The Leadership Challenge

Don’t Stop There! Five Adventures in Civic Journalism

The Journal Star
Leadership Challenge: Building a New Generation of Leaders

Marti Shullaw can remember sitting on a lawn chair in her backyard, watching people waiting to buy drugs from her neighbor. “I mean, they would line up like it was McDonald’s,” she recalls.

Her husband wanted to move. But Shullaw refused. “I guess it was part stubbornness and part knowing I could make a difference.”

Shullaw joined the neighborhood association and became its spokesperson. She lobbied to get a stronger police presence in the area. She started an after-school program for the children in the neighborhood. And now she’s working with other neighborhood leaders, citywide, on a grass roots plan to distribute federal Community Development Block Grant funds.

Shullaw is not the kind of leader Journal Star Managing Editor Jack Brimeyer had in mind in 1996, when he launched the “Leadership Challenge,” a series on an apparent decline in the quality and quantity of leadership and civic involvement in Peoria.

Brimeyer was thinking of starched white shirts sitting around the table at Peoria’s revered Creve Coeur Club, planning Peoria’s future over 16-ounce tenderloins and single malt scotch.

Shullaw is a third-shift foundry worker — too shy to take public speaking in high school — who made her first speech on the floor of the Peoria City Council, blasting the police force for neglecting the city’s neighborhoods.

But after a year of newspaper and television stories about how to improve leadership, how to nurture it, how to diversify it, Shullaw has emerged as a new model of civic leadership — less wedded to the establishment but tied much more closely to the community.

The Peoria paper, in marking the decline of one type of civic leader, helped elevate another, one that holds great potential for the city.

Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

Who will take the place of the men and women who’ve built this city? Where is the next generation of leaders? Jack Brimeyer heard it in Peoria, bubbling up into every conversation about civic life.

But Peoria’s story is a story of our time, a story of life in the United States at the end of the 20th Century.

When local banks merge with national corporations, the people making decisions about a community’s future are suddenly hundreds, or thousands, of miles away. When huge national chains buy up local retailers, the well-heeled businessmen who used to assume chairmanships of local charities and arts organizations are gone. When corporations downsize, employees are squeezed, leaving little time for volunteer work. The stay-at-home “housewife,” with hours to spare for unpaid work, is an anachronism.

A tectonic shift is taking place in society and there was deep anxiety in Peoria about where the city would be left when the pieces came to rest.

The question was how to get at the story, journalistically. As Brimeyer put it, “This story doesn’t have your clear-cut good guys and bad guys, your fraud to be investigated and exposed. How could we get our arms around it?”

Brimeyer had not heard the term “civic journalism” but he’d been practicing it without knowing it. In 1994, the Journal Star had run a series on the problem of teen pregnancies. The stories included “talking points,” in hopes of sparking discussions at family dinner tables or local club meetings, and concluded with a solutions-oriented town meeting.

From the meeting, people formed a task force interested in pursuing solutions. They went to the United Way for sponsorship and got a grant to study the different agencies working to prevent teen pregnancies. The task force convened a second community meeting to share its findings and suggestions and persuaded churches and non-profit groups to adopt many of the program ideas for reducing teen pregnancy.

“This story doesn’t have your clear-cut good guys and bad guys, your fraud to be investigated and exposed. How could we get our arms around it?” — Jack Brimeyer

Ironically, it is non-journalists — the head of the Peoria Chamber of Commerce and the director of the Peoria Area Community Foundation — who take credit for discovering that such projects were eligible for financial assistance from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and persuading Brimeyer to take advantage of the opportunity.

Brimeyer says he recognized that $20,000 from the Pew Center would cover a small fraction of the actual cost of a project on leadership (he estimated in print that those costs would top $100,000). But the money could pay for surveys that might put meat on the bones of his idea.

Brimeyer says he was also intrigued with the idea of collaborating with television and radio journalists who would normally be his competitors. (Such collaborations were, at the time, pre-requisites for Pew Center funds.) He found willing partners at the local CBS affiliate, WMBD-TV and radio, and at Peoria’s public radio and television stations. Then he put the whole group together — colleges, media, even the Chamber and community foundation, as ex-officio members — on a steering committee and was named chairman.

Defining the Issue

The steering committee spent six months planning the project. Reporting started with the Journal Star itself. Brimeyer called a newsroom-wide brainstorming session. His purpose was two-fold: To frame the issue of leadership and to involve the whole staff in the project.

The meeting was better attended and ran longer than he expected. “When I saw how the newsroom got into this story,” he says, “I felt this is something the whole community is going to connect with.

The first installment of the “Leadership Challenge” was thought-provoking, engagingly written and almost sank the series. Community leaders were outraged at the headline: “Leadership Void.” Journal Star editor Brimeyer says he regrets not being more actively involved in the page layout.

“The staff was identifying all kinds of issues: people can’t take off work like they used to; there are too many demands on their time; too many local businesses are owned by chains; they even raised the issue that media attention might drive people out of leadership positions. Then we got into arguments about that.”

As Brimeyer describes it, the editors took their notes into a room and made up a list of assignments based just on the newsroom discussion. “The editor of the weekly kids section took on a story about how kids learn leadership. The education reporter did one on what schools are, or are not, doing to encourage leadership. The business staff looked at why companies don’t encourage employees to get more involved in the community.”

Reporter Terry Bibo was project leader. She inaugurated the series Jan. 21, 1996, with a front-page Sunday story that laid out the thesis that people were dropping out of leadership positions or simply avoiding community involvement altogether. She provided evidence from her long experience covering Peoria: More than half the school board elections in the region were uncontested and some couldn’t get any candidates at all; five local communities could not fill their boards of trustees; local scouting organizations had to hire professional leaders because they had no volunteers.

Bibo’s story ran with a sidebar by Brimeyer, explaining his goals for the series and urging reader involvement.

The package — thought-provoking, engagingly written, carefully worded — almost sank the project.

Restoring Credibility

The headline sat like a lead anvil atop the first installment of the “Leadership Challenge.” Big, bold, two words: “Leadership Void.”

“That was the page designer’s idea, not mine,” says Brimeyer. “I’ve whipped myself for not following through on that process.”

It was not what the story said, not what the series intended, but the headline dominated the initial response to the series. Virtually the entire business community, along with local elected and appointed officials, took it as an affront — a personal attack.

“Anyone in a leadership position is going to be threatened by a headline like that,” says Roberta Parks, chief operating officer of the Peoria Chamber of Commerce and an ex-officio member of the “Leadership Challenge” steering committee.

Journal Star editorial page editor Barbara Mantz-Drake says she took many angry phone calls about the headline. “They said, ‘Wait. I’m a leader. This is a slap in the face at me.’ That’s not what we intended at all.

“We had to go back and make the point in print and in personal conversations that we just want to be sure that 30 years down the road there are people like you. As the project proceeded, that became clear and some of the critics became supporters.”

But it was not easy.

The unfortunate headline lent fuel to a feud between the paper and the undisputed business leader in Peoria, Caterpillar Inc., the construction equipment giant. The company refused to communicate with the Journal Star — on any subject, including leadership — because it was miffed at the paper’s coverage of a six-year labor dispute between Caterpillar and the United Auto Workers union.

Caterpillar seized on the headline to rally other business leaders against the series. Barbara Hartnett, a member of the “Leadership Challenge” steering committee, says the series became a whipping boy in the business community. “For a while, every speech, on any topic whatsoever, would start out with ‘That damn paper says there’s no leadership in Peoria. . . yadda, yadda, yadda. . . and we’re proof that that’s not true.’ I can’t tell you how many speeches I sat through that started that way. It became the standard refrain.”

Hartnett, executive director of the Professional Development Institute of Illinois Central College, says she was stunned by the reaction. “Here were the facts and figures about school boards, about Boy Scouts. I didn’t see how you could argue with the facts. But they did go into denial mode.”

It was not what the steering committee had expected, says Hartnett, “but, by god, people talked about it.”

Surveying the Problem

The paper was able to document the decline of leadership with a series of mail surveys conducted by John Schweitzer, chair of the Communications Department at Peoria’s Bradley University and a member of the “Leadership Challenge” steering committee.

One survey asked local corporations about their policies on encouraging employee involvement in the community. One was sent to members of the minority community to examine what leadership opportunities were open to them. Another went to local volunteer organizations, asking whether and why they had difficulty getting people to work on their activities. A fourth was sent to alumni of the Chamber of Commerce’s leadership training school, to see if they were, in fact, moving into leadership positions in local organizations. And a fifth went to retired Peorians to see how active they remained in the community.

Among the findings:

• More than half the non-profit organizations responding say they have trouble recruiting members. Fifty percent say they have trouble convincing members to accept leadership positions.
• Lack of time is most often given as the reason for not getting involved
• The vast majority of those who do get involved, get involved in more than one organization.
• Businesses with a formal policy supporting public service by employees are much more likely to have employees involved in the community. But few businesses have such policies or widely distribute them.
• Most graduates of the Chamber’s leadership training course did not get involved in public service. Most people wait many years to get involved. Two-thirds of volunteers are over 45. More than half are female.
• Most of those who do get involved say public service feels good and provides a sense of accomplishment.

The surveys generated several weeks of newspaper stories, both reporting the results and analyzing them.

The broadcast partners, however, had trouble tailoring the results to their media. “From the television standpoint, it was a little bit difficult for us to do as much on as we hoped,” says Duane Wallace, WMBD-TV’s news director. “Leadership is a little bit difficult to visualize for TV.” Wallace says he feels, nonetheless, it was worthwhile for the station and that WMBD did a requisite number of stories.

The media partners in the “Leadership Challenge” did short, weekly profiles of less well-known Peorians who took leadership roles in community groups. The profiles ran on both the CBS-TV affiliate, WMBD-TV, and the public TV station, WTVP, as well as in the newspaper.

The Journal Star staff feels the station could have made a greater commitment to the project. One editor suggested that the station should have put one person in charge of the project on an ongoing basis. Brimeyer says he believes the project lost momentum when there was a change in WMBD’s management.

Still, Brimeyer wanted to keep the station involved. So the steering committee devised a series of weekly mini-profiles of civic leaders called “The Leading Edge.” Freelance TV producer H. Wayne Wilson — the steering committee’s project coordinator — produced one-minute TV stories that ran on both WMBD and the public television station, WTVP.

He says the steering committee chose people who were not well-known, “people who weren’t in the headlines and were trying to help the community through a neighborhood association, the PTA, scouts, or some charitable organization.”

The Journal Star would also profile the leader in a two-column box that included a mail-in form that readers could use to nominate others for “The Leading Edge.”

The paper tried other ways to get readers involved with the “Leadership Challenge.” It solicited opinions through clip and mail coupons and its web site. It also kept a special mailbox for comments in its “Teledition” phone service.

Brimeyer was disappointed with the results. “Frankly, we didn’t get a whole lot of feedback. I know we were generating discussion in the community, but they weren’t sharing it with us.”

The calls he did get, though, convinced him the project was having an impact. “I was getting calls from Little League coaches who felt they were leaders but thought they were being used as Saturday day-care centers,” he says. “I was getting calls from ministers who were so frustrated that in their congregations there was only a handful of people they could call on and nobody else would step forward. Some of them, as the project unwound, started doing sermons on leadership and followership. So the word was getting out there.”

Why People Don’t Get Involved

In August and September, the “Leadership Challenge” sponsored another survey. This time, Illinois Central College conducted a telephone poll of 509 Peorians designed to get at why people choose not to get involved.

Statistics professor Joe Pitlik found the results disturbing — particularly the finding that nearly half of those surveyed felt they had no obligation to serve their community.

“That’s the one thing I looked at,” Pitlik told project editor Bibo. “A substantial number of people don’t think they have to give back to the community. They can take out as much as they want but they don’t have to give anything back.”

The survey uncovered other intriguing attitudes:

• Again, a lack of time was cited as the reason for not getting involved in community projects by two-thirds of those polled. Seventy percent said they would take a more active role if their job were less demanding and 72 percent cited the demands of family.
• Even more people, however — 81 percent — said they would take a more active role “if the established leaders made me feel welcome.” More than a third said they thought most organizations and leaders have a closed club, not open to outsiders.
• Another large majority blamed public scrutiny for the lack of community involvement. Sixty-two percent said the news media are too critical of leaders. Seventy-three percent said they would get more involved if they could be assured the media would not criticize them.
• Many more people wanted to be involved. Ninety percent said they would get involved in civic issues that directly affected them, their family or their neighborhood. Seventy percent said they would get involved if a friend asked; 56 percent, if an employer asked; 85 percent, if someone encouraged them and showed them the ropes.

Before running the results, the Journal Star decided to test the perceptions the survey revealed against the real-life experience of some of Peoria’s leaders. The paper held four “community roundtables” involving some 50 people — labor leaders, business leaders, ministers, elected officials and others — to react to the findings.

A meeting of leaders. Peoria Journal Star Photo/Leslie Renken Calvin Butler leads the “blue group,” one of six panels that analyzed the needs and solutions for improved area leadership, during the “Leadership Challenge” town meeting Nov. 18, 1996 at Peoria’s Lakeview YWCA.

The groups were granted confidentiality so they could speak frankly. Some of their remarks were printed along with the survey, to put the results in perspective.

For example, several roundtable participants who are in the public eye said they didn’t find media scrutiny to be a drawback to public service and that those polled were probably overestimating media coverage of public service.

However, several agreed with the survey’s findings that people would get more involved if organizations welcomed newcomers more. “What stands out, after 13 years of volunteer management is mentoring,” one participant is quoted as saying in the story. “There has to be someone there guiding, giving information, developing the all-important relationship. It attacks the ‘Nobody asked me’ excuse.”

The Town Meeting

The series culminated in a town meeting on Monday evening, Nov. 18, 1996, attended by more than 120 people. Peoria civic leader Rebekah Bourland led the session. She says the most important part of her job that evening was to keep people focused on solutions.

“We didn’t want any more identifying problems. That was done (in the polls and stories leading up to the meeting). And there was surprisingly little griping.”

Based on the poll results and community roundtables, the “Leadership Challenge” identified five obstacles to leadership: Access, training, knowledge, time and rewards. The audience broke into six groups to brainstorm how to overcome the obstacles. By the end of the evening there were 147 suggestions, ranging from the philosophical (leaders and volunteers should be appreciated) to the concrete (a database to match volunteers with organizations that need them).

Most of the participants signed commitment cards indicating they’d be willing to work to see the solutions through, then the meeting adjourned. The journalism project was essentially over.

No Dead Dogs Here

Jack Brimeyer didn’t want another dead dog. The Journal Star editor has this story he tells of a little boy whose beloved dog died. The boy’s mother — knowing he’d be devastated — tries to soften the news by saying, “Johnny, your dog has gone to be with the baby Jesus.” To which a puzzled Johnny replies, “Mommy, what does the baby Jesus want with a dead dog?”

To Brimeyer, the dead dog is a metaphor for the mega-projects that papers crank up, and pour their blood, sweat and tears into — and that run and die on the page. The paper may spend months researching and writing, revealing shocking, horrifying, outrageous facts, but the next day. . . it’s fish wrap. Or, as Brimeyer puts it, “The newspapers say, ‘Here’s your dead dog. Anybody want it?’ And nobody does. Nothing happens.”

So, from the beginning, Brimeyer planned his project to outlast the paper’s involvement. He wanted, in the term of art, a “hand off” to the community.

His method was to include, on his original steering committee, ex-officio, non-journalist members, including the president of the Chamber of Commerce and the head of the Peoria Area Community Foundation and the two local colleges. It was his hope that he could hand them the results of the town meeting and step back and that they would metamorphose into a “Leadership Coalition,” that would somehow implement the suggestions, with a ready-made base of volunteers who’d signed commitment cards.

It didn’t work out that way.

Brimeyer’s “dog” came to life, but it did so in complex and unexpected ways. Project leader Bibo has a different metaphor for the project.

“This is like surfing,” she says. “You get prepared, you learn a set of skills, but you don’t tell the waves where to go. You say ‘I’m gonna catch this wave and see where it takes me.’ It’s scary, it’s risky, but it’s fun and exciting, too.”

Creating the Capacity for Change

“It was one of those magical alignments of the planets,” Hartnett says. She was representing Illinois Central College (ICC) on the “Leadership Challenge” steering committee. And at the same time, her job at ICC was to start a training program for community organizations called the “Center for Non-Profit Excellence.”

The “Leadership Challenge” town meeting generated recommendations such as: Train leaders to work effectively with media; train leaders on how to conduct a meeting, understand budgets and organize priorities; teach leaders how to delegate and follow up; help leaders develop listening skills and consensus-building skills. Those were the very things the Center for Non-Profit Excellence was designed to do.

97 neighborhood meeting. Photo: Fred Zwicky/Peoria Journal Star More than 400 Peorians gather in a circle at the Peoria Civic Center to discuss neighborhood issues at a July 1997 conference organized by the Neighborhood Development Commission. After developing key issues, the main group broke up into smaller focus groups.

The “Leadership Challenge” steering committee was looking for a new entity to take over the project for the next phase, implementing solutions. It seemed natural for the Center for Non-Profit Excellence to be that entity.

The first project was the creation of a “Neighborhood College” at ICC to teach leadership skills to neighborhood activists.

What had become clear from the newspaper series was that leadership had drastically changed. No longer could Peoria depend on wealthy businessmen and their Junior League wives to invigorate civic life. That role would go to people who did not have the kind of time that previous civic leaders did. They would work in shorter blocks of time. Thus, you needed more people. You had to tap new sources. There were people willing to take on the role, the surveys showed, but they needed help. And they would inevitably want to work on different kinds of projects, projects closer to home.

ICC received a grant from the Pew Partnership for Civic Change to create the Neighborhood College and other, smaller projects stemming from the “Leadership Challenge.”

In addition, Brimeyer found he had $6,000 left over from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. ICC professor Pitlik had decided to donate his survey services, so Brimeyer turned the money into mini-grants to fund leadership development projects. Some went to ICC for the neighborhood college. Some went to enable a neighborhood organization to conduct a leadership training series and some went to help the Chamber of Commerce place graduates of its leadership training class on the boards of non-profit organizations.

Perhaps the series’ biggest contribution to Peoria was what many people described as creating an environment in which new kinds of leaders could flourish.

Rethinking How Things Happen

Bud Grieves felt a nerve tingle when he read the “Leadership Challenge.” He was one of those wealthy businessmen who might have put up his defenses at the series. But instead, he says, “It made me stop and think. I was at the stage in my life when I was where I wanted to be financially and I had the time to give, and it made me pause and think: There is a time when you need to give back.”

With no previous political experience, Grieves ran for mayor and won. He says the series influenced him to run. (In fact, eight candidates ran for mayor in the election that followed the “Leadership Challenge,” far more than had run in recent decades.)

The “Leadership Challenge” steering committee saw an opportunity in his election and seized it. Within weeks of his inauguration, Hartnett, along with Roberta Parks from the Chamber of Commerce and George Kreiss from the community foundation paid a call on Mayor Grieves.

“We spoke to him about trying to coordinate leadership,” Hartnett recalls, “and the mayor came up with the Neighborhood Development Commission (NDC) to be the structure in Peoria that would be the agent of change in the community.”

Grieves appointed city planner Pat Landes to be the primary staff member and composed the commission with heavy representation from neighborhood associations. He appointed as chairman former City Councilman Dave Koehler, who’d run against him for mayor on a platform of building up neighborhoods.

Grieves charged the commission with implementing a strategic plan for Peoria’s neighborhoods. In fact, he said, it would be the NDC — not the city staff — who would determine how $1.5 million in Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) would be spent.

Landes, Hartnett and others on their staffs sprang into action. In July 1997, they convened a three-day “Neighborhood Conference,” which involved more than 300 people in developing a citywide action plan.

Many who attended the conference had never been active in civic life before. Others had limited their involvement to their immediate neighborhoods. The conference had no pre-set agenda, which gave the participants full rein for their ideas.

Koehler says the staff was nervous about the event. “Had it fallen on its face,” he says, “it would have set us back. However, it was the kind of thing some of us felt intuitively was bound to work. It was an experiment in participatory democracy. The more you drive decision making down, the more you create ownership and responsibility, the better the decision, and the greater the likelihood they’ll work to make it happen because they’re invested in it.”

The conference was, by all accounts, a huge success. Many of those who participated went on to form neighborhood associations and become active in the NDC.

The commission submitted its first CDBG spending proposal to City Council within a year of being created.

97 neighborhood meeting group. Photo: Fred Zwicky/Peoria Journal Star As Frank Corso of Peoria writes down group ideas, the Rev. Tony Pierce of Peoria leads one of many discussion groups during the Neighborhood Conference at the Peoria Civic Center in July 1997.

“We granted money to things that we’ve never funded in the past and never would have dreamed of funding,” says Ross Black, a city neighborhood development specialist, things like community newsletters, special garbage cans for rat eradication, funding to turn vacant lots into small parks. “That becomes a real focal point for that neighborhood and that becomes a victory for the people who live around there,” says Black.

The spending proposal still had to pass through the City Council’s approval process. But says Hartnett, “This was a significant rethinking of how things happen in Peoria.”

A New Generation of Leaders

The Neighborhood Development Commission met in the Peoria Public Library on a cool night in June of 1998, one month after submitting its first CDBG spending plan. The new faces of leadership in Peoria were arrayed around the room.

At the head table was Commissioner Cartheda Welch. Welch had volunteered quietly on neighborhood projects for years until she got accepted to the Neighborhood College. She had what Hartnett calls “raw leadership talent,” which the training unleashed. She went from there to the Chamber of Commerce’s leadership training and now sits on three boards, including the County Health Department’s, where she is on the search team choosing a new executive director.

“This role has changed me as a person. I can deal with all races of people, all races,” says Welch, who is African American. “I have more resources. I know how to dial a phone and make a connection… This is my calling, to make my community better if I can.”

Also attending the NDC meeting was Walter Ratledge. Ratledge had never been involved in the community but he was disturbed by some neighborhood problems and decided to attend the Neighborhood Conference in July 1997. He went home and started a neighborhood association, then enrolled in the Neighborhood College and used his newly learned skills to clear out some problem neighbors — a scrap metal business and landscaper who were violating zoning codes.

“We reclaimed our neighborhood and everybody’s a lot happier,” says Ratledge. But now he finds he’s in demand. “Once you get recognized, they start asking you to do stuff, sometimes five nights in a row. And I’m trying to make a living! But it’s been very rewarding.”

Two seats away from Ratledge was Marti Shullaw. Shullaw had just come from the after-school program she runs in her neighborhood. Shullaw says she never even knew what a neighborhood association was until she moved to her house in Peoria’s Center Bluff area. But she learned fast when she found out the house was in the middle of a notorious drug market.

“I got mad,” she says, “and I decided I was gonna coerce the police if I had to. I kept going to them and hollered loud enough and long enough that they came in and started doing sweeps. And that made the drug dealers mad. They told me they own this area and I’d be the first one to leave. I just handed them a flyer and told them there was a neighborhood association meeting and they were welcome to come.”

As the drug activity receded, she discovered the next most pressing problem: young kids with nothing to do after school. She convinced Peoria county government to give her $23,000 to start a homework program. “I told them it costs $60,000 a year to house a kid in a correctional facility. If I save just one kid, we save $40,000. If I save two, heck, we’re rich.”

There is no step-by-step link joining Welch, Ratledge and Shullaw to the “Leadership Challenge.” But what is generally agreed is that the series created an environment in which the contribution each was making could be recognized as leadership and encouraged and spread. And that Peoria is better for it.

When Shullaw reflects on her life since joining the neighborhood association, she has to concede, “It would have been easier to move.” But as she looks around at the children clambering into her after-school program, she confesses, “I don’t know that I’d be able to give up the fight now.”