Robert-Blaine-3.png

What it looks like to lead a dignified life in a community

A conversation with Robert Blaine, senior executive and director for the Institute for Youth, Education, and Families, National League of Cities
-

In this episode of Work in Progress, Robert Blaine, senior executive and director for the Institute for Youth, Education, and Families with the National League of Cities (NLC).

The National League of Cities represents more than 19,000 cities, towns, and villages across the country. They work with mayors, city managers, and other local leaders to find solutions to pressing community issues.

Blaine explains the NLC mission this way: “Thinking about how we build opportunities into communities that have been historically underinvested and disinvested is really the footprint that our institute stands on. That’s the space that we truly try to inhabit.”

The organization sees a need and works with community leaders to try to fill it. One the NLC’s newest efforts is the Youth Excel Initiative, which focuses on connecting BIPOC youth with STEM careers and a pathway to a secure economic future.

“One of the things that we’ve seen through the course of the pandemic is that there are students that have become disengaged. This (initiative) brings together some intentional opportunities and pathways for students to really build STEM opportunities, and for us to really think about how we can leverage those opportunities to create sustainable and durable pathways for how their futures are going to move, especially when we start to think about economic mobility and their pathway towards a sustainable living wage,” Blaine explains.

The NLC says many BIPOC young people across the country have limited access to quality educational and career experiences that could lead them to equitable career pathways and quality jobs, particularly in the high-demand STEM industries.

Blaine points to issues such as lack of broadband in a community, which, for example, makes it difficult for a young person to connect with a school that had to go remote during the pandemic. The lack of broadband also makes job training and job hunting more difficult in the tech fields.

Blaine says the NLC will be working with the cities and towns to figure out how to tap into federal funding to address this need. “One of the things that I’m excited about is that as the administration has brought out new funding programs. Especially through the American Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, there has been an intentional focus on communities that have been historically disadvantaged.”

The NLC has established what it calls the Youth Excel Framework to help guide city leaders toward creating programs that will “promote long-term community economic security.” Here are the three touchpoints:

  • Developing partnerships and implementing strategies that improve access to quality postsecondary education and career pathway opportunities that lead to higher wage jobs.
  • Focusing on job quality improvement strategies.
  • Integrating the critical perspectives and voice of marginalized youth and young adults.
Data Leads to a Bigger Voice and Greater Access

To do this, Blaine says, the NLC uses data to identify specific needs in a specific community then sits with the municipality and shows them how they can match that need to federal and state funding to create solutions. It’s an approach he says served him well in his former job as city manager of Jackson, Mississippi.

“One of the things that I observed most directly was that those who have the most voice in the conversation are those that have the most access. If we’re really going to prioritize communities that have been underinvested and disinvested, we have to find new ways to make their voices heard. One prominent way of being able to do that is to use data as a way of being able to push back against what we used to call the vocal minority and really try and bring into the conversation the voices of the silent majority.”

Blaine tells me the initiative is in its early stages and there is much work to be done in the 350 communities it’s covering, but he’s hopeful it will make a difference. He adds that one of the challenges in running a city is the push and pull between the hard infrastructure of roads, bridges, and sewers and the soft infrastructure of investing in the community and — in his words — “thinking about what it looks like to lead a dignified life in a community.”

“This is actually a way of starting to bridge those two conversations. In order to be able to have that hard infrastructure, you’ve got to be able to support the soft infrastructure. It’s exciting that this is one of the first times that I’ve heard that full conversation and what that looks like.

“I’m excited by the opportunity. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have ample opportunity to mess it up, as we’ve seen in the past, but I think that we have a real chance to get it right. It’s smart people and smart conversations like this that give us a framework that we can work within.”

You can listen to the full conversation here, or look for the Work in Progress podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode 216: Robert Blaine, senior executive and director of the Institute for Youth, Education, and Families, National League of Cities
Host & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch and Melissa Panzer
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.
Download the transcript for this podcast here.
You can check out all the other podcasts at this link:
Work in Progress podcasts

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.