Economic Development: Working with the Treasure We Have

The Board of Regents isn't taking up DSU parking space for nothing: yesterday they recognized some worthy DSU student groups. KJAM reports this morning that the Regents handed out three awards:

1. Phi Beta Lambda Business Club -- academic excellence award
2. Fear the Turkey Drama Club -- community service award
3. Students in Free Enterprise -- organizational leadership award.

KJAM lists the following projects by the DSU SIFE chapter:

1. "helping low-income families with their taxes;
2. "talking to local students about financial literacy;
3. "working with start-up businesses in marketing and financial planning" ["Board of Regents Honors DSU Students," KJAMRadio.com, 2007.12.14].

Hang on -- the following tangent has a point:

A lot of small communities, ours included, spend a lot of time and money trying to lure big manufacturers from other states. We sometimes fall into thinking that the key to community development is importing jobs and wealth from elsewhere.

But more small towns are realizing that that strategy concentrates a lot of dollars and power in a few outsiders' hands. Rely on a few big employers to provide your jobs, and you shrink your entrepreneurial class. More people are just workers doing what the corporate boss tells them, and fewer people have the opportunity to exercise the sort of leadership in their work that translates into leadership in your community. Instead, some towns are learning from the experience of a big manufacturer cutting jobs that instead of sliding into a culture of dependency on big outside companies, they should work together to build their fortune on the resources, human and material, that they already have.

The key to that self-sufficient strategy: engaging and keeping the youth. Mrs. Madville Times draws my attention (and yours!) to this remarkable article about Brookfield, Missouri, population 4769. The night before graduation, the community had an assembly for its high school seniors. They gave each student a mailbox with a letter inside. The letter encouraged each student to "always consider Brookfield their home."

Simple. A small statement that hey, you kids -- we're glad you're here. We'd love for you to stay. Believe it or not, kids responded:

Students wrote letters of thanks to the Partnership that included, “What a cool idea,” and “Thank you for reminding us that we are important to Brookfield’s future.”

The class salutatorian stopped by the Partnership office to say that, after a senior year of hearing much talk about leaving town, it was refreshing to receive an invitation to stay [Lisa Bauer, "A Team Approach to Hometown Development," Energizing Entrepreneurs, Nov 2007].

Fellow small-towners, think about your local high school. Think about your graduating seniors. How many of them are going to leave town after graduation and never come back? How often do we send the message to these seniors that they have to go off to the big city to pursue their dreams? How often do we fail to send the message that dreams can be pursued right here... and that we will be happy to help?

The LAIC's Forward Madison program has set a goal of boosting Madison's workforce by 400 and its population by 800 by 2012. Imagine if Forward Madison directed some of its two million dollars toward programs that would involve the youth in community planning and business development. Imagine if we could convince 20 more out of a hundred graduating MHS seniors a year to stick around and start businesses here, or to keep us in mind and come back after they get done with college (come back and bring friends, bring spouses, bring business partners). Imagine if, instead of waging a vigorous external marketing campaign to get people to move here, we concentrated simply on keeping more of the best resource we produce, our creative young dreamers.

Back to SIFE and DSU: Madison has an advantage in this game: we have our homegrown youth, plus we get a new wave each year of college students whom we can try to convince to stay here. What's the best way to convince these young people to stay? Get them involved. Get them to invest time and brains in the community. Get them to feel a sense of ownership in the community.

SIFE gets that. When they help folks with their taxes, they get a sense of those folks as neighbors, as people they've done good for. When they help a local business, they feel connected to the success that business then enjoys. When they do a financial literacy class (hey! there's another good skill to make sure our kids have for realizing their own dreams instead of just working for someone else!), our kids become their kids, too. The more community connections SIFE creates, the more their members may want to stick around.

The cool thing with SIFE is that Madison doesn't even have to try. SIFE is a student club, doing good, investing on the community on their own, without any tax incentive or urging from the Madville Times.

But there's plenty the rest of us can do. We've contributed two million dollars to Forward Madison that could go toward all sorts of internally focused community development programs. We could spend that money on the ads and recruitment letters and tax incentives that big corporations get from towns like us all the time.

Or we could turn to our kids and say, "Want to help?" We could get all of our businesses and non-profits together and make a list of projects they'd love to have done: building websites, fixing Main Street facades, installing a new intranet, making a better skateboard park, you name it. Then we hand that list to the schools and say, "Clubs, classes, kids, take you pick. We've got the money; you bring the heads and hands to get it done." Allot some of that $575,000 to a Young Entrepreneurs fund, kind of like DSU's Center for Technoentrepreneurism, but targeted specifically at college and high school students who want to try out a business idea. Pay for mentorships and apprenticeships. Involve the kids in real work, real decision-making. Show them they really are a part of what we are trying to achieve, not just an annoyance we put up with until they're old enough to pay taxes.

SIFE's on to something. Lots of communities are. The kids growing up here and going to college here are our best resource for community development. We need to hook them now so they will stay and be our movers and shakers.