But it did. And today it's a thriving city of more than 50,000 residents.
This week, Ned Hill, one of the economic consultants who had given advice on rebuilding the city, returned to Grand Forks to comment on the success of the city's revitalization:
http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/118966/
His speech is worth reading. He outlines the key steps the community took to rebuild, including measures to revitalize education, commerce and culture. But perhaps the one key that tied together all these together was avoiding what Hill calls rube-ophobia. As he said in his speech this week:
"Do you know what 'rube-ophobia' is? 'Rube-ophobia' is the fear that others will think you’re a rube for who you are, what you are and what you do."
He argues that only Grand Forks can be Grand Forks. No other community can offer what it can offer. That's good advice for any community whether its rebuilding or just getting started: be yourself.
The rest of the speech is below:
When we came in here in 2001-2002, this was a community that was just out-and-out exhausted. It was a community that had learned to work together. It was a community that was starting to learn how to trust each other.
And it was a community that had made incredibly hard decisions.
I’ve been to two other post-disaster communities — New York City after the terrorist attacks and New Orleans after Katrina. And nowhere did I see a community that came together with such a selfless sense of purpose and the ability to make the hardest decisions I’ve seen.
You drew lines on a map that were more than lines on a map. They represented people losing their homes, and you had to figure out how to make those people whole as well as how to prevent future disasters.
There’s something else you folks did. You made hard choices that kept this community together as a whole. Last night, we talked about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency came in here and said, “Expect half your population to leave.” That didn’t happen.
In fact, what came out of the flood really was a phoenix community — a community that not only had a spirit of fight, a spirit of toughness, a spirit of “hell no, we aren’t going to leave,” but a community where people came together and decided that we are going to get it done.
o o o
We had several themes that came out of our visit here in 2001-2002. One of them was the need to “Augment Leadership.”
There was a serious leadership problem in the Grand Cities, and I have to say, that problem still exists. There are still way too many hats and not enough heads.
You already do leadership training in this community. You’ve got every leadership training program known, but the system still may be broken because we don’t see an expanding pool of people being allowed to play.
You need a resource bank, so that somebody who’s looking for a board member, they don’t just go to the same old folks. They go to the resource bank and say, “Hey, who are the up-and-coming stars?” and “Who could stand a little experience by being the junior member of a board?”
You have to be intentional about it. You don’t do change accidently.
A couple things you might want to consider:
To get young people here, you might want to pair recent college graduates with local businesses or entrepreneurial executives for a period of months or years.
Do you want to cure the brain drain? I’ve got the quickest way to do it; it’s called a paycheck. You want to attract somebody back in town? Quick way to do it: It’s a paycheck.
So, one of the things is management internship programs. Small companies can’t afford a lot of cost; how do you make that work?
One way is with cooperative education — partnerships with universities that combine classroom training with practical workplace experience. In Ohio, we’re spending $15 million a year to turn Ohio into the co-op capital of the nation.
It all goes back to that same idea: If you want to hold on to them, get them a job.
o o o
Above all else, please avoid “rube-ophobia.” Do you know what “rube-ophobia” is? “Rube-ophobia” is the fear that others will think you’re a rube for who you are, what you are and what you do.
What happens is, most areas downplay their real strengths and emphasize imagined strengths. And if you emphasize strengths that don’t have just because you’re afraid people will look down on you for who you are, then you’ve proven you’re a bigger rube than they would have thought you were to begin with.
The Cowboy Hall of Fame only works in Oklahoma City. It’s not going to work anywhere else. It’s one of my favorite buildings in North America, Why? Because it’s a gorgeous building, and it fits in Oklahoma City.
Oklahoma City is not “rube-ophobic.” By putting the building up, they showed strength and character and that they know where they’re from.
So, celebrate what makes you distinctive. Celebrate those values — but make certain that you’re open enough so that people who are coming into your community get to be part of it.
o o o
Another challenge that I mentioned in 2001-2002 was “Remove the barriers to investment and participation.” I didn’t really think you were going to do that.
But as I’ve talked to people, I’ve found that the anti-business attitudes have largely melted away. They’ve melted away because of conversation; they melted away out of trust.
It doesn’t mean there’s no arguing. America is a democracy, and it’s messy. But that incredible level of distrust that we observed in ’02 seems to have largely gone away.
That is a fantastic testament to the leadership of this community.
o o o
As for your higher education community: We were very nervous about that in ’02. We thought they were insular; we thought they were shell-shocked; we didn’t think there was a vision at UND.
Oh, how wrong we were.
UND took huge risks: It raised its standards. You can’t have a competitive university without standards and an expectation that students are going to do the work, and the university did that.
We saw a university that was barely a research university now that has new and strong pillars to build from. The Energy and Environmental Research Center always was there. The Odegard Aerospace School always was there.
But now, we’re seeing your engineering school step up to the plate where it hadn’t before. And we’re also seeing the medical sciences step up. These are huge testaments to what this community has done by way of partnering with the university.
o o o
This is one of the most kid-centered communities I’ve ever seen. We saw that in ’01-02; why? Because we tried to hold meetings on Wednesday nights. You can’t get anybody to a meeting here Wednesday nights. I’m not going up against church dinners any more. I’ve just given up.
But the fact is that that this “kid-centered” quality is an important value to the people who want to live here, and that’s a large part of why people come. You have exceptional public education services. You have a child-centered culture.
In one way, your status as a child-centered community could be a weakness because it demands such time commitments from adults. Maybe that’s why there are so few people serving on boards: They spend so much time with kids. They’re coaching soccer and so on.
Why don’t you use those youth activities as a “leadership capture”? Because, let me tell you, if you can coach youth soccer or youth baseball and manage the parents, you can manage a board. It’s easy after that.
o o o
Why is the State Mill and Elevator still such an underused resource? Why aren’t you developing brands — value-added products — that really make North Dakota a brand and that let the mill create more wealth for farmers?
o o o
This community is the ultimate comeback story. And think about it: You made it through the flood, and nobody stole anything. You should celebrate that fact, because it means there is a level of trust, a level of honesty here that makes this an easy place to run a business.
And the fact is that you’ve got an efficient government — despite what the anti-tax guys tell you. You should make that “efficient government” one of your selling points, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment