17
Sep
2002
The phrases "chamber of commerce" and "bohemian" don't often belong in the same sentence. But the Illinois Quad City of Chamber of Commerce is trying to make those terms a little more comfortable together.
At its annual meeting on September 19 at The Mark, the chamber will be celebrating the "Art of Business," and the theme isn't just lip service. In an effort to create a higher cultural awareness among the business community, the meeting will feature displays and performances from a dozen arts and cultural organizations. Participants range from Ballet Quad Cities, City Opera Company of the Quad Cities, and the Davenport Museum of Art to Comedy Sportz, Playcrafters Barn Theatre, and MidCoast Fine Arts.
The chamber also seems earnest in embracing the Midwest Arts Mecca concept, in which local arts groups have banded together to promote the Quad Cities' wealth of cultural attractions. Arts Mecca is a co-sponsor of the annual meeting, and the chamber used it as a tool to contact various arts and culture groups. The Midwest Arts Mecca was also the focus of the chamber's annual QC Direct publication this year as well as the theme of a 2001 Business News Quarterly.
And on Friday, the chamber's Young Professionals Network (YPN) will be holding its first quarterly charity fundraiser at Rock Island Rapids as part of the Gallery Hop! in The District of Rock Island. The networking group has been holding social gatherings monthly and has also started a volunteer corps.
Those are just the most visible signs that this isn't your normal business group. The Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce is proving itself to be an organization that values diversity, creativity, youth, and culture.
The chamber is shot through with the philosophy that growth in the 21st Century requires that communities provide open, welcoming, flexible, vibrant, and stimulating environments to draw not only businesses but workers - particularly young people with creative tendencies. (Iowa and the Quad Cities are expected to face a severe worker shortage in the next decade or so.)
"In order to win at economic development, you have do all these things," said Ashley A. Voss, director of government and chamber relations for the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce and one of the organizers of the Young Professionals Network. "We need to have these people here and create a climate that's welcoming."
Fortunately, both DavenportOne and the Illinois Quad City Chamber see the arts as a tool for economic development. But a comparison of the two illustrates the different level of thinking going on south of the river. While Davenport's chamber of commerce has focused on creating and expanding major arts facilities such as the River Music Center, the Adler Theatre, and the Figge Arts Center, the Illinois Quad City Chamber is reaching out to all manner of existing arts groups, from institutions such as the Quad City Symphony Orchestra to street-level efforts such as gallery hops and MidCoast Fine Arts.
Museums, opera, and the symphony add to a community's culture, Voss said, but much of the "creative class" is also looking for something at a more grass-roots level - art everywhere, from alleys to the airport. One of the things that attracted Voss to the Washington, D.C., area was "the people painting on the sidewalks."
"Young people don't need to move to a larger metro area" to get the arts, cultural, and social stimulation they crave, said Molly Tiernan, director of marketing and communications for the chamber and the other organizer of the Young Professionals Network. Many of those amenities are already here. "We feel we can be another way to get the word out" to young professionals about what the Quad Cities offer, Tiernan said.
This progressive philosophy is represented in many things the chamber does. It has a Diversity Initiative targeting racial minorities and the Young Professionals Network geared toward giving talented young people social and networking opportunities. The Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce has taken the lead on a higher-education study of the Quad Cities, with the idea of keeping young people from leaving the region in the first place. The same can be said of the School-to-Work initiative, which focuses workforce-development efforts on local schools.
And the chamber is also putting together a task force to study the issue of health insurance for businesses. Rick Baker, president and CEO of the chamber, said that one goal would be to study the idea of a purchasing coalition to lower health-care costs for local businesses.
All of these things suggest that the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce has taken a wide view of economic growth, and is willing to back up rhetoric with action. The traditional tools of economic development - tax-increment financing and other incentives that communities have used to lure jobs - are still important under this philosophy, but they're viewed as having little impact on the "brain drain" that's so frequently fretted about in the Quad Cities.
This progressive direction is informed by a new movement that ties economic development to concentrations of the "creative class." Author Richard Florida, in a May article in Washington Monthly, described the demographic group as "a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend. ... They share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference, and merit." While the "creative class" works in a variety of fields, it tends to be young and hip. (Florida's book-length look at the issue, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, was published in April, and his busy schedule includes presentations to business groups and new-idea conferences.)
Florida's premise is that while some big cities struggle with stagnation, communities large and small with a high percentage of the "creative class" - such as Austin, Texas - are thriving and growing. The correlation is no accident, he argues: "Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative-class people prosper; those that fail don't."
The creative class isn't limited to artists. Florida notes that creativity is more highly valued in nearly all fields, and that professionals can belong to the creative class as easily as artists. His study also found a correlation between concentrations of creative class and high-tech growth.
Voss ran across Florida's article and has been passing it along to anybody who might be interested in new models of economic development. She immediately noticed that the Arts Mecca concept in the Quad Cities was exactly the type of cultural energy that Florida cites as important. "I was just floored by the notion ... that there's an entire study on how to attract these people who are essential to economic development," she said. She has been in regular e-mail contact with Florida, and is trying to bring him to the Quad Cities.
"I think it's important for a place to have low entry barriers for people - that is, to be a place where newcomers are accepted quickly into all sorts of social and economic arrangements," Florida writes. "Places that thrive in today's world tend to be plug-and-play communities where anyone can fit in quickly. These are places where people can find opportunity, build support structures, be themselves, and not get stuck in any one identity." Florida measures how open communities are by looking at, among other things, the size of their gay populations.
The idea of being welcoming is part of the thinking behind the Young Professionals Network.
Voss said that the Quad Cities community can be insular, "a clique." She said one friend with a good job decided to leave the Quad Cities simply because she couldn't find social connections. "I can't find a peer group here," the friend complained.
Yet the loss of young talent is "not just an issue here," Tiernan said. It's a problem in many cities across the country.
The Young Professionals Network could play a crucial role in the effort to prevent that from happening so frequently. And the most remarkable thing is that it's not some over-programmed series of seminars or meetings; its purpose is primarily social. YPN did begin with the intention of providing leadership-development training, but early feedback suggested that wasn't high on list of participants' priorities. "What's really needed is just an event for people to get together," Tiernan said.
The thinking is that if young people have a peer group of both business and social contacts, they'll be less likely to leave the area. "This network is going to keep them here," Tiernan said.
Eric Johannes, a YPN committee member and a financial representative at Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, said that connecting young people to each other and a wide variety of Quad Cities venues and organizations "is going to ground them more here. It's going to help keep people around here."
Starting in April, YPN has hosted monthly events at Quad Cities social venues, from a River Bandits game to Comedy Sportz to local bars. Each event features a short program, but the emphasis is on networking and socializing. YPN as averaged roughly 100 people at each event, with about 10 to 15 new participants each time.
Networking events, of course, are common at chambers of commerce, but the demographics of most business groups - typically older, white, and insular - tend to make younger people uncomfortable. "It can be very intimidating for young professionals," Tiernan said.
YPN is also making improvements in the community. The group has started a volunteer corps with e-mail notifications of opportunities, and once each quarter the get-togethers will benefit local not-for-profit organizations. Proceeds from Friday's event will benefit the John Lewis Coffee Shop and the Niabi Zoological Society.
Johannes said in that way YPN can also help other organizations grow. He said he'd like to see the network "get more active in the charitable side of the community" as it grows.
The Illinois Quad City Chamber's leadership credits the organization's staff for its progressive ideas and programs.
"We have an excellent chamber staff," said Virginia A. Dasso, vice president of economic development and community relations for MidAmerican Energy, and the chamber's outgoing chairperson. "They're innovative in their thinking and not afraid to try new things."
Incoming chairperson Clyde C. Schoeck, president of Modern Woodmen of America, added that Baker has been able to network with the leaders of other state and national organizations, and is as a result able to use ideas from other progressive organizations.
Yet even that has its limits. The Chamber Diversity Initiative is "something we've not been able to find a model for," Baker said. "It's always a challenge when we're paving the way."
The Chamber Diversity Initiative is in its second year and has the dual goal of making the chamber more inclusive - "changing the culture of our organization," in Baker's words - and assisting minority business owners. In the past year, the chamber created two subcommittees as part of the program: Education, Awareness, & Support and Business Resources. Yet while the thought behind many of these programs is progressive, much of it at this point is still on the surface. The Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce is still a chamber of commerce, and the organization that's championing the "art of business" and the Young Professionals Network is also the one whose current long-term goals make no mention of the retention of young workers; health care; or the importance of arts and culture.
In fact, most of its long-term goals aren't framed in ways that they can be measured, and they generally address organizational rather than economic-development goals. For example, one of the measurable goals is to "attain an average annual net membership growth of 8 percent over 2002-2004 planning period." (The chamber currently has more than 900 members.) Another goal under membership growth is to "increase the number of minority-owned business-organization memberships from the current 31 to 60 by year ending 2004."
The other easily measurable goals are to "secure the establishment of a four-year public university in the Illinois Quad Cities within five years" and to make the School-to-Work program self-sufficient. (Federal funding for the School-to-Work program will end after 2003.)
Unlike DavenportOne - which judges its success based on various benchmarks such as the number of new jobs and the number of tenants at the Eastern Iowa Industrial Center - the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce doesn't use economic-development data to evaluate its effectiveness.
Instead of being end-based, the goals tend to be procedural, such as "develop an annual action plan that furthers and strengthens the Chamber's position to be the 'voice' for the Illinois Quad City region" and "influence the inclusion of the Chamber's 2005 transportation priorities into the regional transportation plan and monitor and report progress on a semi-annual basis to the Board and membership."
Baker said many of the activities of the chamber are "long-term initiatives that you don't see immediate results" with.
Dasso noted that DavenportOne's goals were established because of the D1 Initiative fundraising drive, reflecting "more of a focus from investors ... wanting to see how that money was spent. ... Our work is much more subjective when it comes to measurement." She added that the Illinois Quad City Chamber thinks that economic-development statistics are better suited to city-based groups such as Renew Moline, REDEEM in East Moline, and the Development Association of Rock Island.
Still, the chamber points to a number of concrete achievements as signs of its effectiveness. Among the things the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce takes at least partial credit for are the successful recruitment of American Trans Airlines (with service to Chicago Midway airport) to the Quad City International Airport, and the funding by the State of Illinois of the $45 million West Rock River Bridge. "That bridge still wouldn't be happening without the Illinois Quad City Chamber," Schoeck said.
The chamber has been successful at the statehouse in part because it's able to present a unified front for the Illinois Quad Cities, Schoeck said.
And sometimes it's also looking at the entire Quad Cities area, such as the higher-education initiative.
The idea of another higher-education institution in the Quad Cities has been around for years, but whenever somebody brought an idea to the Illinois Board of Higher Education, the proposal got knocked down. The problem, Voss said, was simple: "They said, 'Show us your need.'"
So within the next month or so, Florida-based MGT of America will begin a $90,000 needs-assessment study of higher education in the Quad Cities.
Although the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce doesn't want to steer the study's findings, it clearly thinks that a four-year, multi-university institution - an undergraduate version of the Quad Cities Graduate Studies Center - might meet many of the area's higher-education needs.
The Illinois Board of Higher Education has put up $35,000 for the study, and Voss said that the governing body is "on-board" with any proposal that grows out of the needs assessment.
And even though its name suggests it should be parochial, Schoeck said that many chamber programs - from YPN to the higher-ed study - look at the whole region.
"The challenge that we have is selling this entire community," he said. "You've got to look at the whole picture."
To learn more about the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce, visit (http://www.quadcitychamber.com). For more information about the Midwest Arts Mecca, go to (http://www.artsmecca.org).
The chamber also seems earnest in embracing the Midwest Arts Mecca concept, in which local arts groups have banded together to promote the Quad Cities' wealth of cultural attractions. Arts Mecca is a co-sponsor of the annual meeting, and the chamber used it as a tool to contact various arts and culture groups. The Midwest Arts Mecca was also the focus of the chamber's annual QC Direct publication this year as well as the theme of a 2001 Business News Quarterly.
And on Friday, the chamber's Young Professionals Network (YPN) will be holding its first quarterly charity fundraiser at Rock Island Rapids as part of the Gallery Hop! in The District of Rock Island. The networking group has been holding social gatherings monthly and has also started a volunteer corps.
Those are just the most visible signs that this isn't your normal business group. The Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce is proving itself to be an organization that values diversity, creativity, youth, and culture.
The chamber is shot through with the philosophy that growth in the 21st Century requires that communities provide open, welcoming, flexible, vibrant, and stimulating environments to draw not only businesses but workers - particularly young people with creative tendencies. (Iowa and the Quad Cities are expected to face a severe worker shortage in the next decade or so.)
"In order to win at economic development, you have do all these things," said Ashley A. Voss, director of government and chamber relations for the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce and one of the organizers of the Young Professionals Network. "We need to have these people here and create a climate that's welcoming."
Fortunately, both DavenportOne and the Illinois Quad City Chamber see the arts as a tool for economic development. But a comparison of the two illustrates the different level of thinking going on south of the river. While Davenport's chamber of commerce has focused on creating and expanding major arts facilities such as the River Music Center, the Adler Theatre, and the Figge Arts Center, the Illinois Quad City Chamber is reaching out to all manner of existing arts groups, from institutions such as the Quad City Symphony Orchestra to street-level efforts such as gallery hops and MidCoast Fine Arts.
Museums, opera, and the symphony add to a community's culture, Voss said, but much of the "creative class" is also looking for something at a more grass-roots level - art everywhere, from alleys to the airport. One of the things that attracted Voss to the Washington, D.C., area was "the people painting on the sidewalks."
"Young people don't need to move to a larger metro area" to get the arts, cultural, and social stimulation they crave, said Molly Tiernan, director of marketing and communications for the chamber and the other organizer of the Young Professionals Network. Many of those amenities are already here. "We feel we can be another way to get the word out" to young professionals about what the Quad Cities offer, Tiernan said.
This progressive philosophy is represented in many things the chamber does. It has a Diversity Initiative targeting racial minorities and the Young Professionals Network geared toward giving talented young people social and networking opportunities. The Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce has taken the lead on a higher-education study of the Quad Cities, with the idea of keeping young people from leaving the region in the first place. The same can be said of the School-to-Work initiative, which focuses workforce-development efforts on local schools.
And the chamber is also putting together a task force to study the issue of health insurance for businesses. Rick Baker, president and CEO of the chamber, said that one goal would be to study the idea of a purchasing coalition to lower health-care costs for local businesses.
All of these things suggest that the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce has taken a wide view of economic growth, and is willing to back up rhetoric with action. The traditional tools of economic development - tax-increment financing and other incentives that communities have used to lure jobs - are still important under this philosophy, but they're viewed as having little impact on the "brain drain" that's so frequently fretted about in the Quad Cities.
This progressive direction is informed by a new movement that ties economic development to concentrations of the "creative class." Author Richard Florida, in a May article in Washington Monthly, described the demographic group as "a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend. ... They share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference, and merit." While the "creative class" works in a variety of fields, it tends to be young and hip. (Florida's book-length look at the issue, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, was published in April, and his busy schedule includes presentations to business groups and new-idea conferences.)
Florida's premise is that while some big cities struggle with stagnation, communities large and small with a high percentage of the "creative class" - such as Austin, Texas - are thriving and growing. The correlation is no accident, he argues: "Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative-class people prosper; those that fail don't."
The creative class isn't limited to artists. Florida notes that creativity is more highly valued in nearly all fields, and that professionals can belong to the creative class as easily as artists. His study also found a correlation between concentrations of creative class and high-tech growth.
Voss ran across Florida's article and has been passing it along to anybody who might be interested in new models of economic development. She immediately noticed that the Arts Mecca concept in the Quad Cities was exactly the type of cultural energy that Florida cites as important. "I was just floored by the notion ... that there's an entire study on how to attract these people who are essential to economic development," she said. She has been in regular e-mail contact with Florida, and is trying to bring him to the Quad Cities.
"I think it's important for a place to have low entry barriers for people - that is, to be a place where newcomers are accepted quickly into all sorts of social and economic arrangements," Florida writes. "Places that thrive in today's world tend to be plug-and-play communities where anyone can fit in quickly. These are places where people can find opportunity, build support structures, be themselves, and not get stuck in any one identity." Florida measures how open communities are by looking at, among other things, the size of their gay populations.
The idea of being welcoming is part of the thinking behind the Young Professionals Network.
Voss said that the Quad Cities community can be insular, "a clique." She said one friend with a good job decided to leave the Quad Cities simply because she couldn't find social connections. "I can't find a peer group here," the friend complained.
Yet the loss of young talent is "not just an issue here," Tiernan said. It's a problem in many cities across the country.
The Young Professionals Network could play a crucial role in the effort to prevent that from happening so frequently. And the most remarkable thing is that it's not some over-programmed series of seminars or meetings; its purpose is primarily social. YPN did begin with the intention of providing leadership-development training, but early feedback suggested that wasn't high on list of participants' priorities. "What's really needed is just an event for people to get together," Tiernan said.
The thinking is that if young people have a peer group of both business and social contacts, they'll be less likely to leave the area. "This network is going to keep them here," Tiernan said.
Eric Johannes, a YPN committee member and a financial representative at Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, said that connecting young people to each other and a wide variety of Quad Cities venues and organizations "is going to ground them more here. It's going to help keep people around here."
Starting in April, YPN has hosted monthly events at Quad Cities social venues, from a River Bandits game to Comedy Sportz to local bars. Each event features a short program, but the emphasis is on networking and socializing. YPN as averaged roughly 100 people at each event, with about 10 to 15 new participants each time.
Networking events, of course, are common at chambers of commerce, but the demographics of most business groups - typically older, white, and insular - tend to make younger people uncomfortable. "It can be very intimidating for young professionals," Tiernan said.
YPN is also making improvements in the community. The group has started a volunteer corps with e-mail notifications of opportunities, and once each quarter the get-togethers will benefit local not-for-profit organizations. Proceeds from Friday's event will benefit the John Lewis Coffee Shop and the Niabi Zoological Society.
Johannes said in that way YPN can also help other organizations grow. He said he'd like to see the network "get more active in the charitable side of the community" as it grows.
The Illinois Quad City Chamber's leadership credits the organization's staff for its progressive ideas and programs.
"We have an excellent chamber staff," said Virginia A. Dasso, vice president of economic development and community relations for MidAmerican Energy, and the chamber's outgoing chairperson. "They're innovative in their thinking and not afraid to try new things."
Incoming chairperson Clyde C. Schoeck, president of Modern Woodmen of America, added that Baker has been able to network with the leaders of other state and national organizations, and is as a result able to use ideas from other progressive organizations.
Yet even that has its limits. The Chamber Diversity Initiative is "something we've not been able to find a model for," Baker said. "It's always a challenge when we're paving the way."
The Chamber Diversity Initiative is in its second year and has the dual goal of making the chamber more inclusive - "changing the culture of our organization," in Baker's words - and assisting minority business owners. In the past year, the chamber created two subcommittees as part of the program: Education, Awareness, & Support and Business Resources. Yet while the thought behind many of these programs is progressive, much of it at this point is still on the surface. The Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce is still a chamber of commerce, and the organization that's championing the "art of business" and the Young Professionals Network is also the one whose current long-term goals make no mention of the retention of young workers; health care; or the importance of arts and culture.
In fact, most of its long-term goals aren't framed in ways that they can be measured, and they generally address organizational rather than economic-development goals. For example, one of the measurable goals is to "attain an average annual net membership growth of 8 percent over 2002-2004 planning period." (The chamber currently has more than 900 members.) Another goal under membership growth is to "increase the number of minority-owned business-organization memberships from the current 31 to 60 by year ending 2004."
The other easily measurable goals are to "secure the establishment of a four-year public university in the Illinois Quad Cities within five years" and to make the School-to-Work program self-sufficient. (Federal funding for the School-to-Work program will end after 2003.)
Unlike DavenportOne - which judges its success based on various benchmarks such as the number of new jobs and the number of tenants at the Eastern Iowa Industrial Center - the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce doesn't use economic-development data to evaluate its effectiveness.
Instead of being end-based, the goals tend to be procedural, such as "develop an annual action plan that furthers and strengthens the Chamber's position to be the 'voice' for the Illinois Quad City region" and "influence the inclusion of the Chamber's 2005 transportation priorities into the regional transportation plan and monitor and report progress on a semi-annual basis to the Board and membership."
Baker said many of the activities of the chamber are "long-term initiatives that you don't see immediate results" with.
Dasso noted that DavenportOne's goals were established because of the D1 Initiative fundraising drive, reflecting "more of a focus from investors ... wanting to see how that money was spent. ... Our work is much more subjective when it comes to measurement." She added that the Illinois Quad City Chamber thinks that economic-development statistics are better suited to city-based groups such as Renew Moline, REDEEM in East Moline, and the Development Association of Rock Island.
Still, the chamber points to a number of concrete achievements as signs of its effectiveness. Among the things the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce takes at least partial credit for are the successful recruitment of American Trans Airlines (with service to Chicago Midway airport) to the Quad City International Airport, and the funding by the State of Illinois of the $45 million West Rock River Bridge. "That bridge still wouldn't be happening without the Illinois Quad City Chamber," Schoeck said.
The chamber has been successful at the statehouse in part because it's able to present a unified front for the Illinois Quad Cities, Schoeck said.
And sometimes it's also looking at the entire Quad Cities area, such as the higher-education initiative.
The idea of another higher-education institution in the Quad Cities has been around for years, but whenever somebody brought an idea to the Illinois Board of Higher Education, the proposal got knocked down. The problem, Voss said, was simple: "They said, 'Show us your need.'"
So within the next month or so, Florida-based MGT of America will begin a $90,000 needs-assessment study of higher education in the Quad Cities.
Although the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce doesn't want to steer the study's findings, it clearly thinks that a four-year, multi-university institution - an undergraduate version of the Quad Cities Graduate Studies Center - might meet many of the area's higher-education needs.
The Illinois Board of Higher Education has put up $35,000 for the study, and Voss said that the governing body is "on-board" with any proposal that grows out of the needs assessment.
And even though its name suggests it should be parochial, Schoeck said that many chamber programs - from YPN to the higher-ed study - look at the whole region.
"The challenge that we have is selling this entire community," he said. "You've got to look at the whole picture."
To learn more about the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce, visit (http://www.quadcitychamber.com). For more information about the Midwest Arts Mecca, go to (http://www.artsmecca.org).
