Shawn Turner had no idea that spending her afternoon at the Foundation for the Carolinas would be something more than just one more thing added to her already busy schedule. A teacher at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools' Ranson IB Middle School, Turner and her colleagues a few weeks ago attended a workshop at the Foundation’s new Uptown location and left with new-found inspiration, owing in large part to the space in which they worked.

The Foundation avails its sleek, new workspace free of charge to nonprofits and other community-based organizations, extending the reach of donor dollars to support individuals, families, nonprofits and corporations as they positively impact their communities. Marketing and Communications Director Leslie McCray said she and her staff feel fortunate they can share their new space with the community.

“It's always been a part of the Foundation's role to be a hub for philanthropic activity and civic leadership, and this facility allows us to fulfill that role more completely,” McCray said.

Since December, dozens of diverse community groups and nonprofits have held meetings at the Foundation, McCray said, “but we are hoping for more. It's our vision for the building to be fully utilized, week in and week out, all year long.”

A Tradition of Giving

The Foundation in 1958 began working to distribute donors' charitable gifts and dollars philanthropically across the region, and more than half a century later, its tradition of giving continues. As of November 2011, Foundation assets totaled more than $850 million.

The Foundation moved in December to its new offices at 220 N. Tryon St. (the former home of the Mint Museum’s craft collection) from a much smaller facility a few blocks further south. Its new home, the Luski-Gorelick Center for Philanthropy, was a gift from Bank of America. The Luski and Gorelick families’ generous donations supported the building's renovation as well as gifted and loaned artwork.

Stunning glass pieces and remarkable artwork transform what could be an ordinary office building into the home of an awe-inspiring art collection. And with the new space, there is a new hope that area nonprofits will take the giving to a higher level, Foundation leaders say.

Turner appreciated the opportunity to work in the building.

“It just made it a totally different experience, just walking in the door and seeing this beautiful artwork,” she said. Instead of thinking about what a long day it was going to be for her at the workshop, she found herself appreciating the space, she said.

“It made a difference in the way that I came in, the way that I chose to listen, the way that I chose to be 100 percent here. This experience meant that someone thought enough of me to send me to this very nice building to do what I love to do.”

Items that Inspire

Maybe Turner's inspiration that day came from more than just the aesthetics of the 85,000 square-foot facility. Perhaps she was motivated by the meaning behind the items on display, many of which symbolize past successes in the region.

In the Foundation's Legacy Hall, for example, the bronze reliefs depict individuals who established permanent foundations, funds or endowments that still support the region's people and institutions, McCray said.

“Collectively, those funds have donated more than $5 billion since their inception. Many of the universities, hospitals, arts institutions, museums and well-known charitable agencies of our region were essentially built through the foresight of these individuals who had the vision and incredible generosity to create these endowed funds,” McCray said.

It's an environment Foundation leaders believe can build an even more successful future for others.

Assistant Principal Kevin Sudimack and CMS Data Tools Team member Crystal Shue attended the workshop with Turner. They said they left with much more than information on teaching skills and student learning habits - they left inspired by their surroundings.

The teachers’ workshop took place in the Richardson conference room, named after Carolina Panthers founder and owner Jerry Richardson and his wife, Rosalind, where a large portrait of the couple hangs on the rear wall of the conference room. As the day progressed, Sudimack occasionally would look up from his work and see the painting of the Richardsons. He said there was something powerful about being around such an image of success that elevates expectations of himself.

“It makes me feel I am a true part of this community,” he shared.

Middle School teacher Edwina Virella said sometimes, teachers feel society doesn't value them. However, when she was in the Richardson conference room, all she felt was appreciation and respect.

“It's important to your core. You work harder as long as you know that somebody cares about what you do,” Virella said.

Shue added after the workshop, “This room really set the tone for the day. Just the building itself changed everybody's perception of themselves.” She continued, “I really think it made such a powerful impact on the work we did today.”

Surprise Synergy

In addition to providing meeting spaces that inspire good work, the Foundation produces something unexpected - a by-product of innovative thinkers coming together. In McCray's words, there's an “unplanned synergy” among groups that meet in different rooms at the same time.

“For example, a group that serves the homeless and another group that addresses affordable housing issues might be meeting in adjoining conference rooms,” Mc. Cray said, “and when they break for lunch they meet in the hallway and share a little of what they've been talking about - there's a kind of magic in that for us.”

More Information about the Foundation for the Carolinas: 

• Nonprofits and other not-for-profit community groups can use the building for free during business hours Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
• Use after hours and on weekends carries a charge, but at a reduced rate.
• The building has 17 board and conference rooms and a classroom.
• Businesses looking for retreat or meeting spaces are also welcomed. For-profits are charged a fee to use the building.

In April, Charlotte will host the social and musical exhibition, the Violins of Hope, laying the foundation for a significant and long lasting cultural legacy for our emerging New South city. These eighteen violins, recovered and restored from the Holocaust by Israeli master violinmaker, Amnon Weinstein, are uniting our community in true testament to the power of returning musical voice to these once abandoned treasures.

Weinstein began what has become the capstone to his life’s work in 1995 when he acquired the first of many violins with provenance placing them squarely witness to the Holocaust. The instruments will be showcased in the exhibit brought to Charlotte by the University of North Carolina-Charlotte’s College of Arts & Architecture in what the college’s dean, Ken Lambla called, “A historic victory of culture.”

Stating he is “simply overwhelmed” by the complimentary programming his work has inspired, Weinstein acknowledged he is deeply moved by Charlotte’s efforts. Lectures, film, theater, violin master classes, and concerts all are planned during the exhibition run. One program highlight is a concert performance by Israeli violin virtuoso, Shlomo Mintz, who will perform with the Charlotte Symphony on April 21.

That the exhibit’s North American debut takes place in a city with a Jewish population of less than 2 percent involved a bit of luck, serendipity, and oddly enough, an archery class.

Weinstein, long fascinated by the corollary between archery and violin, took his research from Israel to the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1995. Distracted by a dazzling display of archery along the firing line one day, Weinstein approached the man who had neatly arrayed his arrows in the center of the distant target.

Expecting to find the archery instructor, he was instead introduced to David Russell, Violin pedagogue and then faculty member at the Institute. An immediate friendship ensued.

Some years later, Russell was invited to Keshet Eilon’s International Master Violin class in Israel.

“Amnon gave me a violin and asked me to play,” said Russell. “I was being set up. When he told me afterward that it was played in one of the concentration camps, I knew I had to be involved in helping them become known.”

Russell, now the Anne R. Belk Distinguished Professor of Music at UNC Charlotte, has dreamed of bringing Weinstein’s violins to America for almost a decade.

“It is incredibly gratifying to experience the outpouring of support,” said Russell, noting his dream was met with enthusiasm from dean Lambla and dozens of community partners. “This is a way for students to recognize that art carries a nobility of ideas that are important and can actually change lives. It’s transformative.”

The community is using the project as a vehicle for interfaith dialogue, cross cultural exploration and understanding, and as a way to bring lasting influence and impact to the city.

Queens University is not only hosting a concert, but running two courses connected to the project - A course on Nazi Germany and a Topics in Music course on Forbidden Music. Many may not know that Jews during that era were blamed by the Nazis for promulgating Negro rhythms of jazz and blues leading to outright bans of many forms of artistic expression.

Rabbi Murray Ezring of Temple Israel, the largest conservative synagogue in the Carolinas, echoed the feeling that Charlotte is an optimal choice to host the project. Ezring said while he has lived in areas with greater Jewish populations, he is continually impressed by the level of interest from non-Jews in Jewish programming.

“Charlotte’s Discovery Place recently hosted the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit which broke attendance records,” said Ezring. “Ours is a community that shows mutual respect; we are constantly trying to learn about and understand each other.” A special Yom Hashoah service will be held at the synagogue during the exhibition.

One scheduled performance, hosted by Myers Park Baptist Church, is inspired by the heroic deeds of the French Protestant community of Le Chambon- sur- Lignon, who sheltered nearly 3,500 Jews during the war. It features a performance by Russell, who has both taught and performed in the very French village that has become a touchstone for the power of conscience.

Reverend Dr. Steven Shoemaker leads the church, a leader in Charlotte’s interfaith relations, which is home to 2,100 congregants.

“We welcome and look for opportunities for interfaith dialogue,” said Shoemaker. “Recognizing others and celebrating differences is part of our spiritual character.”

When completing a restoration, Weinstein painstakingly glues a small inscription onto the inside of each violin paying honored tribute and remembrance. He is clearly inspired by these special instruments as they reveal the power music has as an art form of social justice and understanding.

Weinstein selected the instruments for exhibition based upon their musical point of view and their individual history. When he spoke of his interest in bringing these instruments to Charlotte, it became apparent his motivation was in revealingthe power of music as an art form of social justice and understanding. 

“When I see the Star of David on these violins,” he said, “I know they have seen unimaginable things. Each violin I work upon reopens a new chapter and allows for them to carry forward their voice, bringing it back into this world.”

A complete schedule of events including exhibitions, lectures, films, and services can be found here.

Love is in the air. It’s basketball season, and two NBA players help define the complicated nature of love. Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks and Dwight Howard of the Orlando Magic are the objects of public adulation, with the former embracing a new love and the other struggling with leaving one love for another.

Delirium and Joy

Jeremy Lin is the Cinderella story of the year. Taiwanese, a Harvard graduate, undrafted and barely known, until late January he has been just another marginal NBA player. He played in the NBA D-League, and then briefly last year with the Golden State Warriors, but he was an afterthought on a team that has two young star guards, Stephen Curry and Monta Ellis. No one would have been surprised had he ended up playing for Maccabi Tel Aviv or the Beijing Ducks. He was released by a new regime in Golden State, had a cup of coffee with the Houston Rockets, and then signed with Knicks just after Christmas. He slept on the couches of his older brother Joshua, a dental student at NYU, and of teammate Landry Fields. His $800,000 annual contract was guaranteed only on February 10.

Lin came to a Knicks team desperate for success. One of the league’s flagship franchises, in the biggest media market, they hadn’t won a championship since 1973, but seemed on the way out of an extended period of chaos and incompetence. Since their last winning season in 2000-01, the Knicks have lost at least 50 games five times, and 49 twice more. They have been the NBA version of Daniel Snyder’s Washington Redskins, a laughing stock with too much money and too little sense, throwing millions at mediocre and underachieving players such as Eddy Curry and Steve Francis. With the acquisition last year of All-Stars Amare Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony and superb defensive center Tyson Chandler in the off-season, however, Knicks fans were excited about a return to the playoffs.

In the Year of Hope, the team fell flat, getting off to an 8-15 record and looking awful doing it. The lockout prevented players from getting to know each other. Anthony and Stoudemire have not complemented each other--in fact, they seemed to fight each other for the ball, and neither shot it very well. Both then got hurt and missed an extended period. Coach Mike D’Antoni’s system accentuates the importance of point guards, but the Knicks had no one able to play point guard capably at an NBA level. A few tried; all were awful. The team faced the “revolution of rising expectations” as fans expressed their disgust at yet another mess of a team. D’Antoni was on the way to the unemployment line. Out of options, he gave the kid at the end of the bench the keys to the team. And suddenly, it roared like a Ferrari.

Five games, five wins, without the superstars. The 6-foot-3, 200-pound guard took on the scoring load himself--26.8 points per game, including a delirious 38-point explosion against the Lakers in which he abused aged point guard Derek Fisher. Lin’s 109 points in his first four NBA starts are the most by any player in league history. In the sixth game, in Toronto, he hit a top-of-the-key three-pointer with half a second left to win the game—and 20,000 Toronto fans went berserk. More than that, he got everyone else involved. In the seventh game, another win, he had only 10 points but 13 assists. Rookie guard Ivan Shumpert, who had been tried at point guard, was suddenly more comfortable at shooting guard. Other little-known players such as Jared Jeffries and Steve Novak have played extremely well. The ball flowed and Lin could get into the paint at will and either score or dish off. He is playing with delirious confidence and joy.

Knicks fans have gone crazy, embracing the ingenuous and sweet kid as the team’s savior. Madison Square Garden hasn’t rocked like this since the mid-1990s, and “Linsanity” has become a cultural phenomenon. Not since Yao Ming has a Chinese player captivated the fans. Even other players have been caught up in the madness. The Lakers’ Ron Artest recently ran through the locker room yelling “Linsanity.” (Okay, Artest changed his name to “Metta World Peace” and madness isn’t a big stretch for him. But still.)

Lin’s religious faith and humility have drawn comparisons to the NFL’s Tim Tebow, but Tebow was a star since high school. Lin has always labored in obscurity, and no major-college teams recruited him, but now he is at the center of the NBA universe, the object of even casual fans’ love. Once Anthony and Stoudemire return to prominent roles, his scoring average will fall, but the team has found a triggerman who will make both players better. More important, the sour feelings about the off-season lockout and ragged play of so many teams in this year’s abbreviated season have ignited the entire league. Lin is feeling the first white-hot passion of love with the fans, without reserve or complication, and both are riding the wave.

Indecision and Worry

South of New York, the love between Orlando fans and Dwight Howard is going through some rocky times, and divorce seems imminent. Howard has gotten the Seven-Year Itch to leave the Magic. Although Orlando is coming off the best three-year stretch in its history, including a ride to the 2009 NBA Finals, Howard has soured on the team’s prospects. After months of hemming and hawing, he officially asked for a trade last December—to either the Los Angeles Lakers, the Dallas Mavericks, or the New Jersey Nets, with the Nets being first choice. Although hardly a shock, it has put player, organization, and city in an awkward position—in a year when the league’s All-Star game comes to the Amway Arena in Orlando, built in large part because of the public’s expectation of continued success with a Howard-led team. Celebrity glamor will be coming to this growing but still second-tier city, and the hometown hero wants out.

Howard’s on-court performance hasn’t suffered—apart from his free-throw shooting, which is worse than ever. He works hard, plays with tremendous energy, and leads the team in scoring. He leads NBA in rebounding with 15.1 per game and is fourth in blocked shots. He is easily the best center in the league and was elected to the All-Star game in a landslide. Yet Howard has criticized his team’s effort and makeup of players, and he has complained—after a win—that he needs to get the ball more in the fourth quarter. His easy smile and ebullient attitude are harder to find, and he has grown testy over the constant questions about his future. His stock answer to the question is, “As of right now, I’m here.” When one follower sent a tweet urging him not to go or he’d be as hated as LeBron James, Howard angrily replied, “And if u hate me becuz another jersey u never loved me."

There it is, the issue of love again. Howard is easily the city’s most loved player since Shaquille O’Neal left after the 1995-96 season. He genuinely loves children and spends hundreds of hours a year doing public appearances and charity work. He has never embarrassed himself with stupid behavior. When he attended his first public practice after the lockout, 9,000 fans came out to cheer him lustily and proclaim their continuing faithfulness on banners. Fans started a staydwight.com website, proclaiming, “This is Your City, Dwight!” Like a wife who doesn’t want the divorce from her husband, the team and fans are marshaling arguments to convince him not to leave.

It is unclear what Howard really wants. He actually said that he wanted to go to New Jersey to be “the face of the franchise,” when, course, he is already that in Orlando. Partly, he is frustrated by a team that is very good, but not good enough to return to the Finals and win it all. He has complained that he wasn’t consulted on player acquisitions. Yet the Nets are hardly in a position to outdo the Magic, and his supporting cast there will be worse than in Orlando. They have a billionaire Russian owner who wants to make a splash, and a new arena coming in Brooklyn, but historically the team has been a mess, and they aren’t winning anything in the next couple of years. The Lakers have a terrible bench and aging superstars, with Kobe Bryant playing at a high level but beginning the inevitable decline. They do have the money and will to secure free agents, but even with Dwight Howard, they won’t be in the Finals this year.

Partly, he may be looking at other stars such as LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony who went to glitzy, big-city teams. The simple guy who went to a Christian school may be blinded by the bright lights, and there are certainly those in his camp who are pushing him to enter the world of the glitterati. Unlike Shaq, however, Howard doesn’t seem like that kind of guy. He doesn’t have a big personality or quick public repartee; he doesn’t seem arrogant. He has a close relationship to the DeVos family, who own the Magic.

Rich DeVos, the wise patriarch of the family, recently uttered some words that Howard might be considering seriously. "Dwight is in a good place, and when you're young, sometimes you don't realize that," DeVos said. "The loyalty you develop in a community is always remembered. But if you leave, you don't pick it up in the next town. It's not an add-on because you lose what you had. Maybe you gain some new [love], but maybe you don't. Maybe the net gain isn't as good as you think."

Many believe the Magic won’t trade Dwight Howard. Team leadership hopes they catch fire and make a serious playoff run, and then wow Howard with what really matters to most players: a boatload of more money. Because teams can offer more money to their own free agents than anyone else can, they will be able to offer him $110 million, when no one else can offer more than $80 million. Thirty million can buy a lot of love.

There is a place on the way that stays open late. Coffee. Sandwiches. Candy. Whatever you need: overpriced and convenient like a gas station for pedestrians. You fill up quick, and go on your way.

“You look for something particular?”

“Sandwiches. You got any sandwiches?”

“No more. All gone. Something else?”

Sandwich and a coffee, but there’s no point in the coffee till I have the sandwich to go with it. At least that’s the logic after a late night at the office.

“You know where I can get a sandwich around here?”

“I don’t know. Why not something else? Instant soup. You use the microwave.”

“Forget it.” The last thing I need at this hour is a salt bath.

On the way to my apartment, I pass beneath a row of neon signs that remind me of autumn leaves in the suburb of my childhood. Only the liquor being advertised costs more than the dew on the leaves that I used to reach for when I was a kid. I guess that’s the price you pay for growing up. Or maybe just something to think about over a drink.

I pull out a bill as I enter the bar. The place is empty, but for a crowd in the corner, and I order a double before taking my stool. The crowd of regulars sits mostly in the dark, drinking more than talking. They’re probably what allows the place to stay open late on a Monday.

“Here you go,” the bartender says, leaving the bourbon in a snifter on a napkin and my change off to the side. Normally I’d push a heavy tip to the back of the counter because I’m a light drinker. But I’m thinking of staying a while, so he’ll have to settle for a single.

No one at the bar on a Monday night is there to talk, and I don’t feel like forcing conversation on the bartender. I make do with the bourbon and my thoughts.

By the time I reach my second double, not living up to the expectations of the snifter, no patience for aroma, I recall the leaves from when I was a kid. I can see them shiny and just out of reach. My feet are always bare in the grass, and I’m on the tip of my toes trying to reach one of the limbs. When I get hold of one, I pull it down and stretch to meet it halfway.

On my third drink, I’m having a hard time restraining myself from dipping an index finger into my shot glass. If that’s not bad enough, I start feeling guilty as if I’d been telling a woman at the bar about licking the dew of a leaf just to sound like a romantic. What’s worse is I can’t remember whether the whole thing with the leaf ever happened. Whether there ever was a home in the suburbs. Or whether I’ve just been spending a lot of late nights walking back from the office without ever getting closer to home.

There's more to the Charlotte Museum of History's newest exhibit on the Civil War than meets the eye. Mounting an exhibition takes years of planning and just plain elbow grease. Museum staff and a host of volunteers work together to assemble the exhibit's many kiosks, video stations and display cases; dozens of artifacts, archival documents, broadsides and reproductions are carefully unpacked and examined before being put on view - little known activities that the public never gets to see. Traveling Exhibits Coordinator Kim Graham from the Cincinnati Museum Center along with Charlotte Museum of History's Exhibits Manager Lee Goodan give a behind-the-scenes tour of this fascinating world of museum exhibits.

Musician Dylan Savage performs in a Concert of Ideas and Music Tuesday, Feb. 21 at 8 p.m. in UNC-Charlotte's Robinson Hall. 

Music is my life and my profession. Throughout most of my adulthood, I have been enjoying a growing awareness of how seemingly unrelated disciplines are more interconnected than I initially thought. At first glance, our universe can seem like a place full of things, people, and disciplines that have little or no connection to one another. That was certainly my pre-college perception. I moved from classroom to classroom thinking literature had nothing at all to do with math and music had nothing to do with physical education. No teacher ever hinted otherwise. 

Since then, thankfully, I have grown to see the world through a more revealing lens. With this growth came the realization that almost all things are connected in some way or another, and some quite meaningfully. These connections could often be symbiotic. When I examined two common points between (seemingly) unrelated disciplines, I often came away with a much deeper understanding of both disciplines; greater than a separate examination would yield. Finding these connective strands was quite exciting to me. 

First connections

At first, as a piano student at the Oberlin Conservatory, I began to see the more obvious connections. For example, at a poetry reading, I became aware of how a certain poet was accentuating rhyme and pentameter in such a way that a steady, pulsing rhythm became palpable. The rhythm of the delivery just yanked meaning from the words in a way I had not experienced before. At that moment, I saw with greater clarity just how melody and rhythm in music are given more depth and meaning through a successful rhythmic delivery. That recognition gave me a more profound sense and appreciation of the function and power of rhythm in poetic meter and music. 

Not long after, in Oberlin’s wonderful Allen Art Museum, I happened upon a Van Gogh painting.  The vigorous, steadily repeating brush stroke patterns on his canvas were so visceral, dominant, and three-dimensional, that it further changed the way I perceived and used rhythm in my own playing – for the better. I recognized that I was often hindering the forward flow in some of the music I was playing by over-using an expressive device called rubato (where the tempo is slightly pushed forward or pulled back in speed) and it was causing my playing to lose forward momentum because I was obscuring the beat. Soon, more and more connections began to fall into place: I saw that character development in literature was quite analogous to the development of melodic motives found in music – that had me thinking more carefully about how to more clearly reveal and express those motives as they unfolded in the pieces I played. 

Music in the marketplace

Later, I began to notice connections that were not so obvious, such as the many connections between music and business or between sports and music. As a musician, I had never thought of the sounds I produced at the piano as a product. However, once I realized that my music was indeed as much a product to me as the running shoe was to Nike, I underwent a complete transformation in how I viewed myself as a musician. I was no longer at the mercy of the marketplace; I had some control and tools to create my own niche.

I started to treat my music as a product and applied many of the business field’s marketing principles to create opportunities for myself that had not previously existed. As a result of some well-placed ads, professional promotional materials, brand creation, and some networking I was able to support myself solely through my music while a graduate student at Indiana University – in a town glutted with starving musicians.      

A new worldview

As time went on, I became more and more inquisitive. The more I looked for meaningful connections between music and other disciplines, the more I saw. This way of looking at the world became a mainstay of my existence. I couldn’t imagine not doing so.

Often, as a result of my interdisciplinary examinations, I would come away with a better understanding of how to accomplish something or solve a problem in music, such as how the technique of using slow-motion replay in sports could also be used with great effectiveness to analyze inefficient motion at the keyboard. That topic became the subject of my dissertation and many subsequent articles, TV features, master classes, and lectures.

I soon realized how my specialized training as a pianist could be helpful to other disciplines as well - such as helping computer programmers better-use their arms, hands, and fingers to reduce the rate of carpal tunnel injuries. I built a consulting business around that idea.

A concert of ideas and music

On Tuesday evening at 8 p.m., Feb. 21, I will present a Concert of Ideas and Music in Robinson Hall at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.  There, I will explore connections between music and a number of seemingly unrelated disciplines in a format of conversation, demonstration, and music. I will be accompanied by fellow UNCC faculty members from a number of diverse fields such as electrical engineering, architecture, sports science, neurology, dance, complex systems, and business. In a series of seven vignettes, I intend to show how knowledge from one field can profoundly influence the understanding of another.    

This presentation won’t be all talk. There will be a number of instances throughout the program in which I will play full-length pieces in various styles, ranging from classical to jazz – yet each piece will be connected to a specific topic. For example:

• A professor from kinesiology and I will demonstrate how slow-motion replay is used to help both athletes and pianists increase performance levels.
• A colleague from the neuroscience department will explain why more detailed knowledge of how the brain works can help musicians with performance anxiety and memorization challenges.
• An electrical engineering colleague will explain how his knowledge of the structure of jazz harmonization helped refine his process of building more efficient circuit boards.
• A professor from the Belk School of Business will explain a marketing process that can dramatically help a musician (or anyone) build a larger audience or understand how and why to create a brand.
• I will demonstrate how my years of playing collaboratively with other musicians have given me a unique perspective of teaching team-building skills -- skills that are highly relevant and coveted in today’s business world.

Learning across disciplines

As our country moves increasingly from a manufacturing-based economy to an idea and innovation-based economy, we will need more educational programs that promote imagination-based thinking. The kind of education that encourages drawing ideas from various disciplines. The kind in which knowledge is not just a series of facts, but grist for seeing connections and finding answers in the most unlikely places. The kind that prompts students to sit still, ponder the “what-ifs,” and value doing so.  Some of today’s best scientists and engineers already engage in these practices: recently, Volvo automotive engineers carefully studied locust swarms to give them insights into how to better-design their accident avoidance software. How was it, they pondered, that so many insects could fly so tightly together, quickly change direction, and not run into each another? 

This concert of ideas and music, then, is intended to intrigue, illuminate, and, hopefully, motivate more people to contemplate and value the inter-connectivity between things, people, and disciplines.

Charlotte has a long history of public/private partnerships in different areas of our city life including our public art. As we step into the national and international spotlights this year with the upcoming Democratic National Convention, it’s an excellent time to showcase Charlotte’s innovative approaches to public art.

Public artworks dot the landscape all over our community, including Uptown, South End, and Balantyne. These works reflect our community’s identity – both the works of art themselves, and the processes that lead to their installation.

Although public art can stimulate and connect us — even improve our quality of life — these benefits are not always without scrutiny, particularly in economically challenging times. 

Funding

One misconception — an issue often overlooked — is that not all “public art” is paid for with tax dollars. And, it is important to remember that regardless of funding, once completed, most public art in our city is free for all to enjoy.

Our local public art falls into several funding categories:

Some work is funded solely by the private sector, which until recently largely has been one corporation. For example, the art collection in and around the Carillon Building (on 227 W. Trade St.) was privately funded by Hesta Properties during the original construction 20 years ago.  

Other public art is funded through a percentage of construction costs — both new construction and major renovations. There is also a category of art for public transportation. (Mecklenburg County collects an additional .5% sales tax to fund local transportation. A portion of art financing comes from this source.)

Sometimes, works have multiple funding sources which may be public and private monies. A good example of this is the Romare Bearden Park, at 3rd and Church Streets uptown. Like a growing number of Charlotte projects, it is a public and private investment with multiple funding sources – including the private Partners for Parks Foundation, which provides both volunteers and funds for local parks. Additionally, during fiscal year 2004, local voters approved a park bond including funding for Bearden Park.  And like all Charlotte-Mecklenburg parks, admission is free to everyone.

Governance and legislation

Since 1981, the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County have jointly operated a successful public art program through the Public Art Commission. In 1993, there was a restructuring of this program, transferring responsibility to the Arts & Science Council. (The Arts & Science Council has an excellent — and free — Public art walking tour brochure and podcast that highlight the history as well as funding of many works.)

This Public Art Commission — designed to represent the “public voice” in the process — is comprised of three members from the visual arts or design professions, two from the business sector, two from the education sector and two at-large, community representatives. The Arts & Science Council acts as the administrator and oversees these projects. The commission actively looks for additional funding through corporate partnerships, donations and grants, like in the Bearden Park example.

Government legislation related to public art — both for federal public transportation projects as well as local capital improvements — has been around for years.  In 2003, the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners and the Charlotte City Council adopted ordinances that appropriate 1 % of eligible capital improvements for public art. (This 1% is based on actual construction costs, usually once a project has begun. Projects can range from new buildings and renovations to parks and greenways.) 

Ned Kahn’s “Wind Silos” installation on the parking deck between 5th and 6th Streets uptown is one of many strong public artworks integrated into a normally bland architectural element — in this case, a multi-level parking structure. 

For more than 30 years, the federal government has encouraged and financially supported art in regards to public transportation design. In 2002, the Metropolitan Transit Commission — the governing board of the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) — voted to allocate one percent of any capital project’s design and construction budget for the incorporation of art into the project. This area of public art has proven to be one of the more controversial for Charlotteans.

New projects

This allocation for art positively impacts both our local budget and our quality of life. Some area artists receive public art commissions, and artists from outside Charlotte sometimes will subcontract to other local businesses and crafts persons to help manufacture and/or install larger scale works of art. 

How we move forward with new public art projects will vary depending on multiple factors, but at the heart of the issue, public art is a great example of successful use of public/private partnerships in our city. 

Ms. Jarvi is an artist who has received funding through the Arts & Science Council. She has not been awarded any public art projects in Charlotte.

I come back to stand in front 

Of the upper barn, again and again 

Even though the wood splinters 

And the paint is all gone, 

The sun glints off the metal roof 

Bright, as it always did. 

There’s still hay in the loft and swallows 

That nest in the rafters. 

And the door’s still here too – 

The little one, up high, on the side 

That Mother wouldn’t let me near. 

Some days, you propped it open 

And tossed fresh bales to the ground 

You made everything look easy, even the end. 

Twelve years dead but you 

Stay fresh in my head. 

I remember the jump, your jeans, 

And the boots on your feet. 

You leapt and landed 

Firm, knees bent from the impact 

You stood up and smiled: a superhero at sixteen. 

“Did it hurt?” 

“Nah,” you said, “wasn’t no big thing.”

Spend more than five minutes with Michael Realon and he will tell you that there are children dying in America’s outdated school system every day. Realon is the entrepreneur-turned-Career Development Officer for the Olympic Community of Schools, one of the success stories of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grants. While dying in physical terms is also true, the death he speaks of is the death of their future prospects, their spirit, intellectual curiosity, creativity and soul.

Realon’s job for the past eight years has been to engage businesses to support the curriculum and development of the collection of high school tracts. Working together they create and explore the convergence of the businesses’ and students’ needs. Encompassing bioscience, math, technology and computer science the effort has proven to be a successful collaboration on a project style learning curriculum and is a model for an interactive integrated system of education. In this effort children are engaged to create things, to take concepts apart, study and look at them critically, using their minds to create something.

But this school alone is not enough; kids are still “dying.”

Educational leadership

The process of creation was not in my mind when I was in school; making the grade, getting to college and then getting a job was. I asked Liz Coleman if the notion that education led to riches was a common one.  Coleman is president of Bennington College, where more than 10 years ago she and her colleagues radically transformed liberal arts education well before most of us were considering these issues.

Bennington is known for its cutting edge liberal arts program and its connection to innovation, civics and responsibility in educational leadership. Buckminster Fuller constructed one of his earliest Geodesic domes on this very campus. Bennington’s reliance on experts and academics has shifted to people that are involved in the work the students are studying. The students are exposed to instructors who are actively engaged in the area of study, and exposed to other areas of study to give context to their chosen tract, Coleman said. 

With the precision of a poet and the heart of our founding fathers, she comments on the general state of the institution of education:

“The stunning accomplishment of this country in making an education available to every single person was certainly not driven by an impulse to simply change job opportunities. Its objective was the public good, not narrow self interest. Moreover it was presumed that education was profoundly connected to the quality of our public life and the vitality of our democracy.”

Democracy and dialogue

Coleman continued, “The fundamental idea of a democracy is the idea that conflict is always going to be there; the challenge of democracy--to deal with differences in ways that are principled and non-violent. Education is properly seen as a critical player in meeting this challenge, in enabling us to respect and engage differences productively. If we had any doubts of the importance of education or the dangers of ignorance when it comes to the well being of democracy, they should certainly have been dispelled by the devastating deterioration in the quality of our public life in recent decades. Whatever can be said for our role in enhancing earning capacities, we have failed miserably in meeting our obligations to improve the quality of our public life, and to give powerful voice to the public interest. And my guess is that we are credited with a lot more than we [the institution of education] deserve when it comes to preparing our graduates to negotiate the world of work.”

Can we foster Coleman’s notion that students should possess a “deserved confidence” of being able to create their future instead of justifying their role in it? That they should be on their journey for the sake of the journey and with responsibility to the rest of the world? With that can we and should we engage them to create?

Self worth breeds success

Bill Strickland, President and CEO of the Manchester Bidwell Corporation, experienced the depths of a child’s journey only to rise to the status of hero to ones just like him. Out of his own ingenuity, creativity and drive (and he would say the blessing of others who believed in him), Strickland achieved a solid leadership role of a thriving organization. While he was not educated to be a teacher, his story certainly has a lesson for each of us.

He is the social entrepreneur behind the Manchester Bidwell Schools. With his support, these centers of learning are being recreated all over the country in an effort to save kids from dying the death Realon warns against. His Manchester School works with kids from the toughest backgrounds - children that are on the brink of destruction and have exhausted other forms of intervention.

“One of the big criteria (for success) is coming to an environment where people tell you that you are worth something in a variety of ways,” says Strickland. “That is the big fundamental message that these kids can learn, we are here to reinforce that learning. The message is from the first time those kids walk through that door they have value. We do not consider these kids at risk, we consider them students.”

Asking the right questions

Perhaps the answer doesn’t lie in the expertise that Realon, Coleman, and Strickland share but instead is found in the example their life suggests -  their willingness to create something they didn’t know how to create toward a vision of higher purpose.

Perhaps the elusive key to our education crisis isn’t about having the right answers but merely asking the right questions.

What if we stop looking for silver bullets, stop looking for the one perfect method of “getting it right” or the one perfect person with the right amount of politics and pedigree in creating the type of education system we aspire to and instead ask ourselves what is our future perfect vision?

What if we stop long enough to realize we have the talent within us to help our children fulfill themselves, if we only understood the mission?

We have the ability to help each child realize their individual capacity, their responsibility to themselves and to the world around them, and to use their minds with ingenuity, courage, integrity, passion and compassion; we merely have not recognized what it takes: trusting our own capacity to create.

2011 proved a productive year for music in Charlotte. With a mix of long-time players and ambitious newcomers, straightforward song crafters and experimental adventurers, there was plenty to be excited about. The following is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of output, but to my mind, it’s the cream of the crop. Albums are listed alphabetically by artist.

Andy the Doorbum - The Man Killed The Bird, And With The Bird He Killed The Song, And With The Song, Himself (self-released) / Appalucia - Appalucia (self-released)

2011 was a productive year for Andy Fenstermaker. His latest solo outing as Andy The Doorbum is as ambitious and accomplished as its title is long. Fenstermaker’s long been an ace storyteller with a Tom Waits-ian knack for casting affecting tales of derelict characters, but here he shows a keener knack for arranging as well. That impulse is what drives the full-band effort from Appalucia to such delirious highs. Joined by a gang of buddies, The Doorbum leads a rambunctious, humorous rave-up not unlike a riled-up and fully inebriated not-so-distant cousin of the Avett Brothers.

Aqualads- Treasures (self-released)

On their fourth outing, Aqualads don’t reinvent any wheels. They do, however, fill the old ones with plenty of fresh air. Here, the long-standing surf band barrels the crisp guitar runs and swinging drums of genre forbears like The Ventures into picturesque settings. Heat-stroked Morricone-esque Spaghetti Western melodies give “Vientos Del Sur” a smoldering Latin swing, while the moody, moonlit exotica of “White Sands,” suggests more shore-bound activities. The sound might be revivalist, but it’s no reenactment. In the Aqualads’ capable hands, surf-rock stakes a mighty claim for currency.

BrainF≠- Sleep Rough (Sorry State/Grave Mistake)

After a pair of stellar singles, Brain F≠ outdid itself on its full-length debut. In its turbulent 10 tracks, Sleep Rough emphasized all of Brain F≠’s strengths — and particularly the vocal interplay between front-persons Elise Anderson and Nick Goode. As the band whips itself into a storm of jittery guitars, counter-intuitive bass lines, and muscular drumming, Anderson sings at the center with an unfazed detachment, grounding the band and drawing its volatility like a lightning rod. That tension, driven equally by the rough melody of early West Coast punk and hardcore’s strident urgency, makes Sleep Rough one of the year’s most exciting records — from anywhere.

Click here to stream (2 songs). 

The Catch Fire - Rumormill (No More Fake Labels)

For long-time local music fans, The Catch Fire might be considered a supergroup. Fronted by Alternative Champ Mike Mitschele and Jon Lindsay, an in-demand sideman and up-and-comer in his own right, and bolstered by Bellglide’s rhythm section of bassist Adam Roth and drummer John Cates, The Catch Fire’s polish is less than surprising. The chemistry between Mitschele and Lindsay is undeniable, and Rumormill, the band’s debut, is an effervescent pop-rock primer build from a thorough synthesis of all that is catchy — from the Elephant 6 swells of “Sing Along” to the Comboland jangle of “Choking Chain”; from the spacey dream-pop of “Ambulance” to the punchy power-pop of “Back In The Band.”

Click here to stream. 

Elonzo- A Letter to a Friend (self-released)

On A Letter to a Friend, Elonzo’s easygoing Americana finally delivers the confident, cohesive statement the Rock Hill band has long promised. Frontman Jeremy Davis leads the band — which also includes his sister, pianist Maggie Davis Bourdeau, her husband, drummer Dan Bourdeau, and bassist Stephen Narron — with his honeyed vocal and the casual sway of his acoustic guitar strums. But its the sonic impulses at the band’s edges — Maggie’s elegant piano, Jeremy’s undercurrent of electric guitar squall — that helps the band bolster the narrative drama in its songs.

Click here to stream. 

Great Architect - Cultural Games (Kinnikinnik)

Easily dodging the so-called “sophomore slump,” the now six-piece Great Architect showcases a less-improvised, but more dynamic voyage of instrumental avant-rock. Drawing heavily from the free jazz backgrounds of many of its members, Great Architect maintains a sense of spontaneity and a fearlessness of the din it can create. But it’s not all chaos, either. And at its best, which is not uncommon on Cultural Games, Great Architect crafts a clear picture of time and place. Songs like “Ocean” and “Pageturner” suggest daring unmade films, filled with taut pacing and explosive conflict.

Click here to stream. 

The Houston Bros. - Empty Spaces (self-released)

On their fifth recording, the veteran outfit displays a remarkable consistency and an unwavering knack for muted melodic hooks. Draped loosely in dreamy reverb, and with principals Matt and Justin Faircloth singing in drifting harmony, songs like “The Future Is Here, Part 2” become bittersweet mirages of nostalgia, pushed along gently by Justin’s unhurried drumming. Nothing here is overstated, favoring instead a patient and spacious mood that lets wavering guitar twang, horns, and piano seep into the recording’s farthest corners. Likewise, nothing is out of place, or unnecessary. Indeed, Empty Spaces is a document of veteran restraint, and assured craftsmanship.

Moenda- Moenda (Kinnikinnik)

Moenda’s full-length debut is also the final statement of the band as a quartet; electronics whiz Steven Pilker departed the band before the album was released. The din captured here, though, was worth preserving. Pilker, in league with synth-player Robin Doermann and guitarist Ross Wilbanks, fill the spaces between Davey Blackburn’s hard-swinging drumming. And special note should be taken of Blackburn’s drumming, a gymnastic whirlwind that feels like it could fit a jazz-riot or a heavy metal blitzkrieg. The band’s rhythmic instrumentals act as a soundtrack to an apocalyptic dance party — and what a party it is!

Click here to stream. 

Yardwork- Brotherer (Lunchbox)

The long awaited full-length from Yardwork finally arrived this year — and it was worth the wait. The band’s knotty, exuberant pop still defies easy definition. It sprints with the urgency of punk, but swings like a worldly funk; its layered arrangements suggest the polyglot pop of contemporaries like Yeasayer, but the rootsy sing-alongs lean toward Akron/Family freak-folk. Whatever it is, though, Yardwork’s sound is vibrant and infectious, and totally their own.

Click here to stream (1 song).

Young And In The Way - V. Eternal Depression (Antithetic) / I Am Not What I Am (self-released)

In their three years of existence, Young And In The Way have released five recordings. With no shortage of ideas and refinements to their approach, the band has also steadily improved on each record. So with the double-feature of this year’s I Am Not What I Am and V. Eternal Depression, their brutal and captivating blend of grinding hardcore and atmospheric black metal has further embraced the band’s own extremes — from tight, volatile bursts of hardcore to panoramic expanses of chilly ambient metal. Growing attention beyond Charlotte seems to attest to the band’s continued potential, too.

To stream, click here and here. 

I play because I’m the author of my success.

Like a beautiful statue, I was once a block of marble. I was rough and my destiny was uncertain. Yet, my essence held unlimited potential.

Through tennis, I’ve been able to carve out the shape of my dreams, the strength of my will and develop a passionate determination to win.

I play tennis because I believe that pressure is a privilege and that I can overcome any challenge. My training can take my talent and skills beyond my limitations, yet my fearless engagement with the unknown ultimately shapes my reality as a confident competitor.

Tennis is a game of emergencies. There are many factors conspiring against my best intentions to perform at my best. However, time and time again I’m able to take those obstacles as “teachers” and implement solutions that make me a versatile, creative, flexible and resourceful fighter.

Tennis is my passport to the world; it’s like knowing many languages at once. The lines on the court are the great equalizers: my opponent and I know and understand the rules. The net does not divide the court: it bonds both sides and engages us players into a battle against ourselves, not each other.

The match is just an excuse to learn the lessons we need, a stepping-stone to the best we can be. In tennis, even the fiercest opponents ultimately become friends.

Winning matters as long as it doesn’t define me. I play tennis to achieve, yet I play to be fulfilled. I want my presence, energy and actions to speak out for me… always positively.

My goal is to be the best under pressure, to be a permanent example of self-control, resiliency, creativity and fairness. Tennis forces me to envision solutions two, three and even four steps ahead. A tennis match is designed; it’s a struggle between imagination and implementation.

Everyone who watches me play must instantly understand that I’m not just a tennis player: I’m the conqueror of my emotions, of my goals, and a champion who’s leaving a path for others to follow. I conquer them by increasing my capacity through training, by embracing challenges and by backing off the battles to recover and learn the lessons. The pulse that sustains life is that of the atom, the cell, the heart, the breathing and also the stress and recovery waves of a tennis match. By sustaining this pulse, I aim to be a nucleus that radiates powerful energy to reach and positively influence others.

Whatever I do in life, I’ll always be a tennis player. Tennis defines my worldview: an environment in which I can be engaged, inclusive, global, egalitarian, fair, passionate, curious, creative, expressive… and where “play” is the spiritual bridge with others I yet have to meet.

When I arrived to Charlotte, I didn’t know anybody – I moved to Charlotte because someone convinced me that I could play all year round (what for me is “the lifestyle”). Tennis opened all doors for me, thanks to kind introductions among players who asked me to teach at local clubs what I’ve learned about peak performance and breakthrough in my work with world-class players.

Because of the power of the “achievement in tennis applied to achievement in business” metaphor, I’ve been able to help senior executives and their companies achieve both incremental and exponential results in Charlotte and Europe. Most of my executive clients are attracted to the peak performance approach, yet that’s only the first step towards more significant endeavors, a new sense of meaning and fulfillment, and a relevant personal legacy.

I want the same for myself.

Tennis may not make one a better person, but by showing much of what is best in us, it can influence positive transformations. Like legendary tennis champions, I want to be my purpose and manifest it by joining understanding to excellence in execution to hint at life’s wholeness. Leaders who act like authors influence their communities and the world. I’m privileged to have met Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Guillermo Vilas and several other tennis legends who never set out to change the world, yet by excelling at the game they showed us that breakthrough is possible and that it’s up to us, not to the forces blocking you.

By the time I’m 80, I want to be known as a living example of how tennis shapes a person to be a leader. I want to be respected for my contributions to my peers and the younger generations, someone who’s never content with what’s given, who’s always embracing the challenge to go “beyond personal best,” regardless of age, condition or circumstances.

Perhaps, the short answer is: I play because I can’t imagine the alternative. If I don’t, I can’t fully be myself.

Let’s go play…

NOTE: I wrote this "manifesto" for one of my Mental Toughness Training students who was graduating from High School and had received a full scholarship to play tennis in College. The purpose is that everyone who loves tennis writes their own manifesto to share their own understanding of their experience.

Sensual but pure

in your white 

allure, not dependent

on sweet smell.

Long slender stalk,

bean-like buds

to watch unfold,

and one could make a bet

how long you’ll last—

indirect sunlight, you sit

in my sunroom

shaded by trees,

your shadow against 

the blinds—double life—

beauty and darkness.

Imagine if I asked you, “Do you think of yourself as an engaged citizen?” What would you say?

“Of course! I vote. I volunteer. I read the paper. I keep up with what’s going on in my community.”  That’s how I answered over dinner one night with a national expert in civic engagement.

And then, we kept talking.

When was the last time I’d attended a city council meeting? Or called the county manager with a concern? Or attended a neighborhood watch meeting?

Hmmm, not recently, I had to admit.

So, if I consider myself engaged, tend to keep up with the community’s critical issues, know who makes the decisions and can probably find the time to attend decision-making discussions, and I don’t participate, what does that suggest about those with a lot less access – whether access to people with power or even access to the information they need to have an opinion?

Why would we assume that just because a meeting is called that residents will attend? And what’s to ensure that a public meeting will actually produce useful information to elected officials?

Those are critical questions today as we see voter turnout at abysmal levels (16 percent in the most recent school board election!), children struggling who need help with homework and local governments cutting budgets as the demand for services increases.

Whose voices will be heard?

Those thoughts and questions are at the heart of my work as the Charlotte program director for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. During my 30-year career as a journalist, I didn’t much think about whose voices will be heard and who gets to decide. We provided information – as fair and accurate as we could make it – and expected folks would use that information to make good decisions.

I’ve come to see that as a naïve view, and it’s complicated by sea changes in the media world.  In 2010, the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy issued a stirring report on why we all should care and how we might respond. I quote from the report here:

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy believes America is at a critical juncture in the history of communications.  Information technology is changing our lives in ways that we cannot easily foresee.  As dramatic as the impacts have been already, they are just beginning.

The digital age is creating an information and communications renaissance.  But it is not serving all Americans and their local communities equally. It is not yet serving democracy fully. How we react, individually and collectively, to this democratic shortfall will affect the quality of our lives and the very nature of our communities.

America needs “informed communities,” places where the information ecology meets people’s personal and civic information needs. This means people have the news and information they need to take advantage of life’s opportunities for themselves and their families. They need information to participate fully in our system of self-government, to stand up and be heard. Driving this vision are the critical democratic values of openness, inclusion, participation, empowerment, and the common pursuit of truth and the public interest.

To achieve this, the Commission urges that the nation and its local communities pursue three ambitious objectives:

• Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information to all Americans and their communities;
• Strengthen the capacity of individuals to engage with information; and
• Promote individual engagement with information and the public life of the community.

A Starting Place for Action

I recommend the Knight report to you.  Its recommendations provide a starting place for action that we as individuals and collectively as a community might take to create more informed and engaged communities. Among them: Fund and support public libraries and other community institutions as centers of digital and media training, especially for adults.

Given the recent funding questions around our public libraries, this one is worth exploring a bit.

I grew up in the library in Shelbyville, Tenn. I’d sit among the shelves of books, pulling out one and then another to read to an even younger patron. I think it was my first (albeit unpaid) job.

Libraries are very democratic places, if you think about it. They tend to be in convenient locations in the community. Everyone uses them, so there’s no stigma in going through their doors.

But some of our neighbors NEED them.

For those with limited income, the library is often the one place they can get information – on paper, yes – but more importantly, on-line. As more and more employers require on-line job applications, what happens if you can’t read, and you don’t know how to use a computer? Or don’t have easy access to a computer with an Internet connection?

The digital divide issue spills over into the engagement question as well.

We hear more and more about digital town squares. But, again, if you don’t have a computer, or don’t know how to use one, you can’t get to that town square, much less speak up and voice an opinion.

Experiments in engagement

Organizations and communities across the country are experimenting with how to get more people involved in more ways in community decision-making. Some are very much off-line; some are very much on-line. More and more, we see that to reach across generations, we must think about virtual and in-person engagement.

The Deliberative Democracy Consortium brings together practitioners and researchers promoting deliberative decision-making in communities. Matt Leighninger, that fellow who prodded me a bit about how engaged I am in our community, is a leader in this field. Central to the Consortium’s work is sharing what they learn about integrating online and face-to-face approaches and helping public leaders find examples and resources for better engaging citizens. 

Matt shared his wisdom with folks in city and county government as well as community engagement practitioners when he visited Charlotte last year. He’s passionate about resident participation being meaningful and effective as well as enabling more people to participate in important community decisions. 

A new non-profit is coming at this engagement question from a different direction. Code for America describes its team as web geeks, local government experts and tech industry experts. Their mission: To help local governments work better for everyone with the power of the web. They do this by sending in teams of techies to work with a local government to innovate solutions. Code for America believes that partnering cities will not only solve a critical problem using technology, but also will help cultivate the next generation of tech-savvy, civic leaders.

Another non-profit providing resources for individuals or organizations interested in community problem-solving work is Public Agenda. Pick your topic, pick your approach. Public Agenda probably has useful research or how-to information to move you forward.

Charlotte and you

Charlotte is no late-comer to engagement work. It wasn’t that long ago that we had 1,100 people in a room on a cold December day coming up with goals to support our children, called United Agenda for Children.  Crossroads Charlotte invites each of us to look to tomorrow but act today.  Souls of our Neighbors, a documentary spotlighting the affordable housing issue, is spreading across the community and the effort will soon include an interactive website to link your desire to help with agencies.

But, we can’t stop now. Yes, we all need to vote. Yes, we all need to volunteer. But, we all need to stay more informed and actively engaged in solving our community’s most pressing problems.

What happens if we don’t? A few people – some well-meaning but some with personal agendas – will decide how our community’s problems are solved. Our public officials deserve to know how each of us feels about an issue. A quick email, a quick phone call, a quick note will be useful to them. Truly. They want to hear from us.

But, don’t stop there. Pick an issue and dig in. If you’re worried about children struggling in school, learn all you can about what affects their academic success. Maybe, they’re homeless and not getting enough food or sleep to concentrate. What can you do personally? What public policies need changing to better support them?

I commit to do that, and I commit to finding new ways to get more people involved in decision-making. I hope you will, too. 

The U. S. Airways plane that has come to be known as the Miracle on the Hudson is now on display at the Carolinas Aviation Museum. The story made headlines this past summer, and after I heard the news, I decided it was time to revisit the museum.  

We used to go to the Carolinas Aviation Museum nearly every month when our son was in elementary school because he was so into airplanes at that stage of his life, but we stopped visiting so often as he got older.  It had been about two years since my last visit, and I was in for a big surprise.  

The museum used to be located in the airport’s original hangar from the 1930s, but in 2010 the museum moved to a much larger and more modern building that - until recently - served as the hangar for Wachovia’s fleet of private jets. Although I was impressed with the new facility, I wondered what happened to the original hangar.

Hangar history

I made an appointment to talk about the hangar with John Scott, the Executive Director of the museum, and he told me the story of another miracle - one that has not made headlines but is still amazing in the context of Charlotte’s tendency to raze its historic buildings: While the original hangar is no longer the centerpiece of the museum, it still stands and it still houses aircraft.  

As Scott explained to me, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) began erecting the hangar in 1936 and completed it in 1937 at a cost of $23,194. Built with high-quality steel, the hangar measures 100 feet by 100 feet, making it big enough to house the commercial planes that were then in service.  

“The completion of this hangar marked the beginning of commercial aviation in Charlotte,” Scott said.  With the rapid expansion of the airport after World War II, new hangars were built, but the original hangar continued to play a role in Charlotte aviation history.  Several aviation companies used it to service or store planes, and in 1993 it became the home of the then fledgling Carolinas Aviation Museum.

The fate of the hangar was called into question in 2010 when the airport built a new taxiway that came too close to the hangar to be safe. However, instead of demolishing the hangar, the decision was made to move it about 100 feet away. 

The big move took place in May 2010.  The movers elevated the entire hangar in one piece, put it on wheels, and rolled it to its new location.  The hangar is still leased to the museum, which now uses it to store four of its historic aircraft that are not currently on exhibit.      

I asked Scott why he thought it was worth saving this building, and he responded by sharing with me his experiences living in Singapore, where he once worked as corporate pilot.  He told me that nowadays there is nothing left of old Singapore; it has all been demolished to make way for gleaming skyscrapers and bustling malls.  

“I don’t want Charlotte to be another Singapore,” Scott said.  “Charlotte Douglas is now the seventh busiest airport in the world in terms of take offs and landings, but it all started here,” he said pointing to the hangar.  “By saving this hangar, we can better understand where we started and how far we have come.”

County Market memories

As pleased as I am that Charlotte’s original hangar has been preserved, I regret that it is no longer open to the public.  Luckily, for those of us who want to get a feel for what it was like to live in Charlotte during the 1930s, another Depression-era building is open to the public: the Mecklenburg Country Market has been functioning as a farmer’s market since 1937.  Located at 1515 Harding Place, the Mecklenburg County Market is shadowed by the gleaming towers of the Carolinas Medical Center.  

The market is a one-story, brick building that was originally constructed in the late 1920s. The bricks were handmade, and there is exposed brickwork throughout both the exterior and interior of the building.  If you look closely at the bricks, you can see that each one is a little different from the other, and some are considerably bigger than bricks used today.  

The construction company that built many of the homes in Myers Park first used the market building as a storage facility.  It then was divided in half.  A dance studio occupied one half, and the other half housed a soda and sandwich shop.  

In 1937, a group of farm wives known as the Mecklenburg County Home Demonstration Club pooled their money and purchased the building.  These rural women used the building as a place where they could sell locally grown produce as well as baked goods, canned foods, and other products. They removed the dividing wall that ran down the middle of the building and arranged to have rows of counters built.  Each vendor rented four feet of counter space. They also paid a small commission on their sales. These women came up with a business plan that has remained viable to this day.

Dale and Lucy McLaughlin now administer the Mecklenburg County Market. For Dale, the market is in his blood - his grandmother was affiliated with the market, as was his mother. Now in his 70s, he still remembers standing behind the counter as a four-year-old boy trying to help his mother. 

He knows every inch of the building.  He can point out the spot where there was once a wood stove that heated the building.  He can tell tales of times when the nearby creek flooded the building.  He sees that the building is maintained, but is determined to preserve the original feel of the place. When you enter the building you travel back in time to an era before the rise of supermarkets and giant agribusinesses.  

Neither the hangar nor the Mecklenburg County Market is a grand or glamorous building. Usually, when people talk about the preservation of historic buildings, they are concerned with saving a Victorian home, the main house from an old plantation, or some other beautiful building.  While I am all for saving such buildings, we also must save the buildings that, though not as glamorous, have played important functional roles in our history. Our city is a richer place because the hangar and the market still stand. 

I looked forward to those mornings when 

My mother, perched at the top of the stairs, would scream 

Jehovah’s! Get Down! 

Born too late  

for the Cold war, 

it was the closest I’d ever  

get to replicating “duck and cover.” 

My child wasn’t old enough to play the  

Cold war game, so I always opened the door. 

Monica and Pernice and I sipped coffee. 

I got Splenda packets the day before,  

Pernice doesn’t take sugar. 

Every Wednesday we three had our little 

Bible study. We would eat scones and sip coffee and we’d 

talk about God and what a good friend he is,  

such a good friend we don’t have to just call him God, 

we can call him by his first name.  

I once belonged to a Pentecostal Church. 

Saturday nights I would actually pray.  

My head tilted in reverence, hands clasped  

tight, I would ask that someone speak in tongues, 

reassuring God it shouldn’t be me.

Madama Butterfly, presented by Opera Carolina, at the Belk Theater January 26, 28, 29

The debate as to whether Puccini's Madama Butterfly is a symbolist pipe-dream or full blown verismo opera is effectively upended in Opera Carolina's production, where it is seen afresh. This is in great part due to the sets, costumes, and projections of Jun Kaneko, which are bold, beautiful, and ingenious but—best of all—put these qualities in the service of Puccini's great score. Michael Baumgartner's lighting design, like the sets, is not only striking but musical. It is more than an experiment, it is an artistic success.

The basic ground of Kaneko's set is a tilted spiral form beginning as a long ramp backstage and resolving in the middle as a circular platform. It is whorled with black stripes on a stark white ground evocative of the undercurrent of time, of fatality—like the title graphics of Hitchcock's Vertigo or the whirlpools of Hokusai. A huge Shoji screen serves as a visual metaphor for Butterfly and Pinkerton's home. Throughout the opera, large paper panels are dropped in changing configurations and with changing projections drawn in Kaneko's fine hand upon them. The look is severe but never mechanical, simple but never naive, the proportions nearly as beautiful as a Cycladic vase.

James Meena, the conductor, skillfully underscores the many vignettes hidden in the arc of the score. He pointed out things in Madama Butterfly that aren't always noticed, those beautiful details which elevate Puccini above his verismo confreres like Cilea and Leoncavallo. He made me aware that Puccini was aware of Debussy.

The choreography worried me at first, but it soon shed its orientalist movement clichés and became beautiful by the time Madama Butterfly's retinue entered. The four black leotarded, square hooded figures which acted as Madama Butterfly's household furniture or servants—I couldn't decide which—seemed to synthesize the costumes of Bunraku puppeteers with cabinetry, but they were never used to the point of annoyance, and after a while I grew fond of them.

The weak link of this production was Fernando Portari's Pinkerton. Pinkerton is a callow bastard, to be blunt, but we must find what Butterfly finds attractive in him if the tragedy which follows is to convince. Unfortunately, his performance was a recital of the part. Yunah Lee's Madama Butterfly was superbly acted but seemed to me vocally underpowered in act one's big duet and in “Un Bel Di Vedremo.” She was, however, gripping in the second part of act two, which was heartbreaking, as it should be. Both Todd Thomas' Sharpless and Margaret Thompson's Suzuki were fine contributions. Thompson brought to her part an almost Brahmsian beauty, and her duets with Yunah Lee's Butterfly were some of the evening's best singing. The brief appearance of the Bonze—played by John Fortson—was haunting.

One other fault of the production was to sanitize the role of Goro, making him less of a pimp than he should be. The same was true of the surtitles, which failed to make the unpleasant points of Pinkerton's character entirely clear, as well as omitting some of the wordplay of the libretto.

If you have an interest in sculpture, painting, lighting, staging, and their interplay with music, I would urge you to see this production of Madama Butterfly. It outweighs conventional ideas of success; it is what the future of opera may look like if it is good.

Photos by jonsilla.com

“Farm to food, truck to table” could serve as the motto for Cassie Parsons and Natalie Veres, as they’ve set out to reinvent Charlotte’s culinary landscape. Co-owners of Grateful Growers Farm and Harvest Moon Grille (the name given to both their food truck and restaurant), they are two of the city’s standard-bearers in the farm-to-table revolution sweeping fervently across the nation. While the food truck currently is hibernating, the restaurant embodies the same culinary passion as its mobile predecessor – and with more space to contain it. Like other chefs involved in the movement, their mission at Harvest Moon Grille is to serve the best food that local farms can provide.

Nearly all items featured on the menu are from farms within 100 miles of Charlotte, such as Windcrest Farm, Barbee Farms, and Laughing Owl Farm, to name a few. The pork products and shiitake mushrooms actually come from their own farm in Lincoln County.

Ingredients for success

Though she launched the farm years before opening the Harvest Moon Grille food truck and restaurant, Parsons says that her passion for food really began with cooking, not farming. And, as a cook, she always has believed that great cooking begins with fresh, superior ingredients – items that were not always available to her in the past. That belief eventually led her and Veres to raise their own pork - the quality of which is the linchpin of their reputation in the food world.

Okay, so what makes Grateful Growers’ pork so good?

The owners raise Tamworth pigs, a red heritage breed that descended from wild boars. Parsons says they are superior in taste and texture, and actually proved it to me. First, she showed me how the streaks in the Tamworth bacon have an equal ratio of meat and fat, thus giving it a rich and hearty flavor. Next, she let me sample it: two strips of thick-cut, peppered bacon. That’s when it really hit home. The difference in taste was astounding.

And that was just the beginning of my culinary awakening at Harvest Moon Grille. The staff provided a breakfast spread that also included two poached, farm-fresh eggs, toasted whole wheat bread, raspberry jam, and creamy, unsalted butter. Apart from the bread, which Veres bakes in-house, each item was delivered from a different farm.

I watched Parsons signal to each item while enthusiastically describing its personal history. At first, it just seemed complicated - the process of acquiring each product from a different location. But, after sampling each item, and coupling the tastes with the farm-to-table philosophy, it became a profoundly moving experience, as I now understood the kind of dedication Parsons and Veres have to their mission.

Serving “fresh, tasty food that is true to its nature” isn’t just a humble expression, but a principle that the Harvest Moon Grille staff upholds every day. And to be perfectly honest, it was one of the best breakfasts I’ve had in Charlotte – and the best wheat bread I’ve ever had, in general. While it was toasted to give it a light crunch, it still retained the soft and creamy texture of oven-fresh bread. Veres studied the history and craft of baking, and truly is an expert.

Consumers’ questions

Living in a major farming state, Parsons and Veres have little trouble finding the local ingredients they want. So, as consumers, they challenge us to ask why we aren’t taking more advantage of our culinary surroundings? Since North Carolina is a leading provider of pork and sweet potatoes, Parsons asks, “Why are we buying our pork products from mass manufacturers? Why are we buying sweet potatoes imported from Mexico?”

Her line of questioning applies to a number of other crops grown locally, and she makes a good point: By advocating for knowledge of our own agricultural history, Parsons hopes that more locals will become mindful of the farmers here, not only because their products are fresher, but also because they are more likely to be chemical-free.

“There is no transparency in what we’re eating today,” she explains. “As consumers, we have unknowingly given over our eating habits to big agriculture. We assume, because the food we buy is FDA-approved, it must be clean and it’s not.”

What makes Harvest Moon Grille’s menu items stand out among other restaurants is that the staff was one of the first, locally, that could actually tell you where the meat and vegetables you order comes from - down to the name of the farm where it was grown. While this factor makes Harvest Moon Grille unique, Parsons says, “I want all of these restaurants to be driven to use local ingredients too, so that I can go out to dinner.”

But is buying local more important than buying organic? To Parsons, the answer is “yes, because food that is ‘certified organic’ can be imported from distances as far as China. So, I’d rather buy local than unknown.”

While their goal is to be 100% chemical-free, Harvest Moon Grille considers it more important to know exactly where the products are grown. This staunch attitude that Parsons exhibits towards maintaining quality and freshness is sacred to the staff’s farm-to-table mission. Furthermore, she proves to us consumers that it’s more than just eating organic – it’s about knowing where the food we eat actually comes from.

While the farm-to-table movement appears to be one solution to various negativities within the larger food industry, Parsons’ position caused me to question, as with many trends before, what kind of lifespan does it have? Cities like Chicago, Portland and New York City have embraced it, yes, but can Charlotte catch on?

“I will make it last,” Parsons vows. “I can’t speak for other chefs in the field, but this is the way I live my life. Plus, if I went away, Charlotte would miss out on the most amazing pork.”

Return on investment

It’s no secret that eating local and organic can come with a price tag. With the high expense of fresh, local ingredients, it’s a wonder how Harvest Moon Grille sustains such reasonable menu prices. When asked if she was taking it on the chin, Parsons assured me that the restaurant is making money, but that profit is not her focus. “I’m not here to dupe anybody,” she said. “Compared to the goals of other high-end restaurants, the money we profit is directed towards buying high quality products, not upgrading the décor.” As an annex to the Dunhill, however, the décor isn’t suffering.

Parsons and Veres continue to explore avenues of change in the city’s culinary scene. In addition to farming, cooking and teaching (yes, there are cooking classes at the restaurant), they hope to one day open up similar venues in the forms of a butcher shop, a burger joint, and maybe even a taco stand. That said, for the time being, they are content running two businesses that have already revolutionized the city’s dining.

Photos by Mallory Nanny

Nichole Jaworski, CEO of Steele Creek Outreach, a Charlotte non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of our local homeless population, recently wrote about affordable housing and breaking the cycle of homelessness. One area organization taking active steps in contributing to the solution of this challenging problem and working with at risk populations is the Housing Opportunity Foundation.

The foundation is focused on building awareness about affordable-housing options in these trying times by improving and stabilizing the living conditions of our neighbors and making an impact in the Charlotte region. Though our work is often under the radar, our members surely are making a huge difference for many in our community.

Established by the Charlotte Regional Realtor Association, the nonprofit was created to give back and educate our community about safe, affordable housing. We are taking a leadership role in living out the foundation’s vision of creating a better quality of life in the region.

As an example, allow me to introduce you to our friend Benny. Benny is a delightful gentleman who values his independence and is proud of being able to live on his own, despite his physical and mental disabilities.  However, Benny was recently challenged by a host of home-repair needs that seemed insurmountable. At the time he came into our lives, Benny was using a portable toilet in his backyard, and his home needed a new roof, painting and a complete electrical and plumbing overhaul.

Working with our partners at the Davidson Housing Coalition, Benny was chosen to become one of the recipients of our Realtors Care Day (RCD) project. Within one day through this service project, he had a new roof and no more leaks.  RCD involves more than 600 Realtor volunteers (with the assistance of housing nonprofits, countless restaurants who donate food and many professional contractors who volunteer their time) who go into the community to accomplish critical exterior home repairs on anywhere from 23 to 33 homes – all in one day’s work. 

Since 2009, 88 families have received assistance through RCD in the form of roof repairs, carpentry, painting, window and door repair, guttering and much more.  Keeping homeowners in their homes is what RCD is all about. What about the impact? Well, one homeowner participant said it best: “My house is no longer just a house, it is now my home.” 

Realtors are also committed to housing on a number of different levels like shelter for the homeless, supportive housing for those transitioning into independent living, housing assistance for those with HIV/AIDS, building handicap ramps for elderly or disabled residents, safe housing for battered women, building Habitat homes, housing for mentally disabled adults or children aging out of foster care, and much more.  And they are able to make an impact on all of these areas through the foundation’s Habitat Support Program and Community Grants Program.  Through these programs each year, Realtors give approximately $32,500 to deserving organizations in the community, making a powerful impact from homelessness to homeownership.

Additionally, the foundation is focused on making an impact by educating our community about homeownership.  If you have ever purchased a house, then you may remember how difficult it was to understand terms like “escrow” or “adjustable rate mortgages.” 

That level of frustration and confusion is dramatically heightened for those who don’t qualify for a traditional mortgage.  To help unsnarl this complex web of terminology, the foundation has launched a website – www.CarolinaHomePrograms.com – that is a comprehensive source for financial and educational resources for the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, as well as Anson, Cabarrus, Gaston, Iredell and Union counties.  The website, which includes down-payment assistance resources, a glossary of real estate terms, information on foreclosure prevention and local credit counseling details, provides the community with the best compilation of resources at its fingertips. And to recognize the needs of our diverse community, the information is translated into a total of 10 languages.

All of these programs and services are realized because people care about the community in which we live. The foundation recognizes that good things happen when we all share in this effort through collaboration and partnerships. To honor this spirit, in 2007, the foundation launched the Humanitarian Award. This annual award highlights a person, project, or organization that has contributed significantly to our community. And each award winner is then able to choose a nonprofit to receive a contribution from the foundation given in their name.

As you can see, giving back is contagious.

Terri Marshall is the executive director of the Housing Opportunity Foundation

is a night on the couch in front of the TV, 

as Rachel Ray tosses together thirty minute 

Good Eats, where pop-eyed news pundits 

play reality game show host, or a funny fat man 

on cat’s feet quips his sexy but loud and nasally 

wife, or the tale of a girl who plays patty-cake 

with the ghost of her stepmom. A poem 

is Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells finessing 

a phrase, the cadence of Bela Lugosi’s soliloquy 

or Joan Crawford’s icy cold revenge— 

the screech and crash, Bang, Boom POW 

of a War of the Worlds, as politicians wrangle

to take liberties with Miss Information, 

and scandal is the Talk Soup d’jour. A poem 

is media pimps tricking out cheeseburgers 

and fries to sell kids sex, and pornography 

defines the First Amendment. A poem 

is a dark screen and a twirling blue circle of light, 

spinning me off to bed—where the story lines 

are rounded up, shaken down and cleaned off.

A retrospective at the Mint Museum through January 29

I once owned a piece of Incan gauze that had been unearthed from the sands of the Andean high desert after 600 years. It depicted mythical animals—llamas, perhaps--copulating in geometrical bliss. Such objects had been elevated from ethnographica to art due to the efforts and advocacy of such pre-Columbian specialists as Pal Kelemen, Raoul d’Harcourt, and George Kubler, author of The Shape of Time, who taught Sheila Hicks at Yale. Kubler was intent on developing a grammatology of forms, one which include writing, implements, pottery, and weaving as well as the traditional "fine arts." It was under his tutelage - and with the encouragement of the textile artist Anni Albers - that Hicks explored the villages of Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru in a time when travel was much less easy than it is now. And it is why - if one flashes forward 50 years - that the Mint Museum features on the wall of its grand atrium a work, “Mega Footprint Near the Hutch,” which is not only a 50-foot wall sculpture but also probably the world's largest construct of post-Columbian Incan braid.

Viewing it is an occasion for wonder. What is it, first of all? An object which is both like and unlike a painting and a sculpture in which color and shape rival each other for our attention, appearing differently from each angle at which it is viewed. The material is a handcrafted linen thread dipped in handcrafted dyes and wound around the cladding used to insulate plumbing. I attempted a count of the components, but this was about as fruitless as trying to count the leaves of a tree.

This is the fourth incarnation of this particular work, which began in an entirely different configuration, as horizontal as this is vertical, for the Target headquarters. Photographs of the different versions confirm a sense that Hicks uses her braiding as a device with which to draw in space, much like Eva Hesse or Fred Sandback but in a different hand, and with altogether a more resonant relationship to color. There is a continual interplay that never quite balances between the cool and warm colors. None is dominant, but appear instead to converse among the others. This ability to make color interact shiftingly, was one which Hicks learned under the master of color interaction, Josef Albers, who also taught at Yale. It is Alber's peculiar wizardry to put one color next to another in order to create a third color - and a fourth - which exists only in the eye of the beholder. This form of visual reverberation is one which Hicks exploits craftily.

The remaining works of the Mint retrospective form a strong case for Hicks as a major artist. The small work - and some is the size of a vest pocket - is presented intimately enough to be studied; the larger work is given space to breathe. I inwardly classified the smaller pieces as haiku, grids, or "rabbits out of the hat" --the last term might apply to a palm-sized piece made of rubber bands, or another of buttoned collars. The grids are small but powerful studies in subtle syncopation. All combine a (literally) homespun quality with great technical panache. They are large, small objects which belie their scale with their sense of heft, like one of Josef Alber's Homages to the Square, or a building by Louis Kahn. Though small, they "read" across a room.

The large works might be described as vulnerable monuments. They are remindful that Hicks - like Eva Hesse - was part of a generation of women artists who eschewed male heroics for a different kind of recognition of birth and death. It seems to say that awkwardness is something to be lived with, that beauty may be found in awkwardness if it is not automatically transcended or surmounted. Hence Hicks’s “Menhir,” like a haystack too resolute to be abject. Unlike Hesse, Hicks’s work also conveys a great deal of joie de vivre as well as ambivalence. Whether large or small, they typically read as craft, albeit craft of a high order, until one notices some little hook or deliberate “glitch" which leads to a greater complexity of meaning, a little like a slant rhyme in a poem by Emily Dickinson.

Which would I choose for myself? There are the sculptural “wall reliefs” which make a kind of visual fugue with tassels. There are the "Battle" series, linen stitched into parchment, as witty as Paul Klee. But the object that I woefully covet is the “Banisteriopsis,” an undulating mound of Hicks’s "ponytails" (picture a huge ribbon made of thousands of ponytails, which can be folded or unfolded in a number of different ways and you get the general idea). From some angles, it resembles the buttes of Monument Valley, from others the inner rill of a mushroom. The first “Banisteriopsis” I saw - in a collection in Montreal - was in dark purples and aubergines, but the one at the Mint is in Titians, Russets, Irish-setter, squash, and pumpkin colors, and seems to grow in complexity as one looks at it, like a hallucinatory landscape.

The retrospective is much more than this, and if you haven't seen it, I would hasten to do so, for it is up only until January 29th. Looking at it, I thought of how often weaving has been a metaphor for thought - think of Ariadne’s thread leading through the labyrinth or Penelope weaving her tapestry by day and unweaving it by night. Our computers began when Charles Babbage applied the hole-punched coding of the Jacquard looms to numbers back in the 1840s, but it was Hicks who elevated weaving arts to something kin to sculpture, painting - and lyric poetry.

______________

Also at the Mint...

Overlapping the Hicks show at the Mint is Jun Kaneko: In the Round which features the work of this Japanese born, Nebraska-based ceramist/sculptor and designer of Opera Carolina's upcoming production of Madama Butterfly, which promises to be a thing of beauty. The studies for the sets and costumes are now up at the Mint as part of the exhibition. A large Kaneko piece will soon partner the Bechtler's Niki de St. Phalle “Firebird” in the square of the arts campus. Meanwhile, on opposite sides of the Mint's grand atrium are two Kaneko ceramic vases, tall as the body guards of Peter the Great, which manage to be both subtle and grand.

On Oct. 16, 2011, in Washington, D.C. thousands gathered to celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a newly erected monument and national landmark was officially turned over the American people. Dr. King championed the national civil rights movement and served as a beacon of hope for those who wanted a better life for themselves and their families.

This dream was especially vibrant here in Charlotte. Few among us may have intimate knowledge about Charlotte’s civil rights history and the important civil rights benchmarks in the Queen City’s cultural evolution. Our community, it turns out, has a rich history filled with significant contributions to the movement.

One local family, the Alexanders, made large strides in the Charlotte community beginning in the 1930s. Zechariah Alexander, the patriarch of the family, owned Alexander’s Funeral Home, which served not only as an important service provider, but also was a hub of community and political activity for local African Americans. Alexander’s sons, Fred and Kelly, grew up with the passion for change by getting involved in array of causes, from encouraging African Americans to register to vote to taking on leadership roles in various organizations within the community.

In 1940, Kelly Alexander became president of the Charlotte chapter of the NAACP and in the 1960s, Fred became the first African-American member of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce and was elected to the city council. Moreover, the Alexanders persuaded then-mayor Sam Brookshire to desegregate public parks and facilities and led a march with several Johnson C. Smith University students protesting segregated businesses in 1963. Even though their homes were bombed in the mid 1960s, it did not deter the Alexanders from continuing to fight for the rights of African Americans in the Charlotte community for years to come. 

Another group of Charlotte citizens took a local school issue to the national stage in the well-known case, Swann v. Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools Board of Education.

The case was brought to the courts in the name of James Swann, a six-year-old grade school student, whose parents wanted him to attend a nearby school, which was well integrated. However, James was due to attend another school across town which was predominately African American. The Swans, along with several other parents, decided to sue CMS in 1965 in order to mandate the school system be desegregated. At first the courts ruled in favor of CMS, stating there wasn’t a requirement to racially mix schools.

In the late 1960s the case was brought to the courts again and by then Charlotte’s school districts were severely segregated. The school district had more than 500 square miles of territory with more than 80,000 students attending 107 schools. Fourteen thousand African American students were attending more than 20 schools which were 99 to 100% African American. Finally, after two years of trial, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Swann, and said busing should be used to desegregate the school system.

However, the most important result of this case was how it outlined what powers the federal courts could bestow on a public school system in order to end school desegregation. Consequently, Charlotte became the most integrated public school system in the country. 

In 1974, a group of West Charlotte High School students wrote a letter to the Boston Globe boasting about the city’s successful integration measures. They were invited to visit Massachusetts and Charlotte became known as “The city that made integration work.” Despite the impact this case had on Charlotte and the national public school system, the federal busing mandate ended when the case was reversed in 1999, and Charlotte’s students now attend their nearby, neighborhood schools.

Charlotte clearly has made a prominent contribution to our national civil rights movement, a contribution that should be recognized and celebrated. The diversity of our community is one of the strongest attributes we have and we should be grateful and thankful for our local pioneers who took a leap of faith and helped to change our community for the better.

As I approached the large, chiseled image of Dr. King in D.C., I saw an inscription on the side of the monument: “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.” I began to think about how the Alexanders, the parents of James Swann and so many others in our community served as drum majors and successfully led the charge for change.

Martin Luther King, Jr. would no doubt be proud of all our community has accomplished.

Eighteen nieces and nephews 

show up at my front door, large 

brown carton in tow, 

four oldest hold each corner. 

They heard me, when I said 

they’ll take me out in a box. 

But I’m not going anywhere. 

I’m dying here. 

The one who lived with us 

during the building of this house 

speaks in a firm voice, “Aunt G, 

get in. We’re taking you to 

the nursing home.” I look 

the other way. I’ve made it clear, 

this is where I’m dying. 

In the back of the pack, 

my youngest sibling, nineteen 

years my junior, cups her hand 

on the ball of a cane, shakes 

her head, refuses to look 

me in the eye, mumbles, 

“Good luck getting her out.” 

I’ll be a bear, I swear. No one 

will move me from my den. 

The one child of eight my mother 

said would never leave home, 

and I’ve lumbered up and down 

the east coast, lived in upstate 

& western New York, Boston, 

St. Louis, the Carolinas, back north 

to Cape Cod, then south again 

before building three more houses. 

Ten homes in thirty years. 

Scrambling, sorting, dumping, 

phoning, scheduling, packing, 

arranging, organizing is enough 

to dig a deep dark cave, burrow 

in, hibernate like a grizzly 

in winter, hope I’ve completed 

every detail required to shift 

a life from one home to another 

for the last time. Have I made 

myself clear. I am dying here.

Our nation’s economic crisis has deeply affected the lives of millions of Americans, many of whom already were living at or near poverty levels before the recession. Individuals throughout the country struggle to recover from home foreclosures and job layoffs, and Charlotte residents are no exception - the unemployment rate in the city remains above the national average.

The unemployment rate is hopelessly intertwined with rising levels of homelessness. As area residents exhaust their unemployment benefits, homelessness becomes the final destination on a road paved with great despair.

Hiding the homeless

Unlike the unemployment rate, homelessness is visible. We see it Uptown outside of the Men’s Shelter, Urban Ministries, and along North Tryon St. That visibility is damaging to the reputations of both the local government and local businesses, as its presence suggests that our city is not meeting the needs of our citizens. Indeed, it indicates failure.

As the city prepares to host the 2012 Democratic National Convention, it aims to put its best foot forward, and our visible homeless population does not represent this effort.

During the 2008 Denver DNC, city leaders found "safe indoor places" for the homeless to go during the convention, saying their efforts were to protect homeless individuals from feeling overwhelmed by the event. Denver's homeless were offered free movie passes, tickets to the zoo, museums, and other cultural facilities - an effort some believed was intended to “hide” them. Officials insisted that those efforts were not aimed at moving homeless people out of sight of the delegates or visiting news crews. 

In August, The Charlotte Observer reported that the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) had received a "strong indication" that the main bus station Uptown would have to be moved away from Time Warner Arena during the DNC.  

I wonder if the city’s nearly 3,600 homeless also will be moved away from the arena? 

Denver's response is typical of mainstream societal views that marginalize our homeless. Homeless people tend to conform to the views that society imposes on them, and regrettably, our local homeless population probably will accept whatever fate is decided for them during the DNC. Some may even believe that it is in the best interest of our city that they remain out of sight.

A social movement

The homeless are politically powerless - their voice is that of the silenced citizen, the one who doesn't stand a chance and is forgotten in the mix. And without a strong, visible, vocal example of the contrary, society perpetuates the stereotype that all homeless people are mentally ill or substance abusers.

In order to change society’s perception of our homeless population, we need a social movement led by a combination of homeless individuals and housed individuals.

We need a movement to unite area residents and shed light on their private troubles, which quite often become public problems. Such a movement would allow the homeless to overcome their isolation and take steps towards becoming active participants in society.

Last week, city leaders announced a new initiative for combating homelessness, called “The Year of our Neighbors.”  The initiative, focused on mobilizing community groups and discussing affordable housing policies, is a step in the right direction. But in truth, it falls short of rectifying homelessness. Policies need to extend beyond affordable housing, and to acknowledge both the root causes of homelessness and the successful paths out of homelessness.

If Charlotte’s homeless were to organize and participate in a social movement, the DNC would be an ideal time to press for social change in front of a large, national audience. Extensive news coverage could be the catalyst for an expedited policy shift that would effectively aid the city’s homeless.

“Violins of Hope,” a collection of 18 violins restored by Israeli master violinmaker Amnon Weinstein, is coming to North America making its debut in Charlotte this April. What is especially remarkable about this collection is that each violin is an artifact from the Holocaust. Some were played by prisoners in Nazi concentration camps; others belonged to the Jewish Klezmer musical culture which was all but destroyed in the Holocaust.

First played publicly in 2008 in Jerusalem and then exhibited and played in 2010 in Sion, Switzerland, the 18 “Violins of Hope” have never before been exhibited or played together in North America. The rich local educational and cultural programming inspired by their arrival is expected to garner national attention for exhibition host University of North Carolina, Charlotte and culminates in a concert performance by world acclaimed violin virtuoso, Shlomo Mintz, accompanied by the Charlotte Symphony.

The irony is that “Violins of Hope” are coming to Charlotte just at the time that the Charlotte Symphony is fighting for its life.

In his famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl tells the story of how he survived the Holocaust by finding personal meaning in the experience which gave him the will to live through it. Frankl wrote about the power of love, meaning and purpose as the differentiating factors that helped explain why some people managed to survive the Nazi death camps and others did not. Frankl noted that those who had an all-consuming passion, love, and a drive to survive—to fulfill their destiny—gave them an unquenchable desire to live in spite of unspeakable human cruelty and harsh conditions.

And survive they did.

The question is where are the donors in Charlotte who have an all-consuming passion for outstanding classical music – or for making Charlotte a vibrant cultural community? Will the Charlotte Symphony survive?

It is poignant to me that 70 years ago one could find people in the Nazi concentration camps risking their lives to protect a violin – and yet today, the Charlotte Symphony has only 23 individual donors who made gifts of $10,000 or more annually to the Symphony in 2010. Their successful funding model that existed for 30-plus years – heavy reliance on a united arts fund and a handful of generous corporations – had the unintended consequence of suppressing the development of a large pool of generous individual donors.

Communities like Buffalo and Albany in economically beleaguered Upstate New York boast a stable full of donors who regularly make gifts of $25,000 and $50,000 annually. Nashville Symphony Orchestra (NSO), in the country music capital with a population of 657,000 and 1.5 million in the 13-county MSA (with only five Fortune 500 companies that employ fewer than 5,000 each), boasts 46 donors who make gifts of $10,000 or more annually - double Charlotte’s numbers. Nashville Symphony has twice as many donors (12 donors) who give between $50,000 and $100,000 annually,  and 34 donor families who contribute $10,000 or more annually (Charlotte has 17). Nashville enjoys the support of 47 businesses that support the NSO at $10,000 annually and another 17 companies of the 46 that contribute $25,000 or more. The Charlotte Symphony has fewer than a dozen companies that provide annual support of $10,000 or more.

The paradox is that Charlotte finally has the right leadership in place, and one that is doing everything possible to build new audiences through new concert programming and more value to the community through its educational activities. Jonathan Martin, executive director of the Charlotte Symphony, is an accomplished, passionate, creative veteran of the Atlanta Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra and one of the hardest working leaders of orchestras in the country.

And to Martin’s and Pat Rodgers’ credit, (Rodgers was board chair of the Symphony at the time) they managed to recruit Christopher Warren-Green as the Symphony’s Music Director and his wife Rosemary Furniss, who have both embraced the city and its residents - and who arrived the same week the Arts &Science Council cut its funding by $1.1 million.

Warren-Green’s role in conducting the orchestra for the Royal Wedding brought international acclaim to Charlotte. What a shame it would be to squander this good will and good fortune – and lose the talent and creativity of these cultural leaders and their extraordinary musicians.

Charlotte needs “Violins of Hope,” Cellos of Hope and a new group of inspired and generous donors who want to continue a distinguished 80-year history of classical music.

Where will those who love and cherish classical music and music education find hope and comfort if the Charlotte Symphony collapses and disappears? On the eve of perhaps the community’s most visible moment in time, with the 2012 Democratic National Convention less than nine months away, can Charlotte be a New South City without a distinguished symphony?

Charlotte stands to look a lot more than foolish – indeed, we may be seen as heartless and uncreative, especially if the second largest financial center and New South City cannot round up the donors and financial expertise to sustain its orchestra and keep Christopher Warren-Green and Jonathan Martin in Charlotte.

Martin and Warren-Green haven’t given up on Charlotte; the question is can Charlotte afford to give up on them?

The word "Kunstwissenschaft," the title of the current exhibition of compelling videos and photographs by Marek Ranis  on display in Ross Gallery at CPCC, translates from German into English as “the science of art,” yet its meaning has an all-encompassing quality that can’t be translated literally. In American culture we rarely ponder the meaning of “aesthetics” in art at its deepest levels, but Ranis invites us to stretch our minds and follow him as he uses the term as defined by Neo-Kantian philosophy. That philosophy proposes five subdivisions within the notion of aesthetics: beauty, the sublime, the tragic, the ugly, and the comic. If this sounds overly intellectual, just think that we follow this path every time we go, for example, to watch a horror movie, and get pleasure from watching blood and gore on the screen. Ranis focuses here on beauty and the sublime (in the sense of being “awesome”), and laces these with overtones of the tragic.

The feeling upon entering the exhibition area in Ross Gallery is intellectually and visually chilly. There is a series of manipulated prints of photographs of Greenland’s icebergs and growlers, with their eerie, bluish quality, parading across the walls, inviting interpretations by the viewers. With mirrored imagery - where images are turned on their sides, flipped 180 degrees and repeated - the photographs resemble Rorschach inkblots. Many have an anthropomorphic quality - masks, busts, human pelvises, or even robots.

In a smaller room, video loops combining views of this icy landscape shot from a moving vessel are paired with NASCAR footage. We catch glimpses of brightly colored cars blurred by speed and icebergs whizzing by, which invite even wider interpretations: Is this a contrast of nature and man-made kitsch? Is this a metaphor for the speed of man-made change in fragile environments? This thought-provoking blend is an invitation by the artist to pause and experience a moment of contemplation.

The Romantic ideals of landscape are major influences on Ranis, an Assistant Professor of Art at UNC-Charlotte. Ranis has made many journeys around the planet inspired by the intertwined perceptions of beauty and the sublime, and has a particular interest in the “transitional moments between beauty and the sublime.” Sights of glacial icebergs offer perfect examples of this transition, as Ranis explains, “between pleasure and the malignancy that can ultimately cause destruction.” Indeed, this concept of the sublime with its frisson of terror may symbolize our tragedy of being unable to comprehend the significance of environmental changes happening on planet Earth.

This concept sprang from Ranis’ artist’s residency at the Upernavik Museum, located on a tiny island in Baffin Bay between Greenland and Canada, and a research trip to northwestern Greenland in 2009. Ranis also traveled in other parts of Greenland with his wife, artist Maja Godlewska, hiking on the ice cap and making boat trips into ice fiords filled with icebergs from calving glaciers.

His interest in global climate change initially took form back in 2004 when he produced a body of work around the concept of “Albedo” - Latin for “white” and a scientific term for surface reflectiveness. June Lambla, guest curator for his 2005 McColl Center installation Retreat from the Albedo Series, explained: “As ice melts, more of the earth's surface becomes dark, reflecting less light and absorbing more, thus exacerbating the warming trend.”

Ranis feels propelled to focus on the phenomenon of global warming because of its acuteness and the fact that people, especially in America, don’t seem to care. “Perhaps, this is due to its enormous scale,” he suggested. “Historically, huge events have often been realized only retrospectively.” For Ranis this subject matter “is a way to express a sense of loss and melancholy about disappearing white landscapes, which many of us will never see. “

Kunstwissenschaft is a potent metaphor for Earth’s looming tragedy. Here, the visual experience strikes the surface of our perception, while the urgent message, like icebergs, lies threateningly beneath the veneer of beauty.

Want to go?

The show is up through January 12 at Elizabeth Ross Gallery, 1201 Elizabeth Avenue on the Central Piedmont Community College campus. Hours are limited. Call for parking directions: 704-330-6211. 

Photos by JoAnn Sieburg-Baker

Harvey fed two successive dollar bills into the stout, robotic ticket machine. He punched his stubby, sausage-like digit at the menu choices. Senior. Round Trip. $1.50. Buy. Two shiny quarters and his light-rail ticket plopped into the slot.

At fifty-two Harvey was eight years shy required of the discount he’d just obliged himself of. Beating the Transit Authority out of a buck was the furthest thing from his mind. Rather, this small societal infraction was a type of psychic balm for Harvey. His petty misdemeanor returned a tiny sense of control and dignity to a man who’d long ago been stripped of both. Caustic erosion of ordinary ate at Harvey’s fortitude like molten lava spewing from the volcanic average. He couldn’t bear to be compliant in every last action of his life. The purloined train ticket was Harvey’s last stand, his Alamo.

Far from malevolent, Harvey was a portrait of convention to all who might notice. He maintained a tidy lawn that perfectly framed his suburban rambler.  Citronella scented geraniums lined his window boxes. He often chatted with his mailman, even knew his kids’ names. Harvey paid his taxes, voted in every election including the municipal ones, and was a generous tipper at the Big View Diner where he always sat in the corner booth and ordered an egg -beaters omelet with dry wheat toast.

The sense of exuberance and adrenaline rush accompanying the anticipation of getting caught motivated Harvey to get out of bed on work days. It made him feel alive. Daily, he rehearsed in his mind what he’d say and exactly how he’d react when challenged by some beefy transit cop. They were the type of men Harvey thought he could have been. They wore shades even if it was cloudy. They made their own decisions. They didn’t sit in cubicles waiting to be told what to do and how to do it. They had independence, something Harvey aspired to have.

Consumed by the fantasy playing on his mind’s super-eight twice each weekday, the lies he imagined grew more outlandish. He’d been given the ticket by a friend, he’d say. He didn’t know the age was sixty, he’d been told it was fifty. The ticket machine miscalculated. He pushed the wrong button.

For forty minutes every Monday through Friday, his blood-pressure soared like a thermometer in July. His senses became more acute. The aroma of yeast rolls from the bakery they passed along the way was that much stronger, pure heaven.

Two or three times a week, he was asked to produce his ticket. To Harvey’s great disappointment, not once in two years had the transit cops so much as questioned him.

They would though, maybe even on the very next ride.

Harvey would be ready.

When I first arrived as a freshman on the campus of Johnson C. Smith University in August of 1988, I was excited about the new opportunities that awaited me in my new home.  Charlotte was a growing city with a new coliseum on the way, a large banking presence, growing airport, and a destination for new talent from around the country.  At first glance, it seemed a total change from the economically and racially segregated streets I experienced in my hometown of Long Beach, New York, where African-American, Hispanic Americans, and some poorer European Americans literally lived on the other side of the railroad tracks.

As I explored my new environment, it did not take me long to realize as I walked down streets such as Beatties Ford Road, or drove through other streets like Queens Road, that Charlotte struggled with the same issues created by social and economic segregation as other communities throughout our nation.  Today, as President and CEO of the Urban League of Central Carolinas, I witness the effects of that isolation in the people we serve each day. Our recent economic downturn and propensity to live in economically, and many times ethnically, segregated neighborhoods aids in the creation and sustaining of disparities that creates pockets of human and talent waste.  In other words, potential human capital that could aid our region in its growth goes untapped.    

We Need New Philanthropic and Leadership Perspectives

Charlotte has a strong history of economic, civic, and philanthropic leadership.  The development of its banking industry, civil and educational rights movements, and ranking as one of our nation’s top philanthropic cities is a testament to some our social and economic engineering.  Current examples of initiatives to address gaps are Project L.I.F.T. (Leadership and Investment for Transformation) in the West Charlotte High School corridor to lift graduation rates, and the Critical Needs Fund to address basic emergency needs.

Graduation rates and basic needs are important, but they are only useful if they are connected to a much larger project of economic and educational empowerment in the neighborhoods most in need of such initiatives.  These initiatives also rely too heavily on the thoughts and motivation of older and established leadership. 

While I believe our Charlotte Region’s philanthropic strength and established leadership give us sturdy shoulders to stand on, there is a need for new philanthropic and leadership perspectives. Leaders must view the educational and economic development of communities facing the gravest disparities as sources of human capital that will help our region and nation gain a competitive edge in a global economy. 

For example, Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland, Ohio developed an innovative job model with the assistance of the Cleveland Foundation, Case Western Reserve University, City of Cleveland, Cleveland Hospitals, and several businesses.  Evergreen has become an employee-owned cooperative specializing in Green and Solar technologies. It produces millions in salaries for employee owners that come from low-income and disenfranchised neighborhoods. The collaboration between the philanthropic and business community has not only empowered low-income residents to own their own multi-million dollar business, but also has given the Cleveland area competitive edge in a growing global field.  

Locally, the Levine Foundation invested $300,000 into the Urban League of Central Carolina’s 21st Century Workforce Initiative this past year. The Levine Foundation’s investment was part of the first $700,000 invested by several corporations and private donors into the program for national certifications in broadband and fiber optics, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, and solar power.  During the first year of their investment, local individuals from low-income neighborhoods earned $7,490,000 in salaries.  It is estimated that these individuals, accounting for displacement, will earn $18,275,600 over three years.  

Just as important, the energy created around the opportunity led the Urban League to become an owner of its own fiber optic school and allow participants to perform contract work in local solar power farms in Kings Mountain, North Carolina and develop other contracts as far as Hawaii in the spring of 2012.

Evergreen and the 21st Century Initiative are just a couple of examples of long-term philanthropic investments that empower struggling neighborhoods and also give the region a competitive edge with a local workforce resource.  Both examples were beneficial for local people struggling with self sufficiency and the local economy.  Imagine if more collaborations and dollars were invested in these types of initiatives.   

Disparities and our Competitive Edge

The recent revelation from the Pew Research Centerindicating that wealth gaps between “whites” and “minorities” in the United States have grown to their widest levels in 25 years is alarming.  The median wealth for a European American household is $113,149 compared to $6,325 and $5,677 for Hispanic American and African American households.  Regionally, the signs of this trend are statistically present as well.  From 2007-2009, the median household incomes for African American and Hispanic American households in the greater Charlotte region were approximately $33,799 and $35,596, compared to $55,674 and $70,774 for European American and Asian American households, respectively. 

The economic disparities are mirrored in education. According to the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, our nation’s 15-year-old students ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math out of 34 countries.  Regionally, this is reinforced with lower cohort graduation rates and lower pass rates in key subject areas such as science and reading for Hispanic Americans and African Americans.  For example, Hispanic Americans had a four-year cohort graduation rate of 59% compared to European Americans at 82%.  Only 53% of African Americans passed the end-of-year science exam for eighth grade in 2010, compared to 86% of European Americans.  The percentages for the end-of-year eighth grade reading exam were 54% and 83% respectively.  This means many of our students are failing in areas that directly relate to 21st century skills development and needs in our global economy.

However, studies such as Programme also reveal some great opportunities for us.  It is interesting to note that our best and brightest rank well with other international students, but we do not numerically produce enough students that perform at high levels, especially in science, engineering, and other technical areas.  Our lack of interest, attention, and support for developing people in communities facing disparities creates intellectual, entrepreneurial, and workforce shortages that could be partially remedied by empowering the untapped talent of those individuals represented by the statistics above.  

The emphasis on entrepreneurial and workforce development cannot be overemphasized as part of the equation, especially for communities facing our gravest disparities. For example, this year we have seen the African American unemployment rate in Charlotte climb above 19%, approximately three percentage points higher than the national average for the same group.  As cited in the Johnson C. Smith University 2010 white paper, “Gaining Traction in Doing Business in Charlotte, North Carolina: Compelling Reasons for Community-Wide Support for Minority Owned Businesses,” many minorities had to start businesses with personal finance without much access to capital from traditional lending sources. Many minority business owners use home equity as a primary source of personal assets. Our current market has not proven friendly to home values, especially in minority neighborhoods that face disparities. 

Furthermore, home mortgage denial rates for the entire region are 23% and 26% for Hispanic Americans and African Americans, approximately 1.6 to 1.8 times higher than that of European Americans at 14%.  This means that lower median incomes, lack of access to capital for entrepreneurial ventures, higher denial rates to establish wealth, and inadequate education models negatively affect job creation, intelligent consumer bases, human services, and the economic bottom line of neighborhoods facing disparities and our regional economy as a whole.  Thus, the impact goes far beyond those communities directly affected.

A New Agenda for a Competitive Edge

Our future as a region is also dependent on the type of talent we develop.  The Charlotte region is well known for its strength in banking and is still the second largest banking center in our nation.  However, our greatest strength may also be a weakness if our workforce is totally dependent on the banking industry, as demonstrated by the problems with our recent housing bubble.  Organizations such as the Charlotte Chamber and Charlotte Regional Partnership have been actively recruiting alternative businesses and industries to the region in the areas of green or sustainable energy, film, defense, and other 21st century fields.  One of the most important factors to successful recruitment of these industries is the education and talent of a potential indigenous workforce and qualified entrepreneurial businesses.  Untapped human capital in struggling neighborhoods could help us address such needs.

Accessing untapped talent requires aligning our post and secondary education models with 21st century job trends and devoting greater attention to workforce and entrepreneurial development in communities with the highest rates of unemployment and under-employment.  New scenario and application-based curricula with the use of technology in classrooms require development.  Special attention must be given to schools with dropout rates of 20% or higher, with alternative learning practices and heavy emphasis on one-on-one mentoring.  Just as important, we must revisit school districting and mixed-income housing policies that will lead to more diverse and stronger educational communities.

From an economic perspective, we must increase entrepreneurial and bankability training for potential business owners that are responsible for most of our employment.  There is a need to revisit lending practices and risk factors associated with lending to minority and small businesses.

For example, Carolina Premier Bank and the Urban League of Central Carolinas launched an initiative for a new bank concept, Urban League of Central Carolinas Bank (ULCCB).  The ULCCB will operate as an affiliate of Carolina Premier to help low-income and non-banked customers become financially literate by teaching real-life banking skills through their own bank accounts. The venture will allow individuals to have paperless accounts to transact business with a very low fee structure along with a financial coach to help develop goals. This will include small business education on bank transactions and how to become more attractive to lenders. The ULCCB will consist of a Community Advisory Board that will include advisers from local neighborhoods. The program provides a way for struggling individuals to become banked and have an actual stake in the development of the financial institution and education.

In addition, we must make more training available in new 21st century industries to expose more individuals to alternative careers.  Just as important, we must be willing to set measurable metrics for the increasing of minority and small business contracts in the public and private sectors and home lending to communities most impacted by foreclosure.  Like many of the aforementioned examples in workforce development and financial literacy, these approaches demonstrate greater possibilities for our community’s financial stability and competitiveness when we invest time, talent, and treasure into such ventures.

If We Have the Political Will

There is no doubt that the aforementioned approaches will require us to change some of our philanthropic and leadership models and develop the political will to implement a new inclusive vision.  We will have to make more long-term investments in communities that go beyond what we interpret as immediate needs. The need to develop more social capital ventures as exemplified by organizations such as Evergreen Cooperative gives a blueprint for new leadership and philanthropic thought around communities that face disparities. It moves our leadership and philanthropic community away from paternalistic initiatives that simply address immediate needs, but also creates new leadership within neighborhoods and financial resources that are owned by residents and used in our local markets.     

As the Cooperative example suggests, this shift will require public and private sectors to establish partnerships that foster the development of talent in neighborhoods most impacted by disparities through long-term investments in 21st century education, workforce and entrepreneurial development, and social capital ventures.  These are investments that will lead to a weakening of our disparate gaps and a strengthening of our region's competitive edge for everyone.  

You and Your Expertise

I urge more citizens to get involved in local education, financial literacy, workforce and entrepreneurial development, and social capital initiatives.  Specifically, more mentors and tutors in schools and service agencies with expertise in science and technology are needed. More successful entrepreneurs and corporate leaders are needed to provide mentoring to underdeveloped communities and non-profits for entrepreneurial and social capital venture development.  We also need more individuals in our financial sector to get involved with financial literacy coaching over longer periods of time with individuals and families in disparate communities and those receiving services from social sector agencies.   Just as important, we need individuals to advocate in the public and private sectors for allocation of more financial resources toward these empowerment initiatives that yield a return for all.

Why I Advocate

Two weeks ago more than 300 people gathered in the First Ward Center in Charlotte to see 108 GED and 21st Century Initiative graduates of the Urban League walk across the stage.  I had just delivered the commencement address when a friend, who is an instructor, handed out certificates with pride.  We looked at each other and smiled at the excitement of the graduates.  We also smiled for another reason.  We came from the same struggling neighborhood in New York and could remember how unlikely it seemed long ago that we would find ourselves in this position.  We remembered the people and agencies that invested in us.  I advocate because I am a living testimony of an investment in human capital that pays back dividends every day.