The history of Building Our Future

(upbeat music) Welcome to Together We're Better Podcasts. This will be the best 30 minutes of your day. I'm your host, Brandon Morris, the manager of Community Engagement with Buildin' Our Future here in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Welcome. - To all of our listeners, this podcast is centered around the question, what's possible when you bring people together around a shared result? - This month's episode is titled, The History of Buildin' Our Future. In this episode, we all have the pleasure of hearing from Jean Moran, retired former owner of LMI Packaging, Todd Battle, president of Kenosha Area Business Alliance, and Tatiana Becanion, the executive director of Buildin' Our Future. You hear the stories as they recall the steps that took for the Kenosha community to give the blessing for the Education Initiative. We now know as Buildin' Our Future. You'll wanna listen to this 30 minutes of how the quote, "Schools Can't Do It Alone" help create the backbone entity of Kenosha County. Let's dive in. (upbeat music) - Welcome to another episode. I'm your host, Brandon Morris, and I'm here with some great folks, great friends of mine, colleagues. Jean, would you like to check in and introduce yourself first? - Sure. Jean Moran, and I am a retired and bottled citizen in Kenosha, and the organization I'm affiliated with at this point is Leadership Table of Buildin' Our Future. - Excellent, Todd. - Yeah, my name's Todd Battle. I'm also a citizen here in Kenosha. I work for the Kenosha area business class, which is the economic development organization for the Kenosha County area. Been doing that for quite a while, but yeah. Thanks, glad to be here. - Thanks, and Tatiana. - Yep, hello everyone, Tatiana Buchanan, and I am the executive director with Buildin' Our Future. - Thank all of you guys for this check in. I am super excited about this episode because I really respect history, and I think it's important. So, before we get into the history of Buildin' Our Future, tell us a little bit about yourself. Jean, let's start with you. Who are you? - Who am I? Well, I'm gonna start with what comes to mind first for me is that I'm a mother of three adult children who I am incredibly proud of. Six grandchildren, one more on the way. So that's first and foremost, and then after that, I moved to Kenosha about 30 years ago. We moved our company here, and it was a great environment that I love, and now that their generation is running that business on my packaging, and that has been my connection here. - Excellent, thank you. And Tat, who are you? - Yeah, I'm not a Kenosha native either. I moved here about 17 years ago with my fiance at the time, now wife, and I started my career here in economic development. My wife's the teacher. We've raised two daughters here that are now, one's a freshman in high school, one's a seventh grader in the local school district. And so, have worked in this economic development capacity for the entire time here in Kenosha, working a lot with public and private community leaders to help grow and sustain the community, and have just been pretty active in a number of different ways, and have a special interest in education, just 'cause I think it's kind of bedrock kind of foundation of where the community's gonna go long-term. - Excellent. And Tat, Tiana, tell us a little about yourself. Who are you? - Who am I? Born and raised in Kenosha, went through the KUSD system, always worked in the nonprofit sector. So either in this region, Kenosha, we're seeing our broad. I love to travel, and in my opinion, there's no greater education than to travel. So, that's a little bit about myself. - Excellent, thanks everybody for checking in. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Now, let's dive into why we're all here, and Gene will start with you. So, how did this idea of building our future, creating this, building our future? How did it come about? - Well, it was really quite a winding path that I cannot explain why it happened the way it did, but I'll just give you the highlights. And the first one I think was being in the business community and sitting on the board of Kava, eventually becoming the chairman of the board, and then having many conversations with Tat, about, and I'll let you talk about this part. The fourth site, 2020, and what would the issues that we would be wrestling with in 2020 be, and how could we address them five years prior to them happening, and so that really got me onto the education focus, and the other highlight would be joining the Kenosha Care's Coalition, which was put together to find great leadership for our school board. And that organization had to spend a certain amount of money, just dictated by law on things that would help the community, and one of those was bringing Jamie Valner, schools can't do it alone, and that just rocked my world hearing his message. It was just very uplifting, and then finally, I got involved in an organization called Be the Change, that I thought that I could take on the world with 10 high school students, and be the change that we needed in Kenosha, and found out that it's much more complex than I thought, and then Debbie Ford called me up, the Chancellor Parkside, and suggested I come and listen to a presentation by Higher Expectations, which is a stride organized group. And at that presentation, I was blown away with the concepts, and then there's a whole long story after that, but that was the road that got me there. - Wow, thank you. So Todd, how did this idea come about from your lens? - Yeah, Jean did a good job of kind of giving you the backstory of the foresight 2020 convenings. We did a handful of those in the community five to seven years ago, and I think the idea was, there's always things to celebrate in a community that you think are going well, and whether it's, we've got a nice performing academy, we've got growth, whatever that the case may be, but then there's also these things that you want to kind of put a lens on and go. These are the areas where if we don't put some time and energy and resources and attention in some of these areas, they have the potential to come, we need to address some of these issues so that the community continue to do really well and continue to thrive and prosper. And I think in some of those meetings, the typical bucket list of things would be, we need to focus on downtown development. We need to focus on our education system. We need to focus on economic development and job creation. So those types of things came up, but I think education kind of rose to the fore as something that was just very, a very significant priority and a very significant building block for the community. And we also just saw that, particularly in Kenosha, we have this very large school district that just has a lot of great things going for, but it also has a number of challenges and just felt like that was something the business community and the community at large could be more engaged in in terms of helping and supporting our school district. And Jean mentioned the Jamie Volmer book and talk. I think that was pretty eye opening for a number of people, just the fact that many of the things that our schools are held accountable for, they don't really have much support or resources to really address. And there's so much stuff that goes on in the lives of our kids outside of the school building or the school day or the school year that really have an impact on how they're showing up at school and prepared to learn. And if we're not addressing any of those things, it's pretty hard to say, well, we want our schools to thrive, but we're going to forget about all this stuff that goes on in our community outside of our schools. And so those were some of the building blocks. We learned more about this strive together, national movement that was kind of a collective impact, continuous improvement effort where communities were coming together with their schools in partnership to say, how can we help? And how can we drive better education outcomes for all? And how do we do that in a way that's positive and constructive as opposed to maybe complaining and destructive? And I think we like all those things about it. We kind of started down this path. So Todd, I guess I'll come back to you. You guys gave the history and how it started and when it started and brief history. So now it's a thing and it's building our future. So when did you get involved with more of the building our future side and why? Yeah. Yeah, for me, it was kind of day one because some of the people that were involved in these four-site 2020 conversations or the Jeannie Ballmer discussion or where do we go from here? Jeannie and I and a couple other individuals did some due diligence. We ended up-- we found ourselves at a conference in Indianapolis that was talking about stride and how it works and how communities can engage and what it looks like and how you set it up and how you operate it and how you fund it. And Kaba, in addition to the areas of economic development organization, has a foundation that's focused on education. And we felt like the things that we were doing in the foundation were good, but this seemed like a better way for us to spend our time and energy and resources in terms of having the most bang for the buck was doing something that was kind of a broader based initiative like this. So we kind of directed some of our Kaba Foundation resources toward this effort and really went about trying to set up an entity. And ultimately, we decided to house it within the United Way and those types of things, but really to kind of create an organization that would lead this charge. So personally, what was your why? Yeah, I've kind of said, I mean, I just think to me, it seems like education ultimately, if you look at the work that our organization does and what we want to see happen in the community, it's all about economic development and people able to have better lives, higher incomes, more disposable income, be wealthier and healthier. And at the end of the day, just to me, it seems like there is an incredible correlation between education and how healthy and wealthy you can be. And so anything that we can do that improves educational opportunities, raises educational standards, increases educational attainment, ultimately is going to make our community healthier and wealthier. Excellent. Jean, to you, when did you first get involved in it and why? Well, I think Todd explained a lot of it. The only thing that I can add, I think to what Todd said, is strive really impressed upon us how important it was to get community engagement. And before we could start anything, we had to know that our community was interested in this. And so there were many people that stepped up and made that possible. I believe Dr. Ford had offered Parkside and we had about 150 people there. And after the training that Todd talked about, we presented to them what this would look like for our community. And are you interested? And they then said, what do they think the biggest issues were? And again, education was right up on top. Then we came back to 30-- so this work is all about, including all sectors. And so we had a meeting at ULINE. They were kind enough to offer us their big conference room. And we had about 30 leaders from the community. Government, faith, business, social services. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but we all sat in that room. And we had a presentation from striped directly to the leadership of Kenosha. And at the end of the meeting said, so silent vote, no one's going to see what you're going to say on a piece of paper. Yes or no, do we go forward with this? And the thing that really impressed me was that we had 30 S's. There were 30 people in the room. We had 30 S's. That was the signal to go. And then as Todd said, it was building the infrastructure after that. So it was right from the beginning with Todd and others in the community. Wow. So I guess personally, what was your why? As a business owner, I mentioned earlier the conversations I had with Todd about workforce development. The writing was on the wall. And I do have a passion for children being able to live into their genius. And I have a fear that too many kids are not getting the opportunity to be who they can be for our community. And I love this site. I think Brandon, my why is that I do love this community. I truly love it. And I want it to be a model for other communities in our country. And if we don't resolve this piece, then that goes away. And that's not acceptable to me. Wow. Powerful. So we have Gene and Todd, who are in the business sector. And you've been having history in nonprofit. How did you get involved in and what was your why? Yeah, so Brandon, I got involved. I was gone for a little bit. So I actually left the community for two and a half years. But I've worked in the nonprofit sector. And I was doing a work abroad as well. And so when I returned to Kenosha, it was I met Gene. And then later on, I had conversations with Todd and Tracy, the former CEO of United Way of Kenosha County, and became really intrigued in this collective impact framework. So this theory of action that strived together lays out. And so I attended the summit at UW Parkside in that ballroom that Gene alluded to back in August of 2016. And I thought, wow, we have the entire community here, all the different entities that make up a community, business nonprofit, our school district, tyred, faith-based community. Our families are our parents learning about this theory of action. And that will take all of us in order for all of our students and our community to reach their full potential. And so it was like sign me up. And that's how it started. And I was pretty impressed because being in the nonprofit sector, this collective impact is about bringing everyone to the table. It's not just one entity to solve these significant problems. And it really does take a village. So like I asked Gene and Todd, personally, what was your why? My why, born and raised in this community, I love this community. I want everyone to reach their full potential and make this the best place. Thanks. All your answers are truly amazing. And it feels very rewarding to hear the history of building our future and your why behind it. So Gene, we're going to come back to you, asking the question, how have you seen the work evolve over the past five years? I'd say Brandon probably the first two years was that infrastructure. It really took a lot to get the funding, the logistics, the staffing, and to identify what the community, what were the pathways, what was most important to us. And when we landed that, we landed on starting with three instead of I believe there were five or six. And that would be smart beginnings, a child ready for kindergarten. He has a much better potential of being ready for a career later in life. A child that is reading at third grade level has a greater opportunity of graduating from high school and being ready for a career later in life. And then just college and career readiness. So I focused on those three. And then really critically important that I had no clue would be important was community engagement. And I will tell you, that's where I've played the most in the last couple of years. And it has been so powerful to begin a conversation with all of our citizens and to include everyone. And it became-- I'm just going to add this for myself. And it's just become so clear to me that unless we include everyone in the conversation, we'll never reach the goal that we're trying to achieve here. And so I'll let the others talk about the rest, but those are the things that really stick out for me. Thank you, thank you. So Todd, have you seen the work evolve over the past five years? Yeah, I kind of echo some of that. I mean, I just think like five years ago when this started, it was a well-meaning kind of good idea. But there was no infrastructure. There wasn't an organization. There wasn't, you know, there wasn't really kind of a network to do anything with. It was just we wanted to make a difference. And we wanted to have a positive impact, but there wasn't really any infrastructure to do that. And now, you know, you kind of best work five years later. There's, you know, active groups in the community. There's networks. There's a lot of trust being built between members of the community that are in different industries or different sectors. There's trust being built between our organization in the school district and key leaders in the school district. And they're starting to be like the foundation of a really strong partnership. Whereas five years ago, it was just an idea with really no way to substantiate it. And now I think we're starting to build some of the momentum that we need in terms of really having an impact on educational attainment and educational outcomes. Thank you. And in Tatiana, being the executive director, how have you seen this work evolve over the last five years? Yeah. So in addition to playing the role of a convener and a neutral facilitator, the Building Our Future team is providing coaching and support to our local partners to strengthen their own services and offerings. So creating more efficiencies within their respective organizations and systems and really supporting the culture of continuous improvement. The partnership continues to collect data and feedback from the community to track outcomes across that career continuum that Jean described earlier. The partnership is lifting up important policy agendas, such as access to high quality affordable childcare. This past year, we launched the first parents advocating for childcare fellowship, which was an opportunity for several of our parents, four parents, to advocate for policy change in the early childhood care space. And we continue to learn from our national organizations drive together. We're starting to focus more on system-level indicators in addition to the cradle to career outcome areas, like kindergarten readiness, third grade reading proficiency, eighth grade math, high school graduation, and so on, and really look at the system-level indicators in addition to how organizations and institutions impact that achievement gap. So that would be some of the work of how we evolved over the past five years. Thank you. Thank you for that. So I'm just going to open this question up to anyone. And I guess Tatiana, we'll start work back with you. But all you guys will get a chance to answer. Is there anything else that you would want our listeners to know about the work of building our future, Tatiana? Yeah, great question there, Brandon. One thing that comes to mind is these problems that we're trying to solve are not shorter, right? We won't have all the solutions in five and 10 years down the road. This really is the ultramarathon I like to refer to. A quote they're really resonated with me the other day is, we are not accountable to numbers. We are accountable to people. And relationships are certainly at the core of our work here. And so community engagement is essential. We heard that loud and clear back at the summit at UW Park side in August 2016 that this partnership would move at the speed of trust. So there's some additional things I would add to our work. Tat, to you, anything else you want our listeners to know about the work of building our future? Yeah, I guess maybe kind of piggybacking on some of what Tatiana said. I think some of the stuff we learned along the way or really kind of maybe sharpened our saw a little bit is I think this work is about making sure that everybody in the community has a voice and is at the table because I think we're trying to affect a lot of change. And if it's viewed as this kind of standalone group that's not connected to the community and is trying to drive change, but really doesn't have broad participation from the community, I think it's less effective. So we had to build some trust. But then also, just in being part of the leadership table in other groups, we had to be pretty intentional about how we did business, how we engaged with the community, how we invited people to participate. And probably that, I think that was something that I learned along the way, particularly with this effort, is just we had to be more thoughtful and intentional about making sure that this group was very inclusive and that the community had a voice at the table and those that wanted to participate and be involved had that opportunity. And I think we have done a really good job with building our future of operating in that way. Thank you. So Jean, to you, is there anything else that you would want our listeners to know about the work of B.O.F.? Well, first of all, I'm going to echo what Tatiana and Tat said because those are critically important things that sometimes get overlooked. The thing that I would add to that is, I don't know if the listeners were at the Inspire event or if they had access to Dan Keith and the book upstream. But I would encourage, if any of this is of interest to them, that they pick up that book and read it because the work that we're doing here that we're talking about today is upstream work. And what that means is that there are so many things that our community needs. We do need new parks, we do need book mobiles. We need so many things, but that's only a part of the solution. And the work that we're doing here is not quite as sexy as that work, meaning that no one might know your name when you're involved in it. No one might know what you accomplished. But 20 years from now, you could have a huge effect on our community. And so I just think that's important. And I think I always want to raise that up because we need support. We need people to become involved both education wise and funding and participation. And so I guess that's what's really important for me. Thank you for that. So Jean, we're going to come back to you with this last question. And this podcast is centered around the question, what's possible when you bring people together around a shared result? I'm smiling at you, Brandon, because you know my answer. It's Margaret Meade's quote, which I always kind of screw up a little bit. And it is that never underestimate the power of a small group of people to change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. Margaret Meade. Todd, to you, what's possible when you bring people together around a shared result? Yeah. I don't know if I have anything as eloquent as Jean. I think that's her statement is great. And that quote is great. Maybe I just attacked this guy, kind of go in the other way. If we don't bring people together and have kind of this shared goal of improving our education system and ultimately improving our community, it just seems like that would be really miss in the boat. So I think that's why I continue to support and embrace this initiative is we're trying to bring the community together around a really important subject, which is raising the education standard in our community. And I think that's got a lot of powerful impact on this community long term. Wow. Well, Tatiana, you have to follow up at the dose. So what's possible when we bring people together around a shared result? Yeah, branded anything as possible. No one organizational loan and isolation can solve complex community problems. The only way we can create real lasting changes by working together and holding each other accountable to the end result. You guys are some power hitters. I love it. Thank you for that. And now for our special edition of Rapid Fire Questions. Tatiana, we're going to start with the year. Are you ready? Sure. Here we go. What's your best leadership quality? I don't know if everybody else would agree, but what I think it is-- I wouldn't say fearless, but I would say I probably have more confidence than I should have. So one philosophy I would say often wrong, but never enough. And so there's times where you might not know something, or might be afraid to do something. I will still jump right in and do it and learn whether it ends up in a good result or an end result. So I think sometimes when you're tentative, you miss some opportunities, or you don't do some things that you maybe should or could or would do. And so I think that just not being afraid to fail or having maybe more confidence than I should have sometimes allows me to jump into things that other people might shy away from. All right. Which restaurant has the best pizza in Kenosha? I've got to go north side on this. I've got to go with Kassikapri. Kassikapri? What book are you reading right now? The book I'm in right now is the Captain Class of Book by Sam Walker, who was a speaker at one of our past inspire events. It's a book about a number. They do it through sports, but it's a book about a number of sports dynasties. And the leaders and the captains on those particular teams and what traits they had in common. And it's not what you would necessarily think in terms of high profile vocal leaders. There are a lot of qualities these leaders have that don't necessarily jump out of the page at yet. Pretty good. Wow. It's Krima Dozerbar in there. He's not? No, OK. All right. Gene, to you. My best leadership quality is a passion that I have to find the genius or the uniqueness in people. And then the courage to support it no matter what it takes. All right, there's two answers. If it's take out, for me, it's Kaisers. If it's cook at home, it's Teneutis. Wow. OK. I am reading evicted. And what it's about is how the system is getting the exact results that it's designed to get, which I'm not very good. But how important it is, therefore, to change the system. And also, the impact that bad system is having on our children. And Tatiana, to you. I'm allowing people to just show up who they are as they are. You know, just be you. We're all having this human experience, and that's hard enough. And so I just really want to create a team that everyone just shows up as who they are. Nice. So I'm going to go on the south side, and I'm going to do Sal's Pizza. Sal's Pizza. And what book are you reading right now? Yeah, a book that I'm currently reading right now is the sum of us, what racism cost everyone, and how we can prosper together by Heather McGee. Heather was one of our keynote speakers at this year's national strike together convening earlier in October. And that's the book I'm currently reading. And hopefully our leadership table members will be reading it alongside the B.O.F. team. All right. So Jean, thank you, Todd. Thank you, Tatiana. Thank you. This was an amazing episode. We appreciate you guys for joining us. Thank you, Brandon. Thank you, Brandon. Happy New Year, yeah, thanks, Brandon. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening in on another impactful episode. This one being titled "The History of Building In Our Future." A big thank you goes out to our guest, Jean Moran, Todd Battle, and Tatiana Buchanan. Thanks again, guys, for being on this episode to build awareness around how an education initiative with a focus around cradle to career outcomes came to life in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Through all the many gems that were being dropped on this episode, here's one that really resonated with me. We are not accountable to numbers. We are accountable to people and relationships are at the core of our work here. So here's a question that I have to all of our listeners. What is possible when you bring people together around a share of result? Feel free to leave your answers in the comments. And trust me, I do read all of the comments. Also, make sure you subscribe to our podcast and share this conversation with a friend or family remember someone that should know about building our future. As always, be well.