCONNECT to Community Forum and provides key statements, findings, readings and further steps for reconnection of civic engagement in NC. We invite you to listen to what we’ve heard and learned, test out our “six recommendations” in your community. We also hope you will share what you’re discovering with ReCONNECT to Community program lead Maggie Woods. This week's First in Future guest is Maggie Woods, Policy and Program Manager for the Institute for Emerging Issues. We also get the opportunity to listen to some excerpts of David Brooks from our ReCONNECT to Community Forum from Asheville this past November. We also invite to also read our ReCONNECT to Community Impact Report.
Agriculture is an $84B industry in North Carolina that supports more than 600,000 jobs. North Carolina has set a goal of growing that industry by 20% in the next few years. Part of that goal will have to be buying more local food and right now less than 1% of our food dollars stays in North Carolina. So buying more local gets those dollars circulating around in our economy and that helps everyone. This week’s First In Future Guest is Erin White, is the principal founder of the Community Food Lab (communityfoodlab.org), which is an ambitious effort to build a Triangle-wide food system working with and for farmers and foodies to bring together rural and urban people into a dialogue about their shared interests. Listen as we learn the fascinating life story of Erin moving from being a farm manager at a camp to a construction work to an architect to a chef and now head of the Community Food Lab. Community Food Lab one of the five efforts that the Institute for Emerging Issues will be featuring at our Forum on Connecting Rural and Urban. If you want to learn more, please attend our Forum on Connecting Rural and Urban and go to our website emergingissues.org to sign up. We promise you an exciting day, with conversations about transportation connections, affordable housing, workforce development, economic development, opioids and behavioral health, culture and recreation and Erin will be there talking about the critical role of food systems.
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.
If you were looking to identify a poster child for citizenship, you could do a lot worse than Kel Landis, co-founder and partner at Plexus Capital. As you’ll hear today, he’s done a little bit of everything -- through a distinguished career as a North Carolina businessman and civic volunteer, and he has written a book “The Little Book of Do”. It’s all about us, our excuses, and how to get started making a difference. I think you’ll find what Kel has to say pretty inspiring. As a bonus, along the way we’ll talk about his interesting thinking about connections between rural and urban parts of our state, Eagle Scouts, Hurricane Matthew, Frank Sinatra, the most famous Michael Jordan quote ever, and a guy named Demetrius who may just transform our state.
Growing up in the streets of Detroit, you could become a victim or become a victor. Reginald Bean chose to become a victor. He is now vice president of culture, engagement & stewardship for Coca-Cola Consolidated. At Coca Cola, thousands of people look to him for advice on their careers and choices. Listen as he provides advice about changing your mindset, getting a positive group of people around you and not letting other people’s perceptions of you change how you think about yourself. These are just a few things he talks about in his book “A Year and Some Change”.
In the late 1990’s, North Carolina leaders did something remarkable. As part of the national settlement agreement with tobacco companies, North Carolina was projected to receive an estimated $4.6 billion in payments, a couple of hundred million each year. Lawmakers mandated that a portion of the money go to establishing a foundation to help increase economic opportunity for rural and tobacco-dependent communities, a foundation known as Golden LEAF. This week’s guest, Dan Gerlach, is the president of the Golden LEAF Foundation. We talked about his thoughts on the rural and urban parts of the state and how we might reconnect and benefit from working together. We also learned about the Foundation’s role in hurricane recovery, especially with Matthew and now Florence.
How do you keep people's attention in a discarded world? There is the "addiction" model of telling people what they want to know, watch or listen, and then offer them a series of escalating rewards. A different approach is to ask people what they really care about and believe in or are curious about and then provide a variety of ways to share it with them. That is what our First in Future guest this week, Travis Mitchell, Chief Content Officer with UNC-TV and Public Media North Carolina, thinks. Listen as he shares what makes our state special in the past is the willingness to come together to work out really tough issues.
The Institute for Emerging Issues, as part of our ReCONNECT NC series, is trying to figure out how communities can get more people at the table to help their towns solve the big problems they are facing. This week's First in Future guest, Corey Madden, executive director at Kenan Institute for the Arts, has an idea for a solution. Artists! Artists are creative, persistent, patient, and experienced at taking raw ideas and turning them into something amazing. Listen to how Corey thinks having artist in your community can help you create processes that might bring more people to the table in solving some of YOUR community’s biggest problems.
The idea that the rural and urban parts of our state seemed to be getting further and further apart, and this is on the minds of North Carolinians. This idea of disconnection to each other in job opportunities or kinds of health care options are an area that the Institute for Emerging Issues has recognized. We are conveying around the state over the next three years to ReCONNECT NC and talk about solutions. Today's First in Future guest, Senior Policy and Program Manger at the Institute for Emerging Issues, Sarah Langer Hall, has been working on a variety of these issues over the past few years and leads our ReCONNECT NC series.
What makes a small town thrive? Downtowns where people come together to see each other and do things. Their story and what makes their town special, and they’re proud to tell other people about it. Public and private sector, that work together with nonprofits and people willing to put in the time. This week's First in Future guest is Jeff Eidson with Explore Elkin and small business owner who is putting in the time to make Elkin special.
What a better way to start our next hundred episodes of First in Future, than talking with someone who is looking at our state’s future on a daily basis—Peter Hans, president of the NC Community College System. He is responsible for 700,000 students in 58 colleges dotted across the state, all within a 30 minute drive of most citizens. Besides awarding degrees, the college help underemployed workers gain new skills and certificates. They train the people who build your houses, keep you electricity running, unclog your sink, take care of you in the hospital and take care of your finances. All this gives people like Hans a terrific grasp on our state’s issues and in our conversation with him, we cover many of them, including: our state’s skills gap, rural and urban differences, underemployment, and the opportunity and threat of artificial intelligence.
For our 100th First in Future episode we chose a guest who represents IEI's history, Anita Brown-Graham, director of the Institute for 10 years. She has shown a long time commitment to making the state a better place, so it was only fitting that we catch up with her and talk about her new role at the UNC School of Government as ncIMPACT Director and Professor of Public Law and Government.
As Halloween fast approaches, did you know SCARY stories abound about Raleigh’s Capital Building? BAHAHA! Tis TRUE! You see . . . the decades of energy and history swirling through the government building have left a ghost story or two. This week’s First in Future guest, Terra Schramm, is the site administrator of the building, and knows the terrifying tales better than anyone. So sit back, and relax (if you can!) as she spins a civic macabre yarn or two.
As we get closer to our November 27 Forum called ReCONNECT to Community, we wanted to give you a preview of how citizens are participating in helping our communities solve the big challenges. This week’s First in Future guest, Seth Saeugling of the nonprofit Rural Opportunity Institute in Edgecombe County, learned about the impact of trauma on children’s ability to learn in rural North Carolina schools through his experience in Teach for America. He and others, work to see how to apply emerging research on brains in a real world setting, not with a pre-developed program, but instead listening and learning. We learn how he is working with others in Edgecombe County to figure out how to translate the research into results.
In 2015, the Institute for Emerging Issues found that young people aged 18-29 are less likely to volunteer, give money, participate in groups or trust people in their neighborhood. That’s not good and it’s not good for North Carolina. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor once said “ . . . developing leaders of tomorrow takes patience, passion and civics education.” This week's First in Future guest is Lucy Russell of the Institute of Politics at UNC-Chapel Hill, a student founded organization with a mission to create more civically-engaged students. Russell knows that there is a strong appetite among young people to listen and learn, share their opinions and see how democracy works.
Universities often serve three main roles in society: teaching, researching and engagement (a fancy word for service.) A huge part of community engagement is listening to what people have to say. This week's First in Future guest, Sharon Paynter, associate vice chancellor for community engagement at East Carolina University, is part of the conversation with communities around and beyond the university. Right now, a big part of any eastern North Carolina conversation has to do with Hurricane Florence and the struggle of communities as they continue to clean up from the storm. ECU is helping the efforts in myriad ways. Visit florencerecovery.ecu.edu for more information.
Hurricane Florence really couldn’t have come at a worse time or in a worse way for farmers in southeastern North Carolina. Many farmers were still recovering from the impacts of Hurricane Matthew two years ago. And because Florence came earlier than Matthew, there were more crops still in the field. This week's First inFuture guest, Scott Marlow with the Rural Advancement Foundation International, or RAFI, has seen how this plays out before. His job is to help farmers figure out what to do next. There are plenty of folks available to help – Farm Services, Cooperative Extension, FEMA and others. RAFI looks for gaps and tries to fill them. Listen to what Scott has to say about the stages of recovery for a farmer after a disaster and looking forward. If you are a farmer looking for advice and support RAFI’s Farm Survival Hotline is 866-586-6746, or you can go to rafiusa.org.
Hurricane Florence has been felt with 1100 roads closed, grocery stores running out of food and farmers loosing their crops and many local food distributors went underwater. The Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina is working to get food from grocery stores and fresh produce from farmers via their hyper-efficient routes that its trucks take to get the food from a series of regional warehouses to a network of providers who get it out to people. This week's First in Future guest, Earline Middleton VP of Partner Services and Public Policy Food Bank of Central and Eastern NC, talks of about the immediate work that the Food Bank is doing, her to focus on the future and her observations about the value of disaster planning. Listen for what she thinks is going to be the time of greatest need when it comes to getting food to disaster victims.
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 and now Hurricane Florence.
What does one do after leaving the job of top salesperson for an entire state? For Sharon Decker, that doesn’t mean retirement. After serving as Secretary of Commerce under Gov. Pat McCrory, Decker moved back to rural North Carolina, where she is helping build a business and rebuild a region’s hopes and dreams. As COO of the Tryon International Equestrian Center, Decker is building a dream that could someday be comparable to golf, or to NASCAR. This week, Decker discusses her career change and shares her book recommendations, and we get the first answer on this podcast to the age-old question, If you were a horse, what kind would you be?
Here is a fact, North Carolina citizens are getting older. Currently, there are about 1.6 million citizens who are over 65. Over the next 20 years, one million more citizens will be added to that demographic. However, this demographic shift presents some amazing opportunities, as many of these older citizens will want to give back to the places they live. Across our state, community foundations are busy helping North Carolinians address big community problems. This week’s First in Future guest is Elizabeth Brazas, the president and CEO of the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, located in a part of the state that will have an even larger number of citizens over 65 than state average in the upcoming years, thanks in part to Western North Carolina becoming a haven for retirees. During the podcast, you will get a lot of insights from Elizabeth—about strategic planning, the role of philanthropy, and respecting the differences between counties. You will also learn about a "mafia" that works for good, balancing permanence and fluidity in a fast-changing world and why not everybody in western North Carolina likes top 10 lists.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” This week's First in Future guest is Chris Suggs, the founder of the non-profit Kinston Teens. At the age 9 he organized a community cleanup campaign, at the age 14 started a nonprofit called Kinston Teens, then moved on to start a national organization for young black leaders, then was named to the Governor’s Crime Commission. Listen and be inspired to hear what he has to say about the influence parents can have on their children, about working on the problems that present themselves right in front of you, and how much you can get done if you don’t demand you get the credit.
This week thousands of freshmen enter college in hopes that in four years they emerge with more knowledge and maturity and a deep substantive understanding about a major or two. This is our "Back to School" episode and this week's First in Future guest, Eric Johnson Editorial Strategy Director at The College Board, talks about his experience of working with first generation UNC students and his work getting them ready for college. We learn his thoughts on listening, learning, talking and reading, as well as what to look for in a college class and the merits of caffeine over alcohol.
The words “public policy” conjure up images in the mind of legislative or municipal hearings or cubes of bureaucrats, but this week’s guest want to find a way to put the public in public policy. Mebane Rash is the CEO and editor-in-chief of EducationNC and the N.C. Center for Public Policy Research and EdNC is looking for ways to get people who are concerned about education feeling like we have ability to participate in what happens. Mebane feels like the best ideas really do emerge from talking across lines of division in town halls and town squares, coffee shops and breweries. This week’s First in Future explores her thoughts on civil discourse and social capital, civic participation and public education, and the connective power of coffee.
In honor of our upcoming forum on civic engagement, ReCONNECT to Community, being held Sept. 17 in beautiful, scenic Asheville, we’re doing something special. This week, we have FIVE new First in Future podcasts lined up, all featuring a different western North Carolina leaders. We are at the end of the week with today’s guest Oscar Wong, Founder of Highland Brewing. Today the craft brewing industry is a phenomenon in North Carolina, but when it started for Oscar, it took eight years for Highland Brewing Company to get where it is today.
In honor of our upcoming forum on civic engagement, ReCONNECT to Community, being held Sept. 17 in beautiful, scenic Asheville, we’re doing something special. This week, we have FIVE new First in Future podcasts lined up, all featuring a different western North Carolina leaders. We are almost through the week with today’s guest Zeb Smathers, Mayor of Canton, NC. Listen for the importance of towns building off of what they have, not running from it. The flip he made from "Canton Can’t" to "Canton Can"! How small towns can’t afford to get ugly with each other, but have to solve problems. One line that will stick out is : “the divides between us are only as deep as we dig them. It’s time to start putting dirt back into them and get to work.”
In honor of our upcoming forum on civic engagement, ReCONNECT to Community, being held Sept. 17 in beautiful, scenic Asheville, we’re doing something special. This week, we have FIVE new First in Future podcasts lined up, all featuring a different western North Carolina leaders. We are half way through the week with today’s guest Darin Waters, Executive Director of Community Engagement at UNC Asheville. We’ll end the week with Oscar Wong, owner of Asheville’s Highland Brewing Company. As for the next guests . . . well, you’ll have to tune in tomorrow to find out who that is!
In honor of our upcoming forum on civic engagement, ReCONNECT to Community, being held Sept. 17 in beautiful, scenic Asheville, we’re doing something special. This week, we have FIVE new First in Future podcasts lined up, all featuring a different western North Carolina leaders. We continue the week with today’s guest Dr. Ron Paulus, president & CEO of Mission Health, which serves a million people in the state’s 18 westernmost counties. Dr. Paulus talks about online apps, robotic services, volunteers, in-home visitors, virtual observers, and a group he calls “caramedics.” And since the average citizen of western North Carolina is older than the rest of the state, what he is figuring out now, are the kinds of solutions the rest of the state will need in the future.
In honor of our upcoming forum on civic engagement, ReCONNECT to Community, being held Sept. 17 in beautiful, scenic Asheville, we’re doing something special. This week, we have FIVE new First in Future podcasts lined up, all featuring a different western North Carolina leaders. We’ll start off the week with today’s guest Kit Cramer, president & CEO of the Asheville Chamber of Commerce. We’ll end the week with Oscar Wong, owner of Asheville’s Highland Brewing Company. As for the rest of the week’s guests . . . well, you’ll have to tune in each day this week to find out who they are!
The Asheville of today is a many-splendored thing. It’s appeared on numerous “Best of” lists and received countless titles – like “One of the Best Places to Reinvent Your Life,” “The Happiest City in America for Women,” “The Hippie Capital of the South,” “The Best City for Locavores,” “The Most Romantic Place in U.S.A. and Canada,” and, of course, “Beer City U.S.A.” – and combined with its natural physical beauty, it offers many enticing features for newcomers. This week’s guest remembers Asheville before all those awards, when it was really struggling to recover from the Great Depression. As a direct descendent of George Washington Vanderbilt, the man behind the Biltmore House, Jack Cecil and his family have been in Asheville for generations. As we talk with Jack about how Asheville recovered, changed and grew into itself, we hope you’ll listen for some of the ways he’s learned what it takes to develop communities in the future in a way that lasts. Tune in to part two!
The Asheville of today is a many-splendored thing. It’s appeared on numerous “Best of” lists and received countless titles – like “One of the Best Places to Reinvent Your Life,” “The Happiest City in America for Women,” “The Hippie Capital of the South,” “The Best City for Locavores,” “The Most Romantic Place in U.S.A. and Canada,” and, of course, “Beer City U.S.A.” – and combined with its natural physical beauty, it offers many enticing features for newcomers. This week’s guest remembers Asheville before all those awards, when it was really struggling to recover from the Great Depression. As a direct descendent of George Washington Vanderbilt, the man behind the Biltmore House, Jack Cecil and his family have been in Asheville for generations. As we talk with Jack about how Asheville recovered, changed and grew into itself, we hope you’ll listen for some of the ways he’s learned what it takes to develop communities in the future in a way that lasts. Tune in to part 1 of 2 of our conversation!
Just listen to someone else. Hear what they are saying. Recognize that other people see things from a different angle, and it changes the way we see things ourselves and gives us a different perspective. That is what our First in Future guest, Pearce Godwin, founder and CEO of the Listen First Project discovered. He was riding down a bumpy road in Uganda in 2013 and saw something about the US that many of us were only beginning to realize. What he realized changed his life and he started the nonprofit and the National Conversation Project. Listen and hear what he is saying.
Just think about the impact on southeastern North Carolina of a place like UNC Pembroke—an institution originally built to train Native Americans teachers and nurses, but eventually expanded to serve all students who needed affordable, high quality education.
This week's First in Future guest is Dr. Robin Cummings, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. He talks to Institute for Emerging Issues Director Leslie Boney about communities surrounding Pembroke and how they are solving problems by building onto or utilizing their infrastructure, and how UNC Pembroke is getting in on the act.
In the 90s, it was recommended that every resident state should have access to affordable high-speed internet. General thinking was that with broadband speeds and quick shipping pickup, a rural business could sell products all over the world, a worker could learn online to advance their skills or students could do homework with research from around the world at their fingertips. This week’s First in Future guest is Nelle Hotchkiss, senior Vice President of North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives, and she talks about how the state’s electric membership solved a very similar problem 90 years ago of getting much needed resources to rural NC. Listen and learn a little bit more about broadband, workforce development, volunteerism and entrepreneurship.
This week's First in Future guest was a New York born, Georgia raised and Duke educated law clerk, and former school superintendent who’s now the head of North Carolina's largest general purpose foundation. Maurice "Mo" Green is the executive director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which has been in the news lately as they’ve finished up a two year review on their philanthropy that has narrowed their focus and fine-tuned their ideas on how they want to help others.
This week's First in Future guest, Andrea Harris, is the Senior Fellow at NC Institute of Minority Economic Development. The past 50 years she’s been standing up for the elderly, fighting for affordable housing, helping minorities in our state get businesses started. In 1986, she and two colleagues co-founded the N.C. Institute of Minority Economic Development, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting minority and women businesses. There were then fewer than 30,000 minority businesses in North Carolina; today, there are more than 132,000.
In honor of Independence Day, July 4th, First in Future's guest is the secretary of North Carolina Department of Military & Veterans Affairs, Larry Hall. He is responsible for taking care of the state’s obligations to a huge number of active duty and retired members of the military – in all close to 1 million residents of our state. His department helps them apply for benefits, runs job transition programs, nursing homes, even cemeteries. Listen out for his thoughts on the economic impact of the military, the changing role of active duty military across the world and the role that veterans can play as “culture carriers” in our state. He also reminds his fellow Marines, once a Marine, always a Marine and once a state senator, always a former state senator.
A scene is repeated in cities across the state, this company leaves, that plant closes or fails, and it rocks the town to it's core. Who is willing to stand up and return to fight for it after college? So imagine you are a new attorney fresh from law school, who grew up in Wilkes County, an area suffering the loss of Lowes foods and Lowes Home Improvement headquarters and NASCAR races. If you are this week's First in Future guest, Michael Cooper, the co-director of New Leaders Council of North Carolina, you move back to make a change. You go to court everyday to help your community, you join every board that you think can make a difference and you write stories and columns to inspire about what is possible.
What do you think about public schools? Do teachers get paid enough? Are there too many administrators? Do we test students too much? Not enough? Should we keep students closer to home? The past 32 years the Public School Forum has been trying to answer those questions. Our First in Future guest, the Executive Director of the Public School Forum of North Carolina, Keith Poston has been leading the organization for the past 4.5 years. Imagine it is your job to have a take on 20 contentious issues, and knowing someone disagrees with you about every opinion. The truth is we all have opinions on some of these questions. North Carolina invests 55% of its total budget on education, and 70% of the education funding is spent on K-12 education. But is that enough? Are we spending it in the right ways?
Here is a fact, North Carolina citizens are getting older. Currently, there are about 1.6 million citizens who are over 65. Over the next 20 years, one million more citizens will be added to that demographic. However, this demographic shift presents some amazing opportunities, as many of these older citizens will want to give back to the places they live. Across our state, community foundations are busy helping North Carolinians address big community problems. This week’s First in Future guest is Elizabeth Brazas, the president and CEO of the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, located in a part of the state that will have an even larger number of citizens over 65 than state average in the upcoming years, thanks in part to Western North Carolina becoming a haven for retirees. During the podcast, you will get a lot of insights from Elizabeth—about strategic planning, the role of philanthropy, and respecting the differences between counties. You will also learn about a "mafia" that works for good, balancing permanence and fluidity in a fast-changing world and why not everybody in western North Carolina likes top 10 lists.
In order to lead other people, you need to know what you believe and why, and then bake that into the culture of your organization. You can follow the army leadership path of learning through a set of experiences and classes and determine out of millions of members who has earned the honor being a leader. Then there is the civilian path of parents who teach and mentor them while learning leadership. Then there is the convergence of both paths at the Shelton Leadership Center, where young people learn the fundamentals of values-based leadership under the direction of their director Barbara Mulkey, this week's First in Future guest.
Imaging how strange it must be to walk down the halls of your high school, the best in the state at something, and nobody knows your secret. Emmanuel Carter does it every day. Carter is a four-time high school chess champion as well as a 17-year-old Lee County High School senior. He's also one of the few young African Americans playing chess at such a top level. This week on First in Future, he talks to IEI Director Leslie Boney about his journey to becoming a chess champion, how he learned the game and how he applies its lessons to other parts of his life.
Seventy out of eighty rural North Carolina counties are described as "medical deserts", meaning they have no primary care doctors. Finding solutions to rural health care is a big, complicated problem with many experts throughout the state weighing in on possible fixes. One such expert is Dr. Robert Bashford of the Rural Initiative at the UNC School of Medicine. He is a former OB-GYN, practicing psychiatric, and the former admissions director of the UNC School of Medicine. Dr. Bashford is trying to reimagine what a new health care team could look like in rural counties, and this week on First in Future he talks to IEI Director Leslie Boney about his ideas.
How many of you are doing what you thought you would be when you graduated? That is a question that our guest asks when he is speaking to to groups and the reason is because what we need to know to be able to succeed is changing so very quickly. Careers these days are not fully planned pathways so much as a series of responses to opportunities. Our guest, Dr. Warwick Arden, is the executive vice chancellor and provost of NC State, which means he is responsible for the entire academic side of the university.
This week, we talk to Jessica Hong, a junior at Apex Friendship High School and president of her school's DECA club, an organization that prepares emerging leaders and entrepreneurs in marketing, finance, hospitality and management. As entrepreneurship becomes ever more important to the American economy, we talk to this 17-year-old—the youngest guest ever on First in Future!—about the business of business, and why young people should care.
If you make judgements about someone based on what they are wearing or how their hair looks or how they talk, you have an excellent chance of being wrong. Do southern accents work against us? What about the other dialects we speak? Do people judge us based on the words we use? The answer to all those, unfortunately is yes. What can we do about that moving forward? Well we talked with professor of linguistics at North Carolina State University and world's leading fan of North Carolina accents, Dr. Walt Wolfram about how we can get beyond being judged by the dialects we use.
Sometimes we can try to avoid looking forward, almost like if we ignore the pending changes, they won't happen. North Carolina's population is changing—it's growing—and more and more of our residents weren't born here. Our guest this week, Dr. Rebecca Tippett, the founding director of Carolina Demography at the Carolina Population Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, is a leading demographer. Demography is the science of understanding how populations grow and change, and in this First in Future episode we talk about our state's population growth is changing: where it's coming from and where it's going.
A recent survey showed that only a third of millennials consider public service an appropriate career track. The hours are unpredictable and that makes it hard to do the state's work, so maybe that is why so few of our elected officials in North Carolina are young. So a group of younger legislators are trying to change that by forming the NC Future Caucus. Our guest today are two of their members, Sen Jay Chaudhuri, a youngish Democrat from Wake County and Robeson County Republican, Danny Earl Britt. We learn about what value a caucus of young people brings to our state, and how it might represent part of the solution in getting beyond some of our bitter partisan divides.
"Tell the truth, do the right thing, and let the chips fall where they may." Those are the words that motivate North Carolina State Treasurer Dale Folwell, a man on a mission to show everyone in North Carolina just why they should care about the state's pension fund and health plan. It's an issue that may not be "sexy," but has huge implications for all the state's citizens. Our guest this week is the only former motorcycle mechanic, former legislator and former head of employment security who is currently taking care of more money than Bill Gates . . . $112 billion dollars!
In this week’s First in Future,Leslie Boney talks to Amy Strecker the Stakeholder Philanthropy Manager for DukeEnergy about what it takes to stay connected, not just to your power, but to your community. In her current job, she helps Duke Energy invests back into North Carolina and our communities. We also learn why she thinks that restoring civility might be the biggest issue we need to focus on the future and the power of the chocolate cookie.
We are good people, strong people who want to do the right thing. Let's do it! That is how our guest this week feels. Tom Campbell, the host of the nation's longest running TV shows, brings together opinionated people from across our state to take a tough look at whatever is going on in the news in a given week. We talk to him about growing up in eastern North Carolina, how he developed his reputation of being "often wrong, but never in doubt", and hear him explain why some places in the state have lost their mojo and what they need to do the future to get it back.
It is the middle of March, which means it is time to talk about.....mechanical and aerospace engineering, and March Madness. The "Sweet Sixteen" stars today and our guest Professor Larry Silverberg from NCSU College of Engineering knows something that most basketball players are perfecting....what is the optimal way to shoot a free throw. We learn about the three revolutions of backspin and 52 degree angle and why not the center of the hoop.
First in Future begins our second season. Want to know how rural North Carolina’s doing these days? Well, here’s a statistic to think about: Last year, half the state’s rural counties gained jobs and half lost jobs, while the overwhelming majority of North Carolina’s suburban and rural counties gained jobs. Rural counties aren’t doing as well as urban areas, it seems, but the picture might be more complicated than you think, with some rural areas blossoming in the modern economy and others lagging behind. And if there’s anyone who knows the different chapters of rural North Carolina’s story, it’s Grant Godwin. Godwin currently serves as chair of the board of the Rural Economic Development Center after spending a long career in the private and public sector. A native North Carolinian, Grant grew up on a farm in Sampson County and learned some lessons that have lasted a lifetime. Take a listen as he tells them and maybe you can apply some to your own life. Also, if you’ve ever wondered how to safely approach a turkey, you’ll learn that today, too.
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 studios. Taped segments will air on the North Carolina Channel. Visit www.ncchannel.org/schedule/ for specific air date.
Next month the Institute for Emerging Issues will be launching KidsREADY NC, a four county tier 1 and tier 2 focus on early childhood education. We will bring together, everyone who cares about early childhood and see what they can do if they get all the people in the same room. Get great information, set goals, and improve coordination. This week’s guest, Page Lemel, Vice Chair of the Transylvania County Commissioners, was an inspiration on "how to do it" and her approach to come together, discuss challenges and seek solutions in a collaborative way.
This week we wanted to revisit our conversation with Read Charlotte Executive Director Munro Richardson and his approach to tackling the goal of doubling the percentage of 3rd graders reading proficiently by 2025 in Charlotte. The Institute for Emerging Issues is getting ready to launch our new initiative, KidsReadyNC, in four communities across the state and wanted to hear Munro's thinking about the program. Afterwards, we also have a conversation with IEI's Assistant Director, Pat Cronin, who is heading up KidsReadyNC.
A few months ago, we heard from Abdul Rasheed, CEO of theWilliam C. Friday Fellowship for Human Relations, on how to make a difference in creating civil dialogue. We wanted to go back to that conversation to re-examine what it means to be a citizen and to be an active part of our community through leadership. Follow the conversation we will talk with IEI program and policy manager, Maggie Woods.
This installment was 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.
Frank Emory, of the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, sat down with us in the summer of 2017 for us to discover many insights, such as the value to the sorts of questions Frank’s learned to ask as an attorney. We wanted to look back at that conversation and learn again about the value of building the bridge between the challenges of rural and urban areas and hear from Sarah Hall, Senior Manager of Policy at IEI, about some of the work on this issue.
This installment was 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.
Want to know how rural North Carolina’s doing these days? Well, here’s a statistic to think about: Last year, half the state’s rural counties gained jobs and half lost jobs, while the overwhelming majority of North Carolina’s suburban and rural counties gained jobs. Rural counties aren’t doing as well as urban areas, it seems, but the picture might be more complicated than you think, with some rural areas blossoming in the modern economy and others lagging behind. And if there’s anyone who knows the different chapters of rural North Carolina’s story, it’s Grant Godwin. Godwin currently serves as chair of the board of the Rural Economic Development Center after spending a long career in the private and public sector. A native North Carolinian, Grant grew up on a farm in Sampson County and learned some lessons that have lasted a lifetime. Take a listen as he tells them and maybe you can apply some to your own life. Also, if you’ve ever wondered how to safely approach a turkey, you’ll learn that today, too.
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 studios. Taped segments will air on the North Carolina Channel. Visit www.ncchannel.org/schedule/ for specific air
If you’re looking for someone to give you a thorough political summary on the political history of North Carolina and where the Old North State stands in relation to its Southern neighbors, there’s no better person than John Hood. Hood, president of the Raleigh-based John William Pope Foundation, can also give you a few good pointers on how to speak to people who might think a little differently than you, and how to do it without yelling.
The John William Pope foundation is a grantmaker that supports public policy organizations, educational institutions, arts and cultural programs, and humanitarian relief in North Carolina and beyond. Hood is also chairman of the board at the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina think tank that issues reports, hosts events, produces broadcast programs, and publishes Carolina Journal, which serves an audience of nearly 150,000 North Carolinians through its print, online, and radio editions.
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
Well before his passing, James. B. Duke already had a vision for his philanthropic legacy, and he created the Duke Endowment with specific issues he cared about in mind, such as the support of child welfare.
This week’s First in Future guest, Rhett Mabry, president of the Duke Endowment, and talks to us about an upcoming program that will benefit from this legacy—the multi-year launch of an experimental initiative that explores what would happen if every child in a county who needed help in their early years received it.
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.
Did North Carolina’s investments in pre-kindergarten programs like SmartStart make a difference for our state’s children? How long did the effects last? Did they make a substantial difference in the lives of the children?
This week’s First in Future podcast guest, Ken Dodge, answers these questions. Dodge, a professor at the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy, has studied the impact of our state’s early childhood investments by examining their effects on every student who has been through NC public schools since 1995.
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.
Over the 31 years of the Emerging Issue Forum, we have had CEOs, governors, and presidents as speakers. The first time ever, we have booked a red, furry monster – Elmo. This week’s guest, Joy Potts, is accustomed to dressing up in a costume as the former Read-a-Roo for UNC-TV. She now has a bigger job as Director of Children’s Media and Educational Services at UNC-TV.
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.
If you are talking to the smartest people in the state, you have to talk to David Reese. He’s figured out how to deliver a diverse group of services like arts education, afterschool programs, parent education and summer school with a limited budget to benefit and empower families. This week’s guest is the president and CEO of the East Durham Children’s Initiative. We talked about how do you help parents get more involved in their kid’s lives without getting in the way of their job as parents and how to work with partners to avoid duplication of services.
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.
As we move into the new year, we sat down with former Governor Jim Hunt to try to exact some of what he has learned during his lifetime – about how to get change done, what North Carolina should aspire to be, and where he thinks we might still go as a state. This week’s conversation with Governor James B. Hunt is all about leadership, what he has learned about getting stuff done, focusing priorities, the role of religion in public life, and how he learns new ideas.
Through out his long service to the state, even former North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt’s opponents admit that he was a man perfectly suited to be Governor, and in his sixteen years as governor of North Carolina, he changed the state. This week we sat down with Governor James B. Hunt and talked about one big idea he had – starting the Emerging Issues Forum. Why he did it. What we can learn from how he thought about it. And how we can apply that to the way we learn.
The use of the evergreen trees to symbolize the arrival of winter goes back well beyond 2000 years. But over time they came to be one of the symbols of the holidays. Our special Podcast holiday edition, features our state’s favorite economist, Mike Walden and Tommy Burleson, the former 7’2.5” NC State center, who now farms North Carolina holiday trees. We have both men talking about the $100 million industry.
What should we be learning or telling our kids to learn to get them ready for the future? Should we be preparing students with specific skills that may be extinct in the future or general skills that will enable them to adjust to a changing market? Count Jennifer Kuzma among the people who would advise you to keep an open mind about what your career is going to look like. This week’s guest, Jennifer Kuzma, is the Co-Director of the GES Center. As we listen, we have the chance to think about mosquitoes, killer genes, the ethics of Ancestry.com, new uses of the tobacco leaf, do it yourself biology, and how grateful North Carolina should be to have so many people from out of state moving here.
In the late 1990’s, North Carolina leaders did something remarkable. As part of the national settlement agreement with tobacco companies, North Carolina was projected to receive an estimated $4.6 billion in payments, a couple of hundred million each year. Lawmakers mandated that a portion of the money go to establishing a foundation to help increase economic opportunity for rural and tobacco-dependent communities, a foundation known as Golden LEAF. This week’s guest, Dan Gerlach, is the president of the Golden LEAF Foundation. We talked about why he does the job, how he does it, the Foundation’s role in hurricane recovery, and the value of civic groups. We also talked about the importance of internships, Kinston’s mayor and…Notre Dame football.
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.
What sector of North Carolina’s economy is comprised of 380,000 people, pays $16 billion in wages each year, and generates another $200 million in tax revenue? This week’s guest is Center for Creative Economy’s Founding Executive Director Margaret Collins, who spearheaded an effort to examine our state’s “creative economy” (yes, that’s the answer to the above question in case you’re wondering). She set out to identify the number of creative industries working in North Carolina and to determine their overall impact to our state’s economy – and it’s no small contribution. Listen this week as we talk about the importance of creative thinking in business, North Carolina’s film industry, and what type of instrument our state would be in an orchestra.
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.
Steve Troxler, Commissioner, North Carolina Department of Agriculture by Institute for Emerging Issues
Brian Etheridge, the president of Leadership North Carolina, each year finds a new crop of 50-some individuals from business, nonprofits, education and government and feeds them a firehouse of information on North Carolina history, government, education, economic development, health and human services and the environment. They learn together, work on projects together and then figure out what to do next with all that information. This week we talked with Brian about growing up in rural North Carolina, the importance of listening, the hardest job he ever had, how leaders translate information into action and how food might be the solution to some of the state’s trickiest political disagreements.
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.
Next week marks the start of Global Entrepreneurship Week – seven days celebrated around the world, with events designed to recognize and encourage more people to think more seriously about starting companies and organizations. Across the state, universities will be holding a series of events – 12 of the 16 public universities in North Carolina have entrepreneurship centers that will be participating. At NC State, the Entrepreneurship Initiative will be holding a “shark tank”-like event. And they’ll be holding a special event called “Ladies Who Launch” to celebrate women entrepreneurs. Women are still a minority when it comes to starting companies, so acknowledging the problem and celebrating success matters a lot. This week, we talk with Emily Neville, an undergraduate political science major at NC State, AND co-founder of an enterprise called Reborn Clothing Co. She is so passionate about her company she talked to us in the middle of a cold, so be patient about her cough. Then listen for some really good insights on the kind of thinking you need to do to launch a new idea, or to do entrepreneurship in rural places. You’ll also learn about textile waste and slow fashion. And if you stick with it till the end, you may get an idea for the perfect holiday gift.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the Southeast Raleigh Innovation Challenge, a pitch competition designed to get more people thinking about a business they could start, and getting the folks with the best ideas some of the money and support they need to get those businesses going. If today’s guest could give them one piece of advice about making their businesses successful, it might be “take other business leaders out to lunch.” That’s the approach Sepi Saidi used as she built one of the Southeast’s fastest growing engineering firms, SEPI Engineering. During the interview, you’ll hear more about what she’s learned on making a business successful, some thoughts on how to get more women working in STEM fields, and how we might grow more young entrepreneurs. We’ll also talk about how cowboys and the Six Million Dollar Man influenced her growing up in Iran – and you’ll learn at least one word of Farsi.
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 airdates.
If you were looking to identify a poster child for citizenship, you could do a lot worse than Kel Landis, co-founder and partner at Plexus Capital. As you’ll hear today, he’s done a little bit of everything -- through a distinguished career as a North Carolina businessman and civic volunteer, and now, he’s written a book on the importance of the word “do.” It’s all about us, our excuses, and how to get started making a difference. I think you’ll find what Kel has to say pretty inspiring. As a bonus, along the way we’ll talk about eighteenth century ministers, Eagle Scouts, Hurricane Matthew, Frank Sinatra, the most famous Michael Jordan quote ever, and a guy named Demetrius who may just transform our state.
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.
When solving big problems, local folks are the canaries in the coalmine – they are likely to notice a problem before anyone else, and more likely to be able to get to work on it quickly. This week’s podcast is evidence of that. I’m talking with Ben Brown, host of the podcast for NC League of Municipalities. Every couple of weeks on his podcast he identifies a big issue that is facing cities and towns across North Carolina, and goes in-depth. If you work for a city government, if you care about city government, or even if you hate your city government, I’d urge you to try the podcast. It’s called Municipal Equation. This week, we talk about the top five issues that cities should be worried about, the latest on smart cities, the value of broadband, autonomous vehicles, revenue flexibility, and modern storytelling. We also talk about some cool things folks are trying in Benson, Raleigh and Wilson; and if you don’t know what Fuquay-Varina’s catchphrase is, we’ve got you covered.
In the late 1990’s, I worked on a project called the North Carolina Rural Prosperity Task Force. The idea was to develop a series of recommendations that could make a meaningful difference for rural North Carolina. At the time, the state had just passed a threshold where more than 50% of the state lived in just 15 of our 100 counties. The fear was that rural areas, and rural people, would get left behind. The recommendations of the Task Force made some difference, most notably in getting high-speed internet to more places and making more people aware of the challenge – but the trends have continued. In the past six years, 41% of North Carolina municipalities – almost all in rural North Carolina – have lost population. And people have noticed. As the Institute for Emerging Issues has been asking people about the big issues they are concerned about, and as I have talked to people for the podcast, I’ve been hammered over the head at how many people say their number one concern is for rural North Carolina. There’s nobody in the state who thinks more about that than Patrick Woodie, President of the N.C. Rural Center. I think you’ll find him optimistic. We talked about rural North Carolina’s struggles in recovering from Hurricane Matthew, the new generation of rural leaders, the importance of entrepreneurship, and why he thinks calling what’s going on a rural-urban divide is just plain dumb.
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.
From the beginning, it was a romantic idea. In 1954, a building contractor named Romeo got together with North Carolina’s state treasurer and a bank president to hatch a ridiculous idea – what if the biggest companies in the world decided to show up and move their operations to a big plot of land covered with pine trees in the middle of North Carolina? If you’ve never thought of it, it’s worth noting that the biggest selling point of what became the Research Triangle Park was that there was a bunch of research going on at three points of a triangle – at Duke in Durham, at UNC in Chapel Hill and at NC State in Raleigh. And the idea was that companies would want to be close to the really smart people who were doing that research and graduating from those places. As part of the park package, businesses and the three universities kicked in $500,000 to start a nonprofit called the Research Triangle Institute, where people would “improve the human condition by turning knowledge into practice.” Sixty years later, RTI International is not just a support to the Park, it’s a huge employer too. How did it get so big? What’s it working on? And what can RTI tell us about addressing some of North Carolina’s biggest challenges? I talked to RTI International President and CEO Wayne Holden about RTI’s research on the opioid crisis, how they help in communities, and what it takes to come up with truly innovative ideas.
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.
The old joke about economic developers is that they like to be buffalo hunters; they are always looking for a giant beast of a company that they can drag back and use to feed the entire community. But these days the buffaloes are rare. There are a lot more economic developers out there than gigantic companies looking to move, and more and more people are shifting their focus to looking for entrepreneurs, people who have a history of imagining new ways of doing things. You might call them unicorns – rare and inspiring. This week we talk to one of them. Jud Bowman started his first successful company while he was still a student at the NC School of Science and Math. In the 18 years since, he’s started two more. He’s a self-proclaim serial entrepreneur, and Sift founder and CEO. Our conversation started out rocky, with what is probably the worst joke in First in Future history. But then we settled in to a good talk, where he imagined how Uber might help rural North Carolina, talked about why phone apps work, how Montessori unleashes the mind, the difference between STEM and STEAM. Oh…and violas.
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.
If you are a nonprofit wondering how to raise money more effectively, this episode is for you. If you are a business trying to figure out how to get your employees more engaged in the community, this episode is for you. We’re talking with Isa Watson, a Chapel Hill native who left the state to go to school, work for a chemical company and a corporation, and then came back. Now she heads up a company called Envested, a company based in Durham that aims to help people and companies connect to nonprofits in a meaningful way. We had a rich conversation about boomers and millennials, the intergenerational transfer of wealth, and which classical composer would be most likely to be successful as a tech entrepreneur.
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.
The hardest job I’ve had in my life was my first job out of college. I worked regular 80-90 hour weeks – 106 was my record. The customers had widely varying backgrounds and expectations. My bosses required regular reports, but didn’t provide me much support at all. It required every ounce of my brain. Every day was survival. And I loved it. I taught high school. In many ways, I became the poster child for teacher burnout. I went in ready to change the world. Instead, I washed out at the same point so many teachers do – after three years. People across the nation, and across the state, have been working for at least the past 20 years to figure out what it takes to get more teachers to stay in the classroom longer. Today, as the next school year cranks up, we talk with the dean of NC State’s College of Education, Dr. Mary Ann Danowitz, about the newest ideas schools of education have to raise up new teachers, find people from other professions who want to teach, and get teachers to stay longer in the profession. As you listen, try to think to yourself. Are there really many jobs in the world more complicated – or more important – than being a kindergarten teacher?
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.
A couple of years ago, the Institute for Emerging Issues took on a challenging topic: what will all of us be doing for work in twenty years? We called the Forum “FutureWork.” The real answer is, of course, nobody knows. About the only thing we know is that things are changing really fast. But what happens next is NOT A QUESTION WE CAN IGNORE. To help us answer the question, we turned to NC State Professor Mike Walden, who may just be the state’s best known economist – I call him the economic “explainer-in-chief." Join us as we talk robots, bricklaying machines, writing economic thrillers, the future of taxation, where education funding should go in the future, the best predictors of job success, and a new, possibly hopeful, future for liberal arts majors.
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.
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.
The Asheville of today is a many-splendored thing. It’s appeared on numerous “Best of” lists and received countless titles – like “One of the Best Places to Reinvent Your Life,” “The Happiest City in America for Women,” “The Hippie Capital of the South,” “The Best City for Locavores,” “The Most Romantic Place in U.S.A. and Canada,” and, of course, “Beer City U.S.A.” – and combined with its natural physical beauty, it offers many enticing features for newcomers. This week’s guest remembers Asheville before all those awards, when it was really struggling to recover from the Great Depression. As a direct descendent of George Washington Vanderbilt, the man behind the Biltmore House, Jack Cecil* and his family have been in Asheville for generations. As we talk with Jack about how Asheville recovered, changed and grew into itself, we hope you’ll listen for some of the ways he’s learned what it takes to develop communities in the future in a way that lasts.
The Asheville of today is a many-splendored thing. It’s appeared on numerous “Best of” lists and received countless titles – like “One of the Best Places to Reinvent Your Life,” “The Happiest City in America for Women,” “The Hippie Capital of the South,” “The Best City for Locavores,” “The Most Romantic Place in U.S.A. and Canada,” and, of course, “Beer City U.S.A.” – and combined with its natural physical beauty, it offers many enticing features for newcomers. This week’s guest remembers Asheville before all those awards, when it was really struggling to recover from the Great Depression. As a direct descendent of George Washington Vanderbilt, the man behind the Biltmore House, Jack Cecil* and his family have been in Asheville for generations. As we talk with Jack about how Asheville recovered, changed and grew into itself, we hope you’ll listen for some of the ways he’s learned what it takes to develop communities in the future in a way that lasts. Tune in to part one, and check back on Friday for part two!
With a name like Marshall Brain, there’s quite an expectation to live up to—but for this guy, director of the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program at NC State, he makes being a "brain"-iac look easy. For one, he’s relentlessly curious about everything. As the founder of HowStuffWorks.com, Marshall set out to explain to people how stuff works – literally. And he’s extended that curiosity and that easy, straightforward sense of information-sharing beyond his one-time hobby. He’s the former host of Nat Geo’s “Factory Floor with Marshall Brain,” the author of more than 20 books, and a frequent guest on CNN, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” MSNBC, “Good Morning America” and more. As you might imagine, it’s hard to have a boring – or short! – conversation with Marshall, so we’re breaking it into two parts. In part two, we pick up in a place that may seem a little remote from North Carolina - Mars. As you listen, we think you'll see how thinking a little bit about Mars can help us think differently about our state's rural-urban divide, about early childhood education, and about the challenges and opportunities of automation. Listen to part one at bit.ly/IEIFiF141!
With a name like Marshall Brain, there’s quite an expectation to live up to—but for this guy, director of the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program at NC State, he makes being a "brain"-iac look easy. For one, he’s relentlessly curious about everything. As the founder of HowStuffWorks.com, Marshall set out to explain to people how stuff works – literally. And he’s extended that curiosity and that easy, straightforward sense of information-sharing beyond his one-time hobby. He’s the former host of Nat Geo’s “Factory Floor with Marshall Brain,” the author of more than 20 books, and a frequent guest on CNN, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” MSNBC, “Good Morning America” and more. As you might imagine, it’s hard to have a boring – or short! – conversation with Marshall, so we’re breaking it into two parts. In part one, we sit down with Marshall to talk about cleaning toilets, flying fighter jets, and whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about the future of jobs in North Carolina. Plus! We ask him what he tells young people is most important when they’re starting a business. Tune in to part one, and check back for part two!
A couple months ago, a group of CEOs from some of North Carolina's largest corporations gathered in Garner and did something remarkable: They folded themselves into chairs and began reading books to five-year-olds. It's part of an effort by a group called the Business Roundtable to highlight the importance of early childhood education. The CEOs at the announcement that day were advocating for more investment in a series of things that are more likely to result in more students being really good at reading by the end of third grade. Their argument is that it's not only a good thing to do—it's in their business communities' interest. This week we talk with Jenn Mann, head of HR at SAS, about how investing in early childhood programs is helping SAS tackle one of industry's most pressing issues: talent retention.
Per educator Karl Fisch, the challenge of educators is to “prepare students for jobs that don’t exist yet, where they’ll be using technology that hasn’t been invented yet, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.” Education needs to become much more about teaching people not just a body of facts but how to learn, ensuring learning becomes a lifelong process. Community colleges are critical to equipping students of all ages with the necessary skills to meet the challenge of change in our state, and with nearly 800,000 people enrolled in one of North Carolina’s 58 community colleges each year, the community college system’s role in addressing the FutureWork challenge continues to grow. This week, we talk with former NC Lieutenant Governor Walter Dalton, now president of Isothermal Community College in Columbus, to talk about how community colleges are thinking about their work going forward, and what that means for all of us.
In the center of Pembroke, a sleepy town of just 3,000 in southeastern North Carolina, the Thomas Family Center for Entrepreneurship at UNC Pembroke has set up shop in a restored furniture store. Heading the center is an unlikely leader: Thomas Hall, a man who, until recently, worked in Boston to launch a number of consumer products. His new charge is to work with an enthusiastic group of citizens to figure out how to create a vibrant innovation ecosystem in Robeson County, just a few miles from the South Carolina border. Pembroke's team is joining with similar communities as a part of InnovateNC, an initiative that grew out of IEI's 2015 Emerging Issues Forum, Innovation Reconstructed. Their goal is to, in part, assess their assets and try to build on - not abandon - them. This week, we talk to Thomas Hall in the Thomas Center's 20,000 sq. ft. incubator about "coop-itition," the county's first makerspace, and how entrepreneurial success can transform this small community.
Jim Johnson at the Kenan-Flagler Business School likes to describe North Carolina's future this way: "Going forward," he says, "our state will be grayer and browner." Like the rest of the country, North Carolinians are, on average, getting older, grayer. In the next 30 years, there will be another million people in the state 65 years or older, beyond the years people say are most productive. The people coming into the workforce, Johnson says, will be browner. Sometime during the mid-2020s, North Carolina high schools will graduate their first majority-minority class. Right now, our state doesn't do nearly as good a job educating African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans, or students from low-income backgrounds. Each of these groups is less likely to graduate from high school; less likely to graduate from college; and will, on average, make less money. If older people are going to retire, we need every smart person we can find graduating, ready to think faster, create more and help to invent our future. This week's guest is working on a solution for one of those groups, young African-Americans. Atrayus Goode, an alum of 100 Black Men of America, founded Movement of Youth, a multi-state group designed to help connect young African-Americans with role models who inspire them to set high goals and dream big dreams. Goode talks with us about leading productive conversations on race, the Service Year NC initiative, and raising kids to be strong, independent leaders.
As North Carolina looks to our future, there are two types of innovation we're going to need: business innovation and social innovation. UNC Wilmington's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship innately understands the value of both and strives to nurture emerging companies committed to innovation. This week, we talk with David Morrison, UNCW CIE Nonprofit Advisor in Residence, who leads the Center's nonprofit wing and works one-on-one with individuals to launch nonprofit initiatives. In David, UNCW CIE got someone who has a strong track record starting and sustaining a social enterprise. They also found someone who is a fierce advocate for the rights of the left behind. Morrison shares his story, discusses the value of innovation, and reaffirms his commitment to accessibility for the estimated 236,700 working adults with disabilities across North Carolina.
These days, we're inundated by what the North Carolina Office of Science, Technology and Innovation call a "data tsunami." Here's a mind-blowing number from their recently released report: We have collected more data about ourselves and our world in the past two years than we have collected in all of human history. Given that data - and its influence on our lives - isn't going away, we need to find a way to do more with it. This week, we sit down with John Hardin, Executive Director of the Office of Science, Technology and Innovation, to tease out some of the ways we could use data to help us be "first in future." We also unmask John's favorite superhero - an amalgam of all the core strengths embodied by forward-thinking North Carolinians.
What does one do after leaving the job of top salesperson for an entire state? For Sharon Decker, that doesn’t mean retirement. After serving as Secretary of Commerce under Gov. Pat McCrory, Decker moved back to rural North Carolina, where she is helping build a business and rebuild a region’s hopes and dreams. As COO of the Tryon International Equestrian Center, Decker is building a dream that could someday be comparable to golf, or to NASCAR. This week, Decker discusses her career change and shares her book recommendations, and we get the first answer on this podcast to the age-old question, If you were a horse, what kind would you be?
One of the signs of a vibrant economy is one in which there’s a constant churn of “creative destruction”: A mix of one group of companies going out of business being replaced by new companies. Statewide, there’s a patchwork of incubators to nurture these new companies; these shared spaces bring together a variety of young firms into a common space to help fledgling companies share costs and benefit from the energy that comes from being around other startups. This week, we’re joined by Sean Ahlum, director at one such incubator, tekMountain in Wilmington, to talk about Wilmington, surfing, breweries, utility infielders, equity crowdfunding and innovation ecosystems.
At IEI, we're committed to North Carolina's future, dedicating our time, talent and energy to identify and address the state's most pressing issues. We start to determine the issues we work on by listening, by giving the problem a name; then, we frame the issue through research and collaboration. If we do our work right, good things happen, and the state and its people make some progress. This week, we sit down with Donnie Charleston, IEI Economic Policy Manager, to talk about finding common ground, talent development and why a generation of Batmans would benefit us all.
In North Carolina, a remarkable coalition of organizations has gathered to distill the best ideas from across the early childhood community to help shape our state’s future. This week, we're joined by Tracy Zimmerman, executive director of the North Carolina Early Childhood Foundation, to talk about the importance of collaboration in investing in early years, the draw of North Carolina, and the strongest - and most flawed - superhero out there.
Investing in early childhood education is a longterm proposition, and it takes conviction to be able to wait. This week, we check in with Jim Hansen, Regional President of PNC Bank, which is a making a 12-year, $350 million investment in early childhood. Also: observations on batting averages, Blowing Rock and “playing offense” with our state’s future.
Two leaders of the North Carolina General Assembly’s early childhood caucus talk about why they care about the issue of early childhood education, preparing for automation, Winston Churchill, and why grandchildren might just be the state’s perfect talent recruitment tool.