Giving Forward Podcast: ‘Civic Superman’ with Bill Scheu

Transcript

Nina Waters 

Thanks so much for coming to Jacksonville and for being part of this conversation. It’s great to be with you anytime. So we’re going to talk today about our shared journey with The Community Foundation, which was a wonderful experience, I think, for both of us. But I want to start with a little bit about you. And I know that talking about yourself is hard for you, the humble man that you are. But I was reading an article about you that that termed you the “Civic Superman.” And I think that was so appropriate considering you were the past chairman of our board and you were the recipient of our Prize for Civic Engagement – only one of two recipients of that award. You’ve mediated some really difficult conversations, including some things that you’ve done for us. You’ve also been a shareholder at Rogers Towers for years and a really faithful member of Riverside Presbyterian Church, among other things. I want to take you back to an early civic engagement by talking about the work you did around Blodgett Homes and how that experience informed your work moving forward in the community.

[Blodgett Homes was a 565-unit public housing development built in Jacksonville in the 1940s. In 1960, I-95 was built right near the development, prompting many residents to move and the complex to fall into disrepair.]

Bill Scheu 

The Chamber of Commerce and the City Council wanted to move Blodgett Homes off of State and Union streets, which is now down near the expressway – 565 homes. So they made this plan, and they really didn’t talk to anybody about it. They just presented to the city council. In the meantime, the Blodgett residents showed up and just raised all sorts of fury about this, because this was their neighborhood. And the error of White people telling the Black people that not only did they not have a say, but they were going to be farmed out somewhere that they didn’t even know where. They were both sad, and they were angry. And they had gotten with Legal Aid. And it was a boisterous City Council meeting, as you can imagine. And after that, the mayor, who I think was [Tommy] Hazouri at that time, asked me to put together a group to mediate it because I had just come off a term as president of Legal Aid. So we put together a task force, a majority of the members of which were residents of Blodgett. There was also a City Council person and Chamber person and some other people from the community. People didn’t know each other, didn’t trust each other. And you can imagine how that was. But we all came together and started trusting each other. And we took a vote on whether there would be scattered site housing, where they would have individual homes, or they would be staying in their own neighborhood together. And the African Americans won the vote, like 13 to 11. Their choice was to do the scattered sites. And what sometimes happens in in these committees is the losing side tries to undercut what happens, and they’ll work against it. I give credit to the people on that committee because they didn’t do that. So there began to be great trust. And after about two months, we presented a unanimous plan to the City Council for what to do –scattered site housing, with 100 units that would remain at the Blodgett area. It was just a great experience. And that really sort of was the beginning of a lot of Black-White cooperation in the community.

Note: There were actually two important votes about the future of Blodgett homes, and both votes went down racial lines – African American residents wanted the new homes to have air conditioning, and they also were in favor of scattered site housing as opposed to one large complex, with a few of the homes located near the original site of Blodgett. In both votes, the committee upheld the direction the residents chose. The committee really came together as one by the end of the discussion, and that’s what made it such a moment of trust.

Nina Waters 

So the work you just described in the community really led to you being a trusted bridge-builder around racial issues in Jacksonville. And one of the largest, or most famous, moments was when you were appointed interim Supervisor of Elections after the hanging chad incident in the state of Florida. Can you talk a little bit about that experience?

[The election of 2000 came down to a handful of votes in Florida, which revolved around partially detached perforated ballots, known as “hanging chads,” and the election was ultimately settled during a five-week process that ended up being decided by the Supreme Court.]

Bill Scheu 

That was quite an experience. Well, you remember that in 2000 was the presidential election with all the hanging chads. Well, 2004 came around, so they wanted to avoid that.

John Stafford, who was very capable as a Supervisor of Elections, was very sick (and he died maybe six months later). So he couldn’t do it. So Mayor [John] Peyton actually asked me if I would supervise the 2004 elections. And I was shocked. But I said, “Well, we’ll just think and pray about it.” So we ended up deciding to do it, and the press conference to announce it was two days later on a Tuesday morning. And this was just two weeks before the presidential election, so that’s a big deal. So, at the press conference, is Congresswoman Corrine Brown, and with her she brings Jesse Jackson. And he said to me, “Y’all stole the election in 2000. And you’re going to steal the election now.” I said, “Dr. Jackson,” (I knew he wasn’t a doctor) “we’re gonna have a good election. I’ll see you later.” And I turned around and walked off, and he never came back. And we ended up having a great election, primarily because the two parties had a meeting every day at 4:30 in the office of the supervisor. And Republicans showed up, Democrats, the Kerry campaign, the Bush campaign, and no press, that was the rule. And since I was the only representative of the public, there didn’t have to be press, because there weren’t two public officials. [Florida’s Sunshine laws require a meeting to be public only if there is a gathering with two or more members of the same decision-making board.]

There was always a problem to start with, but by the end of each meeting, we’d worked out the problem for the day. And the next day, there was gonna be another problem. And that’s the way it was, but it worked out real well. About 50 members of My Rotary Club, which was West Jax, volunteered to go around the precincts and make sure everything was working right. They did a great volunteer job, and the workers were just fantastic. It was a great experience.

Nina Waters 

Through all this your law firm never wondered or worried about you…

Bill Scheu 

Well, they probably worried about me…

Nina Waters 

But they put you on loan, and they did that over and over again – which is an amazing thing about that firm and how they give back to the community.

Bill Scheu 

Well, tell me about you, and what brought you to The Community Foundation?

Nina Waters 

Good question. So I was the Executive Director of the Pace Center for Girls Jacksonville. We built a building on University Boulevard in 2000 and moved into that building. And we were able to pay it off in seven months because it was a really good time economically. So I really was thinking about what I needed to do next. I made the leap to The Community Foundation, and it was an interesting experience. I’m not a risk taker. I’m so predictable. But I’ve taken two risks in my life. The first risk was I married my husband after one month of knowing him. We got engaged a month after we met, and my father thought it was my college sweetheart that he had just met – and it wasn’t. And that was a really good risk 43 years ago. The second one was taking this job. I didn’t know anything about philanthropy, and I had a lot to learn. And there were days that I felt like I made a really great landing in the wrong airport. But it was people like you and Andy Bell and others who really helped me and had patience with me as I learned the craft of philanthropy and stepped into the role.

[Andy Bell was the president of The Community Foundation for Jacksonville from 1988-2004.]

Andy was a great president. He came from Winston Salem. He was really the first professional staff member at TCF. We didn’t operate like a community foundation for the first 20 years or so, mainly because we almost operated like a private foundation for a specific number of donors. And Bob Shircliff took on the job of chairman of the board, and   he contacted a few foundations that were doing really great work in California and North Carolina. And he hired Andy and brought him on board. Andy had a huge job in building the assets of the foundation. And the early questions were: How do we build assets? How do we start doing grant-making? And Andy put all of that in place. When I got there and worked under him for two years as Executive Vice President, I was able to learn from him as an onsite mentor. And then you came in as chair of the board my first year as president. We were a pretty good team.

Bill Scheu 

We were a great team. I learned a lot from you. And what we were trying to do, it seems to me, and what you’re really the expert at, is building trust and building relationships. And with your nonprofit background, you had a lot of relationships that nobody really had had before at The Community Foundation. And Bob had done so much philanthropy that he was able to communicate on that level with the various agencies. Y’all were a great team.

Nina Waters 

And you, with your civic leadership background, which was also very helpful. So you came from that same model: How do we lead in the community? So you felt the same way that I did about that. And I think that really helped us to swing the pendulum from a donor-focused community foundation, which is still important, to a civic leadership community foundation. And figure out what that looks like.

So, if you remember, in 2005, when you chaired the board, is when we moved into the education arena. That was a really big moment for The Community Foundation to say: how do we step out on an issue? We hadn’t been known to do that. And indeed, when we stepped out, there were some people shooting arrows at us. They were now saying that this isn’t your place, and, “Who do you think you are?” I remember a conversation with a city leader who stopped me and said, “Who do you think you are, stepping out on education?” So it was an interesting time for us as we were making that shift. Not forgetting the donors, but saying: how do we move from donor-focused to more community-focused?

There was concern on the board that if we stepped out on an issue, we would lose some donors. And there was a lot of work in the community foundation field at that time about that very subject. And I remember an article that we all read called “The Cost of Sticking Your Neck Out.” It was a great article. And it really told us you’ll grow as a result of it. And we certainly did! We went from $51 million quickly to $630 million over 20 years. Unbelievable. And it’s leadership work because people understood what a community foundation does. And they said, “Oh, I get it. I understand. I want to be part of that.”

Bill Scheu 

Well, you and I had gone to that community foundation conference somewhere in South Florida, the Aspen Institute…

Nina Waters 

It was the Aspen Roundtable for Community Change. And that that was in 2005, my first year, your first year as chair…

Bill Scheu 

Henry Thomas went, an African American.

Nina Waters 

Henry Thomas went with us, and he was chair of the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission Board. And so the three of us went. The Aspen Roundtable, which is part of the Aspen Institute, was doing seminars for community foundations, and we were in the second cohort. The first cohort actually got to go to Aspen. We got to go to West Palm Beach, which maybe was good, since it was in January. And we spent three or four days with 12 other community foundations learning about structural racism. The name of the of the session was “Structural Racism in Society.” And we learned about structural racism and the history of race in our country. And we did it together. And the cool thing was, we said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually bring this seminar to our community?” Because we learned about it as the United States, as a country. But in the South, where we are there, there are other narratives about race, as well, or richer narratives in some cases. And so we were able to bring the Aspen Roundtable here with the lead facilitator, Kimberlé Crenshaw, who is nationally known.

Bill Scheu 

And really political chamber leaders, civic leaders…and just ordinary folks, too.

Nina Waters 

Yeah, we had the mayor, the head of the school board, school board chair, the sheriff. Twenty-eight people came together for a weekend, including heads of all the universities, to really talk about structural racism and address education in the criminal justice system, employment, racism in the media. And we were able to put a Jacksonville focus on that and talk about our history as a community and then what do we want to do as a result of that. It was a really great experience. And it’s led to some lasting work that continues to happen. It was called Project Breakthrough: Changing the Story of Race in Jacksonville. And it was a collaborative with us, The Community Foundation (we were the only funder), the Aspen Institute, the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission, and OneJax. It started in 2007, and now it’s still going on at UNF and their College of Education.

So we’re having a lot of those conversations today in our community, and sometimes people don’t realize that there have been conversations before today. This is an issue that we’ve talked about for a long time. And when we did Project Breakthrough, we went back and looked at, I think it was 14, studies that have been done since the 1940s until now – including the Young Black Males Study that you did through the Jacksonville Community Council – around race, and we catalogued those. And then a new organization that’s come in place since you moved is called 904WARD. And so we gave that catalogue to 904WARD, and they are doing a whole Race in Retrospect piece of seven different areas of racism and structural racism in our community and looking at where are we. So it really lives on in so many ways.

Bill Scheu 

It does. And most of it is about forming relationships and building trust. And it used to be that there really were not any relationships of substance between African-Americans and Whites. And over the years, those gradually built up for a lot of reasons. Mayor [Alvin] Brown was the first African-American mayor. He was only a one term mayor, but he did bring some of that.

Nina Waters 

And Mayor Peyton, with study circles. Were you part of that? Study circles were a huge way to really build trust and have those conversations across communities. We have some similar things now with the Longest Table that the Chamber does and Community Suppers that OneJax is doing.

Bill Scheu 

Mayor Peyton had a lot of courage undertaking some of that. He really did, because it was important. And it was kind of scary because you really didn’t know people and how to articulate much of anything. And because you didn’t want to set things to fire, either. You wanted to be able to do things in a positive way.

Nina Waters 

That’s a challenge for us still as a community, and especially as a country. How do you have civil discourse? How do you have honest conversations? How do you agree to disagree civilly?

Bill Scheu 

Look at Congress right now. Thinking about that today, they’re not forming relationships. It’s just Democrats are on one side and Republicans on this side. And it’s almost like their bases are insisting that they don’t talk to the other side.

Nina Waters 

You don’t see people reaching across the aisle. I don’t know if it’s worse now than it was before or if we just see more of it.

Bill Scheu 

It’s just so sad, but that’s the way it is.

Nina Waters 

In preparing for this time with you today, I was looking back at the work we did with Feeding America. And if you can believe that was almost 10 years ago, 2014. Our community almost lost being a Feeding America city – that designation with Feeding America – when Second Harvest Food Bank, which was then under Lutheran Social Services, was in danger of losing its connection to Feeding America nationally because of years of, unfortunately, not responding to concerns that Feeding America had about the safe handling of food.

Bill Scheu   

And also where some of the money was going. Feeding America, which is a national organization, came in.

Nina Waters 

Feeding America is all over the United States, but they’re independent. They’re not really affiliated with or under an organization. So they wanted to form an independent food bank here. And Second Harvest wasn’t willing to negotiate with them. And the challenge for me was that if we lost Feeding America, we would lose the indemnification for grocery stores.

Bill Scheu 

That means that if something goes wrong with some food, that the indemnity is where the provider of the food agrees to make the person whole that suffered a loss or an injury because of the food.

Nina Waters 

Exactly, which was so important. If we lost that, the grocery stores would then no longer donate food to our food bank. And a food bank is like a logistics organization, and all of the food pantries in the entire region are fed by the food bank. So if we didn’t have grocery stores putting food into the food bank, and then we didn’t have the food bank having any food to get out, we would lose the entire chain. So Feeding America contacted us as a community foundation, because they were working with community foundations all over the country and said, “Can you mediate some type of compromise?” So we brought in the mediator extraordinaire, Bill Scheu, to try to help us bridge that because we were in a huge amount of danger at the time. We had Feeding America who came from Chicago, I think it was, and then Lutheran Social Services, you, and The Community Foundation, meeting in that room. It was a really great meeting to get on the table everyone’s beliefs and narrative about why we were where we were. At the end of the day, there wasn’t the ability for Second Harvest Food Bank to relinquish assets, so we had the job of standing up a new food bank that was going to run in parallel. And then eventually what happened was, Second Harvest couldn’t exist without the Feeding America designation, obviously, so they became more of a food pantry than a food bank. And Feeding Northeast Florida was birthed at that time.

Bill Scheu 

Weren’t you involved growing up in your family and food business in some way?

Nina Waters 

I grew up in a little town outside of Pittsburgh called Aspinwall. And my grandparents came over from Sicily in the early 1900s. And my grandfather started as a huckster. So he carried bananas on his back, then he got a cart, then he got a truck, and then he built a store. It was one of the oldest grocery stores in Pittsburgh. And then my father and my uncles came into this store, as well. So I started working there when I was eight years old. I got my Social Security statement recently, and I saw that my dad started paying into Social Security for me at the age of eight.

Bill Scheu 

So what does an eight-year-old do working in a grocery store?

Nina Waters 

I stocked and dusted shelves. We had this little machine that you would stamp the price on everything, and then I would stock all the shelves.

Bill Scheu 

I don’t know that you know this about me, but when we were little boys – I grew up in Ortega – my parents shopped for groceries at Allen’s in Avondale. It was a great supermarket. My brother Frank and I…I’ll never forget that Phillip was the guy that did the stamping and the packing. Well, we’d go there, and he took a shine to us. And he let us do the stamping, which when we were little kids, was just a lot of fun. So I can identify with you as an eight-year-old doing that.

Nina Waters 

I loved it, and our store catered to the one of the wealthiest suburbs of Pittsburgh called Fox Chapel. And the Heinz family, and the U.S. Steel people, and all kinds of those folks lived there. And I think it really prepared me for the job I have today, because I grew up in the service business. My brother and two sisters are nurses, my mom is a nurse, my dad a grocer. We’ve grown up always serving others. So this interested me tremendously – the work with Feeding Northeast Florida.

And we did it all in the background, like we do a lot of our work. A lot of people don’t really know we were involved. We were involved in raising the majority of the money to get them on their feet and turning it, of course, over to them. But again, it’s the role of a community foundation. We don’t need the credit, because we are funded by our fees, and other ways, but we need those organizations to get the credit and for the light to shine on them as a new organization.

Bill Scheu 

What you were saying reminded me of really the guiding things for me, Scripture-wise. First Corinthians 12 talks about some of us being ears, some noses, and some feet. We can’t all be an ear, and an ear can’t do what a foot does, and foot can’t do what an ear does. But we’re working together for the body. Scripture says the body of Christ, but it’s really the body of the world. People can bring their different gifts and be appreciated and work together for a common goal. The other scripture describes what that common goal is in Micah 6: to do justice, love mercy, and – most importantly – walk humbly and not seek the credit. And that’s a good example of The Community Foundation.

Nina Waters 

That’s my favorite scripture, too. It is important, and I think it’s been a guiding light for us. I know your faith has been extremely important to you and guided your work in this community. Do you want to talk a little more about that?

Bill Scheu 

Well, that’s been important, and it led to really building relationships. But it’s important that you really don’t necessarily get the credit for things. It’s just helping people to use their gifts to do what they can do best.

Nina Waters 

We’ll be celebrating our 60th anniversary of The Community Foundation next year. And when I look back, I look at all of the capital that we as a Community Foundation deploy and the capital that that we as individuals deploy. Financial capital is really the way that people think about foundations, the money that you give, the grants that you give. But the other capital, which you’re talking about really, is the relational capital, the social capital, the intellectual capital, which you have an abundance of, and you do a lot, especially with your mediations. But I think the thing that stands out for me the most about you is that you aren’t afraid to exercise moral capital: Where do you put the stake in the ground? What do you stand for? And I think that’s important. And I think in the early years of The Community Foundation, it was hard to do, because we didn’t have the assets, we didn’t have the reputational capital to…

Bill Scheu 

To put a stake in the ground and be respected.

Nina Waters 

Exactly. And so as The Community Foundation grew under Andy’s leadership, and then when I came on, we had the ability to exercise that moral capital. And one thing I remember you telling me was be careful how often you do that, because you can’t stand for everything. If you stand for everything, you stand for nothing. But you helped us to find our courage and our voice.

Bill Scheu 

Well, I wouldn’t say that was me. I think that was you. I think you brought a lot of courage and, innocence, if you will, to it. But that gave you the ability to explore and to experiment and to not be afraid to put a stake in the ground.

Nina Waters 

And for the board allowing me to do it. One thing I learned from you is board structure, and this has made sure that every trustee has had a voice in the work of the Foundation.

Bill Scheu 

As long as you communicate with your board members. They don’t just want to be there, they want a role to play. So you didn’t want to exclude them from the decision-making because that was important to them. And that continues today. You’ve done a great job, and The Community Foundation is so blessed to have had you all these years. And who knows what’s going to happen next, but they’ve got a good foundation to build upon.

Nina Waters 

Well, thank you, and it’s been a blessing and an honor to be on this journey with you. So thank you.