Public Power - January/February 2008 - (Page 12) 10 QUESTIONS 2 Anne Grady Anne Grady served on the City Council in Opelika, Ala., from 1986 – 2000 and is now economic development representative for Alabama Municipal Electric Authority. From 1988 to 2002 she was director of the Lee County, Ala., Community Leadership Program. Jeanne LaBella interviewed her on Dec. 11, 2007. When you were a City Council member in Opelika, you were instrumental in launching the Lee County Community Leadership Program. Why did you conclude such a program was needed? Our Opelika Chamber of Commerce did a long-range plan in 1983. My husband was the chairman at the time. Around that time, U.S. News & World Report magazine came out with an article identifying the 20 most successful cities in the country. The article explained why these cities were successful. Eighteen of them were a manager-council form of government or had city managers, so they had a highly educated person in government working with them. All 20 of them had community leadership programs to train their citizens about their communities with classes and other events. This, in turn, created a pool of citizens who could help them accomplish what they needed to accomplish to reach that success. We wanted to do that too. 12 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2008 3 How did you organize your program? We met once a month from September through May. Meeting in the summertime is so difficult because families are in and out of town. We would meet all day, the third Thursday in every month. We were a county program—one of the first county programs in the state of Alabama—it combined the city of Auburn and the city of Opelika and our county. One of the nice things about these programs is they are so flexible. Other community organizations schedule meetings during the day or twice a month. You can set these programs up to accommodate the people in your community. 1 4 What kinds of topics are covered in the classes? The curriculum includes an in-depth look at areas such as economic development, education, health care, social services, the justice system. Most of those topics have to be taught by people in your communities who are part of the activities. Your faculty is local and most of them just give of their time. We would meet all day, so we needed lunch. Often a restaurant or caterer would even furnish our lunch. These programs can be done relatively inexpensively. Most programs charge a fee. It can be very minimal or it can be more—whatever the community feels it needs to be. The program belongs to the community—not just to the people who go through the programs or to the people who teach the programs. Sometimes businesses will put people through the program and pay their tuition. Everybody had to buy in to this process for it to be successful. How do you identify candidates who are invited to participate in the program? We do a lot of advertising about the program and, interestingly enough, people really care and begin to read in the newspaper about forming the next year’s program or they hear about it by word-of-mouth. We end up with a nice list of people asking to be a part of the 5 program. We set a limit—ours was 25—sometimes there are 30 or 50— whatever the community can manage. We would take all the applicants by a certain date and then we had a committee on our board of directors that would look through all the applications and pick the 25 for that year. Sometimes people applied one or two years in a row and eventually got in. Almost everybody winds up going through the program. If anybody cares that much to give that kind of time, then you know you want them to go through the program. We wanted a very diverse group—many men, many women, diverse cultures, African Americans, Hispanics. We never counted how many of each group we had, but it always seemed to balance out. People just seemed to migrate to the program and we’ve always had good, interested people to pick from. Who decides who will go through the program? We formed a board of directors that determined the curriculum and then we’d meet and talk about how we’d run things. The chairman of our board would appoint a committee to decide who would participate. Are there any particular program graduates you can think of who are success stories? We look at each one as successful. Everybody is coming from a different element of the community. You don’t want people going through the program that just have political interests or interest in one particular thing. You want your program made up of people who are already active in their churches, their Sunday school programs and their civic organizations and their professional organizations. [Through this program] you are providing them with information to give them an in-depth look at their community in different areas so they can go back to these organizations—back to what interests them—and we all begin to determine the same direction for these programs. PUBLIC POWER 6
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