Following our trip to the east - our Leadership St. Louis class traveled to St. Charles to learn about our neighbors to the south and west. The three counties surrounding St. Louis (viz., St. Charles, Franklin, and Jefferson) are exceedingly homogenous with regards to race. According to the 2000 census less than 2% of their residents of the are black. This compared to more than 27% for the residents of St. Louis city and county and11% of the residents of Missouri as a whole. One of the presenters mentioned that many of his residents came en masse from Florissant which itself had previously benefited from a similar diaspora fleeing the arrival of blacks in north St. Louis.

The area leaders were proud of their accomplishments and growth. They highlighted the generosity of the community by its self-imposed tax support of the Community and Children’s Resource Board. They toured us through the area on busses and showed clean, orderly, and affluent communities.

These leaders also made a point to address the "s" word - sprawl - claiming, through a creative historical argument, to not be an example of this negatively tinged phenomena. As we learned more, however, their protests did not seem to ring true. For example, they talked about how the lure of the area was for attractive and  affordable housing and that they had benefited greatly from a massive home building boom. Yet the St. Louis region is not really growing and growth in one section comes at the expense of another. Another example given was the creation of a new urban community, New Town at St. Charles, in the middle of a corn field. Essentially trying to remake what is already available in our rich diverse urban community with a homogenous population miles from anywhere.

This visit really got some members of our class thinking that these were examples of more-or-less isolated communities and fragmented governments competing with each other, taking from each other, and all without benefiting the whole.

It was exactly what we had seen the previous day in East St. Louis and Southern Illinois. This area is an example of what the east side looked like in its boom days. The St. Charles area is still riding the wave of prosperity - though the current economic bust has really stopped them cold in the last months.  Yet they still seem to lack an adequate appreciation or the wider difficulties which result from their actions.

These experiences are going to lead me to ask other leaders these questions.

What are you doing to reduce political/cultural/economic fragmentation in the St. Louis region?

What are you willing to do to reduce political/cultural/economic fragmentation in the St. Louis region?

I know that the reduction of fragmentation is extremely difficult. Yet it seems to be a central stumbling block to regional growth. How might we start? What about the regional support the Metropolitan Zoological Park & Museum District. This tax district (currently comprised of St. Louis City and county) pays for the Zoo, Missouri Botanical Gardens, History and Art museums, and the Science Center. These free services are clearly something people from the surrounding communities enjoy and clearly make St. Louis a great place to live.  Broadening the base of support has been discussed for a long time and it would be a significant first step for the surrounding counties as they support the region as a whole.

Before they follow the example of East St. Louis the surrounding counties to the west and south have the opportunity to join with others in the region to move the whole - not just the backyard.

In our first in the community experience weekend in our Leadership St. Louis year we visited and heard from leaders from south western Illinois, just across the the river from St. Louis. We heard two stories.

The first trumpeting the tremendous growth of the area - nurtured in large part by the cooperation between various jurisdictions, particularly Madison and St. Clair counties. This was capped by a presentation about East St. Louis which was passionately portrayed it as an ideal location ripe for economic development. That presentation had me ready to move in for the great views of St. Louis from the high end (but yet to be built or even planned) condos. These presentations had me worried that soon the Illinois tail would be wagging the St. Louis dog.

The second was by individuals working in the East St. Louis area with its large number of poor and marginalized residents. These folks told the well know story of East St. Louis. Of how the area’s major industrial employers incorporated their own company towns to avoid paying taxes to support East St. Louis and its infrastructure. That that lack of support made the town focus on residential and entertainment - which during the post WW II boom seemed good enough. However, with the exodus of manufacturing jobs from this country in general and the southern Illinois river bottom in particular,  East St. Louis, and its surrounding communities lost their status, their jobs, and their residents. As the years went on they fell further and further into disrepair and, for some at least, ill repute.

East St. Louis was described as the hole in the donut. That little of the economic boom we heard about in Madison, St. Clair, and the other surrounding counties actually got to East St. Louis. This is not universally true. For example, in the following class discussions it was pointed out that public transportation carried many East St. Louis residents to the new warehouse jobs in the east side. But on the whole the area is rather sad. For all of the impassioned presentation about East St. Louis the list of city tasks they shared with our class were simple and practical - getting street signs on every corner, cleaning up vacant gas stations, …

When the counties spoke of their successes they said that they were the result of cooperation between the small towns that make up their communities. It was of sharing and of joining together in common purpose. There are undoubtedly a legion of reasons why East St. Louis is the hole. One serious and obvious underlying cause for this is the historic lack of cooperation and sharing between it and the other southern Illinois communities. Without that cooperation success and prosperity are not widely shared to the detriment of the whole region. While I understand those as historic reasons - what it the excuse for this today?

One of the exercises in our opening Leadership St Louis week end is to work in small groups and agree on the set of regional activities that we have accomplished and to suggest those things that we, as a region, need to address.

As the small groups reconvened we listed the groups’ results. For the accomplishments there was surprising agreement. And I suspect that anyone from the region would probably arrive at a similar list. For the most part they were heavy on big ticket infrastructure improvements. Think Highway 40.

What was more interesting, however, was the much broader range of issues that the groups thought were important to focus on in the future. Folks had identified things that I never thought of as being very important, and after some reflection, I could see their point. I was pleased that there seemed to be general agreement that education needed a prominent spot on the list of improvements that we needed to make but even there we had lots of ideas and suggestions for what those improvements should include.

From my perspective, it seems critical that we as a community need to focus on the seemingly never ending train wreck that is the St. Louis public school system. For practical reasons this is important because the youth who walk through that system need to be capable of stepping out to run our business, teach our youth, and serve our communities. For moral ethical reasons this is important because our society should be judged on the way we treat those most in need of our help and our young rank high in that need.

In St. Louis efforts at school improvement seem never ending. Each time they make a change I think - OK this looks pretty radical but something significant need to happen and perhaps this will do the trick. Bring in an outside turn-around firm with no experience in education - OK this looks pretty radical but something significant need to happen and perhaps this will do the trick. Have the State take it over with a specially appointed board - OK this looks pretty radical but something significant need to happen and perhaps this will do the trick.  Increase the use of charter schools even though they seem to have a rather checkered history in St. Louis - OK this looks pretty radical but something significant need to happen and perhaps this will do the trick. Hire a new superintendent - well given the number that we have in the recent past this this is not at all radical - but something needs to happen and perhaps this will do the trick. 

St. Louis has a proud history of excellence and forward thinking in its public schools. In 1873 Susan Blow brought the concept of Kindergarten to the United States opening the first one, "the Des Pres Kindergarten in Carondelet." She has been honored for her contributions with a St. Louis Walk of Fame star.

A few weeks ago another St. Louis educational luminary was similarly honored. William B. Ittner was inducted also induced into the Walk of Fame in The Loop. As described by their site

Unhappy with the prison-like schools of his youth, St. Louis-born architect William B. Ittner devoted his life to improving education through better school design. Appointed St. Louis School Board commissioner in 1897, he designed open buildings that featured natural lighting, inviting exteriors, and classrooms tailored to specific needs. His 50 St. Louis schools include Wyman Elementary (1901) and Sumner High (1908).

Ittner’s early twentieth century buildings, scattered throughout our neighborhoods, are still beautiful, at least from the outside, and inspiring additions to our community and reminders of our educational heritage.

Yet the obvious historical strength of the schools is no more. My understanding of the school situation comes from the local paper and from talking with people in the schools themselves.

The problems with the schools are many. Inconsistent administration, broken families, poverty, violence, poor moral, problematic infrastructure, the flight of good students from public education, the flight of strong families from the city, …

For example there was a brief article in the Post Dispatch, "Charter schools here post another enrollment gain" (A4, 8-Oct-08) said that St. Louis is one of the top Charter School cities in the nation (moving into the "top 10 - maybe even top five," evidently the data is pretty sketchy at this point). St. Louis also has a large number of religiously affiliated schools. While these may be positive for the students attending both of alternatives have a deleterious impact on public education. Like cherry picking in health insurance, these schools can pluck out the best students and the most active parents from the public schools leaving those with more difficulties, and perhaps less obvious talents, to their own devices and without positive role models from other successful students. I can not fault parents and students for making these choices - they need to maximize their opportunities. However, as a community we are diminished.

Because of the range of difficulties, to expect AN intervention in the schools, no matter how radical, to make THE needed change is naive. What we need is to help the whole community rise together. To address the intertwined problems that keep us from reclaiming our proud traditions and history of innovation.

It is this effort that I hope to learn more about as we proceed through our Leadership St. Louis year.

In an effort to make clearly obvious that these posts are my personal opinion, I have decided to drop my initial convention of tying them to specific Leadership St. Louis sessions. While they will still be tagged as "Leadership St. Louis" they will no longer carry that name as part of their title.

Prior to our opening retreat we have all taken the DISC assessment ( an "assessment" not a "test") that describes our leadership behaviors. According to the presenter, like the Myers-Briggs it is based on Jungian theory, though the presentation does not stress this nor do I see an obvious connection.

Four dimensions are described and we are asked to self select the one that we feel most closely reflects how we are at work. For my part I select the "detail oriented and completion focused" C type as slightly more important to me than the D type with its "get it done attitude." Meeting with others who also find affinity with this dimension is a lot like talking to myself. What my C group members describe doing is exactly what I to do as a matter of course.

When we get our actual results I find that I am must know myself pretty well. I was indeed highest in C followed, lower by a single point, by D. Termed creative by the DISC report it reflects my interest in the specific details of getting things to work and the desire to actually get things to work and to make decisions.

As a psychologist, trained in assessment, I find the results of assessments I take about myself fascinating. Do I see myself in the results? Do I see others in the assessment? Can I see how a particular individual might score and why they and I have the relationship that we do? In this case I can answer yes to all of these question.

But more interesting to me are the questions from the group. I have taught for the last 10 years at the American Ethical Union’s Lay Leadership Summer School. There we have traditionally taught and used the Myers-Briggs. So, as I listen to and participate in the DISC portion of our weekend it is with both ears - as a LSL participant and as a faculty doing similar work for the AEU. The questions and comments from the groups are remarkably similar.

I am both this way AND that way, it depends on the situation.

Is my score related to American or world cultures?

These were hard questions to answer.

How can this be valid?

There is more to me than this.

The presenter fields the questions carefully, stressing the ideas that this is "only one data point," that we each have a unique personality, and that we cannot be fully described by the pattern of four scales. 

For me, the idea of assessment seems so natural. That those few questions on the assessment, hard as they were to answer, do seem to accurately describe things about the way I think and work. Yet it is clear that my response is idiosyncratic. Others are clearly concerned reading more, or less, into the assessment then is there.

When I last used the Myers-Briggs in Summer School I worked hard at minimizing the stress the assessment caused our students by presenting it as a useful heuristic. That helped some. But no more than the comments of our DISC presenter. The questions and concerns remain the same. Perhaps that is just the way it is going to be.

Last weekend was the LSL’s class of 08-09 first official meeting, a two day overnight stay at the Cedar Creak Conference Center in New Haven Missouri. With a mixture of trepidation and excitement my car pool drove an hour out of St. Louis into Missouri’s lovely wine country. Who will be our roommates? What do those cryptic agenda items really mean? What will we learn about ourselves? About others? About our region?

Confidentiality and these posts

Early on we have a discussion about our ground rules. Taking as a basis the rules adopted by the previous class, we are invited to question and add as we felt appropriate. The question that I raised was the rule of confidentiality - what was its intentions, where were its limits. The answer, as one of my classmates later put it, was not particularly "crisp." The sense that I got was that I should avoid quoting presenters who might be letting more show than they would in a typical public setting. That this should extend to my classmates who will be conversing openly and frankly with each other based on a mutual respect for our multiplicity of views, positions, and cultural backgrounds. And, finally, that I should not be to explicit about some group’s events and activities so as to preserve the mystery and sense of anticipation for future classes. (Certainly people I have talked with from previous classes have  been pretty vague when talking about the program with me.)

So I will endeavor to follow the spirit of these guidelines while writing these words. I will do this as I also attempt to follow another of our accepted guidelines, to "commit to act upon the new knowledge gained in LSL outside of the group." Should any of my classmates come upon these words and feel that I have not followed these commitments please give me an "ouch" and I will respond.

Connections

Some of the goals of this retreat were to have us learn about ourselves, to meet all of our classmates, and to start the conversation about our region that we will continue over the next nine months (and most likely beyond). I have not been a participant at this sort of retreat for ten years, since I was a student at the American Ethical Union’s Lay Leadership Summer School. Yet the excitement about meeting new people, with widely divergent (and to a person fascinating) backgrounds is still there.

We are divided into groups for activities; each time a different group, each time a different activity. We are encouraged to sit in different areas of the room during our meetings. To eat with people we do not know. We wear our name tags at all times (a great support for my name challenged memory) and always introduce ourselves as we stand to speak. We are given a photo, name, bio directory of our class. All with the goal that we should meet and know each of our 65 classmates. It is a whirlwind as I try to keep track of names and stories. I missed meeting some folks during the two days but will make it up to them as we continue to work together.

In the end I found that the meeting met its goal of connection. I thoroughly enjoyed the people I met, worked with, and played with. I felt a connection with people who two days before had been nervous freshmen. I also heard the start of a community with people helping others solve problems and reaching out to share ideas and resources. Not bad for the first two days.

We had a small group meeting over lunch. Twenty participants and two facilitators.

Before lunch I chatted with a classmate. We both talked about  being impressed with the diversity and accomplishments of our classmates. We both marveled at having been included. Personally, I have always felt like a junior member of groups: even when I have lead those groups. Yet as I look more objectively at my position and what I have done I do fit the group and look forward to sharing my experiences, thoughts, and feelings. My lunch time neighbor echo this sentiment and suggested that it was probably widely shared among our classmates.

Introductions today are longer and more detailed. We talk about our positions and about our passions and interests. Only two from our group are natives. Many of the rest came for a "brief" time and remained because they loved the region, its opportunities, and its people. Most folks worked for groups I have heard of, all for really interesting and often times important businesses and causes.

As one fellow shared his story, working to increase minority participation in road construction projects, I realized that I had read about him, and his group, years ago in the paper.  At that time he was involved in shutting down work on a highway project to get more minority construction participation. In the more recent past he was and is) officially involved at the very beginning of the Highway 64/40 reconstruction project to foster the same goals. This impressed me greatly. First, because being proactive it seemed more likely to be effective; and second, it showed that the state’s bureaucracy could learn and respond appropriately to the concerns of its citizenry.

We received some additional instructions and orientation, one of which surprised me. The statement was made that our conversations were to be treated as confidential. That many of the individuals who would talk with us would do so with a candor that was not typical for individuals in their positions. As a psychologist, I treat confidentiality very seriously. I share confidential information with no one, not even with the woman with whom I am married. Yet this stricture seems to fly in the face of the goal of getting us to use the information learned and our experiences to foster the development of the region. I am in fact a proponent of radical openness and think that we would be much better of share information - the good, the bad, and the ugly - widely. We are, as Harry Stack Sullivan observed, "much more human than otherwise" and prone to making bad choices and errors. What makes us better is not hiding those errors but acknowledging them and forthrightly addressing them.

Nonetheless, I will abide by the request for confidentiality in these notes and in conversations; but will continue to explore exactly what confidentiality is to entail and when and where it is and is not needed.

This is our last meeting before September when we begin the program in earnest. 

Last evening I attended my first Leadership St. Louis function, a reception and introductory meeting at Ameren UE’s headquarters.

During the initial reception I could only talk to a handful of folks. But each of them did something interesting and important. One was the COO St. Louis YWCA, another ran St. Andrew’s Center that supports the elderly (in their homes and in various other locations) and helped those of us with aging relatives get them the services and care that they need, another was responsible for community efforts for a large St. Louis based health firm, and another worked with Jewish Fund for Human Needs a program to distribute grant funding to deserving agencies, and the list goes on. Also on in the class was an old friend that I had not seen in a few years, she was now running Voices for Children an agency working with hundreds of foster children.

In our introductory meeting each class member stood and introduced themselves. An ethnically and geographically diverse set of folks with impressive credentials. Lawyers working for private firms and public entities, artists, for and not for profit business executives, community organizers, university management, religious leaders, …

Most interesting, and I think very clever, as part of the introduction we were to tell folks where we live so that we could do car pooling. The idea behind this was to promote connections between class members, to give us a some time to wind up and down, as we traveled together (not to mention saving on the cost of gas). Previously I had been planning to support the region by taking Metro link from home to the meetings but this sounds like a better option. 

We also received a pep and words from the wise talk, from members of previous classes: attend meetings, sit outside of your comfort zone, you are not representing your employer but rather your community so speak frankly, and over and over this life changing experience.

Classes start in the fall and I intend to blog about those as they occur.

I have been selected to be a member of the 2008-09 Leadership St. Louis class. founded in the 1970’s it focuses on teaching a diverse set of leaders who work and live in the St. Louis region about the region and on developing a community leaders who will support and lead the region. As they put it, "(t)he program provides advanced skill development and community immersion experiences which enable participants to explore critical issues in our region."

Heard about this from my boss (class of 2004-05) who asked it I would be interested in going (and willing to pay for it myself). Looked at the information and got excited. For the last 8 years I have been training leaders as a faculty of the American Ethical Union’s Lay Leadership Summer School. This seemed like a great opportunity to turn the tables and get some renewed training for myself. Even though I am a transplant (which in St. Louis means that you cannot tell folks what High School you attended), I love the St. Louis region and have been pleased to call it home for the past 30 years. So self renewal and finding out about how the region really operates sounded like a winning combination.

I was very excited and pleased to be selected. One of the things I talked about in my interviews to get into the program is that, if accepted, I would blog about my experiences. So with my acceptance this is my first post. Keep an eye out here for more about my experiences with Leadership St. Louis.