Jeanette Pierce and The City Institute
I got to hang out with my new friend, Jeanette Pierce, in Detroit last week, who through The City Institute, runs tours designed to get people to understand and appreciate where they live and work.
"Tour" isn't really the right word for what she does, "learning journey" is closer. Instead of saying, “…and over there we have a great African food place…” she’ll talk to the group about how the owners were refugees, got separated in the ensuing chaos and were unable to be together for the birth of their twin children, about how they opened the restaurant because out of a desire for comfort food from their home country, and how much they give back to the community.
Then they’ll eat the food and meet the owners in person.
You know where I’m going with this, so some quick takeaways of our conversation:
1) Jeanette is brilliant. She knows more about more things than I know about one thing. If you've never sat in a minivan darting through traffic after gorging yourself on Nyumbani and espresso to grab cookies and cupcakes from a place that has baked for Oprah and President Clinton while listening to the history of Detroit, warts and all, you're missing out.
2) Whatever you think you know about Detroit, you probably don’t.
3) Attraction and retention isn’t just about jobs, because jobs are everywhere. It’s about context: both the job AND the community the job is in. You can throw $10 million at an ad campaign promoting open positions, but if you don't also answer the question, "What else you got?", you'll lose and people will go somewhere else. Creating emotional connections between people and where they live (or where you want them to live) is EVERYTHING.
4) A man who had just finished one of her tours became sad. She asked why. He said that a few years earlier, he had been offered his dream job…but turned it down because, based on what he had heard about Detroit, decided that he wouldn’t enjoy living there. “But now I know I would have loved it.”
5) People can't love a place they don't know.
6) Jeanette and I both do the same kind of work in different mediums. Storytelling, absolutely. But it's also building the emotional infrastructure of our places, a prerequisite for all the kinds of economic and community development that gets to go on a spreadsheet and wins trophies. Attraction means being attractive. Retention means teaching people why they should stay. Human-to-human interaction create personal investment, and personal investment creates economic investment. People don't start businesses in places where they don't feel supported, they don't shop local businesses in places they don't care about.
And "care" is really what everything comes down to. The recent Mackinac Policy Conference highlighted that in regards to population growth, as a state, and therefore as individual communities, we have a long road ahead and a lot of work to do.
A great place to start would be to say, out loud, "I care about this place because..."
If you have lots of answers, share those answers with lots of people.
If you only have one or two, you're off to a great start.
And if you don't have any, find someone who does, hop into their minivan, and say, "What else you got?"
Check out Jeanette's work at The City Institute, especially her new Sought-After City program, over at www.thecityinstitute.com.