One
of the big Richmond news stories in recent days has
been the announced departure of the Richmond Braves,
the city’s AAA minor league baseball team. The old
baseball stadium, the Diamond, is crumbling but
regional leaders couldn’t pull their act together
to figure out where to build a new stadium or how to
pay for it. So the Braves announced they’re moving
to Gwinnett County, Ga.
Yeah, we got the ol'
tomahawk right between the eyes.
Many locals regard the
loss of the Braves as the greatest disaster since
the retreating Confederate army set the city ablaze
in 1865. No question, the inability
to organize a competitive offer is proof of
dysfunctional leadership at some level. But is the
departure of a minor league baseball team really
such a catastrophe? Even in a metropolitan region approaching one million people, there are so many
worthy civic causes to support and there's a limited
reservoir of funding to pay for them all.
We've
got museums out the wazoo -- the Virginia Museum of
Fine Arts and the Science Museum of Virginia
foremost among them. The Virginia Historical Society
has a museum devoted to history, as does the Museum
of the Confederacy and, don't forget, the Valentine
Museum. We've got a symphony, a ballet, multiple
performing arts locales, a speakers forum, a world
affairs council, several amateur athletic
leagues and more performing arts groups than I can
count. Oh, we've also got the Lewis Ginter Botanical
Garden and Maymount, a combination garden-petting
zoo. And did I mention the six institutions of
higher education, including community colleges?
Every one of them has grand plans.
Of course, there's
also
the United Way and the multitude of organizations
that serve the misfortunate: the poor, the homeless,
the illiterate, the abused and the orphans.
Even
after you've hit up your elected representatives for pork-barrel earmarks, and you've
issued all the capital- funding bonds the rating
agencies will let you get away with, and you've
soaked the local philanthropists for all they can
give, there's only so much money to go around. So,
you have to make choices. And when push came to
shove, Richmonders decided they really didn't care
enough about minor league baseball to cough up the
money for a stadium.
Throughout
the R-Braves controversy, however, there's one set of
questions that Richmonders have failed to ask
themselves. If not a baseball stadium... what?
Should we invest community dollars in different
entertainment venues -- like a performing arts
center? Or, to take a different tack, should we help the poor
and afflicted? Or, to go another direction entirely,
should we build our institutions
of knowledge creation? Finally, and most important,
whatever our choice, how does it fit into a larger
vision of the kind of place we want Richmond to
become? Richmonders
shave fumed and fulminated about the R-Braves in a
conceptual vacuum. The blinders may fall,
however, when civic leaders assemble a 2015 Metro
Future Task Force to establish a strategic vision. With a little prodding,
the Task Force may do more than compile an
undifferentiated wish list
of community projects that appeal to a wide
cross-section of the region. Hopefully, it will set priorities.
In
a recent column, "Vision
Impaired," I laid out a framework for
analyzing regional issues affecting the Richmond
metro area and setting priorities for collective
action. Normally such discussions revolve around
what government can do. But government can't do it
all, and with this column I shift the focus to what
the community can do through the use of
not-for-profit enterprises -- what people commonly
refer to as the civic realm.
The Richmond region,
indeed every region, needs
a strategic plan to guide investment in civic
projects. Such a plan should be flexible enough to
incorporate new priorities, and it should not bind
individual philanthropists in any way. But, by
reflecting the carefully considered priorities of
the community, such a plan would give donors,
sponsors and elected officials with power over
earmarks a dispassionate tool for sifting through the
seemingly infinite choices.
Regions
have four strategic alternatives for allocating their
civic resources:
Knowledge
creation. For the most part, contributions to
knowledge creation equate to supporting
institutions of higher education, although they also
can mean underwriting research at institutes such
as, to mention one in the Richmond region, the
Massey Cancer Center. Ideally, philanthropists would
not
contribute to institutions of knowledge creation on
the basis of idiosyncratic preference. Gifts should either fill a significant void,
as when Richmond civic leaders helped finance the launch of the VCU engineering school
-- Richmond had been the largest metro region in the
country without an engineering school -- or to
bolster knowledge creation in specific industries
where the region has, or wants to have, a
competitive advantage.
Quality
of life. This is the catch-all category for
hospitals, environmental organizations and cultural institutions -- museums, gardens,
performing arts, etc. -- that contribute to regional
quality of life. A sense of regional priorities
should guide philanthropic investment in this realm
as well. To
refer back to my column, "Brain
Gain," about building human capital, it
would be helpful for a philanthropist to know, for
instance, if the region was targeting a particular demographic for
recruitment and retention. If the
region were trying to attract scientists, perhaps it
would be useful to support the Science Museum of
Virginia. If the region were promoting itself as a "green"
community, it might be desirable to invest in
conserving
valuable view-sheds or wildlife habitat along the
James River. If the
region were were hoping to induce the immigration of
young creative-class
professionals,
philanthropists could consider underwriting the Richmond Folk
Festival or the preservation and revitalization of
historic warehouse districts.
Safety
net.
There are numerous government programs to assist the
poor and afflicted but they do not come close to
helping everyone who needs a hand. Private efforts are an indispensable
part of the social safety net, and helping the less
fortunate is its own reward. Even so, philanthropists
must make important choices. Do their
gifts perpetuate a culture of dependency, or is
philanthropy designed to equip the region's less fortunate citizens
to participate more fully in the community? It's the
old buy-a-fish or teach-a-man-to-fish dilemma.
Social
activism. This category of philanthropy is far
less common in Virginia than some other parts of the
country. I describe "social justice"
philanthropy as those efforts designed not to help
the poor and downtrodden individually but to change
social and economic institutions conditions that are supposedly
responsible for their plight. For the most part,
I regard such causes as counter-productive because
they tend to get bogged down in rancorous
scapegoating and blame gaming. Often, groups run by
social activists magnify racial and class grievances
rather than preach individual self improvement that
might actually ameliorate conditions. Indeed, I
would go so far as to suggest that philanthropic
investment in social activism typically generates a negative
social return. Others will disagree, of course. But
there's no denying the strategic significance of
this alternative.
My
sense of the Richmond region is this: Philanthropy
provides adequate support for humanitarian causes.
(Just take a look at all the organizations
supported by the United Way of Greater Richmond
and Petersburg.) There appear to be few social
activist organizations -- a
good thing. But there is one critical imbalance:
Support for "quality of life" institutions
far outweighs support for institutions of knowledge
creation.
The
Richmond region may be above average in per capita
income, but it is not a major center of scientific
knowledge creation. We're making progress. The VCU
School of Engineering is progressing nicely, and the
Massey Cancer Center is growing, along with other
life science research at VCU. With the construction
of the Philip Morris corporate research center, the
region has a second major private R&D center.
(The Newmarket research center, which studies
chemical additives, is the other.) So,
we're moving in the right direction.
But
Investment in knowledge creation is not a
top-of-mind priority. For instance, proposals to launch a research center that would
complement the advanced fibers industry cluster --
the region is home to the companies that manufacture
Kevlar, Nomex, M5 and Spectra -- have failed to
generate any enthusiasm. While the Richmond region has a
solid economy based largely on professional services
-- law, insurance, investment banking, and
advertising/marketing -- it is not creating many new
technology-intensive industry clusters capable of
moving the
economy to the next level of wealth creation.
In
contrast to the relative dearth of
knowledge-creating institutions, the region is inundated with cultural
institutions, which are expensive to maintain and
soak up considerable philanthropic capacity. Do we really need three different
major museums focused on regional history -- are we still so
fixated on the past?
Wouldn't it make sense to consolidate two or even
three with the goal of creating a single institution
that could create world-class historic exhibits at less
expense? Do we really need a "world-class"
performing arts center, supported largely at
taxpayer expense, to host showings of
"Cats" or "Mama Mia"? If we're
serious about attracting the creative class to
Richmond, shouldn't we be underwriting more
experimental, street-level music,
theater and art by starving artists?
Philanthropic
resources are scarce. How we invest them defines our
community. Surely it makes sense to develop criteria
for setting strategic priorities and making the best
choices.
--
January 28, 2008
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