by Sean McManus
Staff Writer
Magic. That’s the word David Swain uses to describe that intangible synergy between community activists, business leaders, local government and Jacksonville Community Council, Inc. (JCCI) that coalesce to produce real change in the city.
After personally supervising more than 16 of the notoriously massive JCCI annual studies over the past 15 years he spent there, Swain is retiring as associate director to do some traveling with his wife and also squeeze in some consulting for the nonprofit civic organization that has provided Swain with a vehicle for his two professional passions — academic research and community service.
“And I also plan on resurrecting my electric train set,” said Swain at the JCCI offices on Atlantic Boulevard. “It’s been collecting dust for 20 years.”
Wearing the traditional tweed jacket and diminutive but confident parlance of a street-wise academic, Swain is a real, live 1960s community activist. He has seen Jacksonville evolve from a city that governed on race politics to one that serves as an international model for community-building. And, he helped enact that change.
Swain moved from community planner to associate director and eventually took over the work JCCI does with “indicators,” the relatively modern procedure for both determining topics for study as well as measuring the success (or failure) of policies after changes have been made.
According to Lois Chepenik, JCCI’s executive director, Swain is a “stickler for details” who helped advance the organization’s reputation for quality and transparency.
“Not everybody wanted to work with David because he would hold your feet to the fire,” said Chepenik. “But his vigilance and perfectionism maintained the integrity of JCCI. “Every organization has a ‘corporate memory,’ and he will be missed. If JCCI is known as the conscience of the community, then David was the conscience of JCCI.”
Swain was studying to get his Ph.D at the University of Michigan in 1967 when he watched the Detroit riots rip apart that city.
“That was the trigger,” said Swain. “I knew I had to do something that would be important, that would help people.”
He and his wife joined Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), the domestic peace corps developed in the 1960s to help fight the war on poverty. The first stop was rural Tennessee where Swain, who has a bachelor’s degree in history from Oberlin College and a master’s degree in history from the University of Michigan, helped aggregate resources and fight for the poor.
A year later, a sister anti-poverty agency — one more concerned with urban blight — sent Swain further south to work as a neighborhood center director for Greater Jacksonville Economic Opportunity, Inc. in a city that was dealing with a major government overhaul as part of an unusual city and county collaboration project known as consolidation.
“I would get in my Volkswagen Beetle, and armed with some cursory census information, drive around the city mapping low income neighborhoods,” Swain recalled. The federally-funded agency, which still exists today as the Northeast Florida Community Action Agency, was establishing storefronts where people could gather to talk about how to improve their neighborhoods.
“Then we would deliver those ideas to City Hall,” said Swain. “We were discovering pockets of poverty that government officials didn’t even know about. We provided a forum for people to talk about their needs.”
According to Swain, consolidation — a positive event overall — did leave some of Jacksonville’s poor lost in the mix. During a time when many roads were still not paved and public utilities were scarce, Swain would help people with simple things like trash collection.
“It was certainly a springboard to what I’m doing now,” said Swain. And, like every community activist project in the 1960s, it was neck-deep in the politics of race. “Ask people about the race riots on Florida Avenue in 1969. Some of that area was never rebuilt.”
Swain left Jacksonville to study public administration at Syracuse University, earning a second master’s degree. In 1973, he returned to Jacksonville and “switched sides,” going to work for then mayor Hans Tanzler and one of the mentors Swain had during his 34 years in Jacksonville, longtime City Administrative Officer Lex Hester. Swain called Hester, who died unexpectedly in October 2000, a brilliant administrator.
He completed a doctorate in public administration through Nova University, and in 1979, Dr. Swain, who had been an adjunct professor on-and-off at the University of North Florida, left the local office of Housing and Urban Development to take a full time position at Edward Waters College.
He spent the next seven years at EWC, training young community activists. He taught every course in public administration and most of political science courses. Swain recalls the quality and enthusiasm of students who didn’t have much — most were there on scholarships, and how much they wanted to learn despite their disadvantages. The faculty, Swain said, was diverse. He taught with professors from India and China. Two department chairs were African-American.
Swain began volunteering at JCCI the same year that a group of local citizens who wanted to improve Jacksonville met at a retreat in Amelia Island to start the organization which would eventually emerge as the city’s leader in community improvement.
JCCI, whose mission is to bring together disparate groups to the same table to talk about solving everyday problems, was the perfect place for a guy like Swain, who had been bringing together disparate groups to the same table to talk about solving everyday problems ever since he got out of college.
And the research component to JCCI complimented what Swain had been doing at EWC, which was studying neighborhoods to develop quantitative measurements of things like economic opportunity, employment, budgets and the role of grants. He had written two books on public administration; he was, after all, a teacher.
“I had just been given tenure at Edward Waters when I left to go work as a community planner for JCCI,” said Swain, who began staffing for the two JCCI annual studies and picked up where others had left off with the new program to develop quality of life indicators.
“JCCI and the city of Jacksonville really led the nation in the concept of indicators,” said Swain, who has visited places as far away as Brazil to teach governments how to measure the success of policy. “When I joined JCCI, they had gone from a group that canvassed neighborhoods to talk about education reform to one that was counseling the United Nations on how to get citizens involved in the policy-making process.”
Cultivated by another Swain mentor, Marian Chambers, the former executive director of JCCI, who first decided that it was fine for JCCI to talk about change but that it would be better if they actually brought about it, the group’s intellectual leadership in the concept of indicators emerged in tandem with the Internet, bringing their work into the spotlight with other groups who wanted to target the issues that affect their communities.
“It really swept the country and the world,” said Swain, who has published countless papers on the subject. “All of a sudden I was getting requests from places like Singapore to deliver talks on how to measure quality of life.”
JCCI has studied everything from health care to garbage and has a board which includes some of the most powerful people in Jacksonville. And where most people in Jacksonville see 100-page JCCI community reports and bar graphs on teen pregnancy, Swain sees magic.
“These studies open your mind,” said Swain, who remembers one chair a few years ago who had his preconceived notions completely reversed during the research phase. “People have their ideas about specific ways to solve specific problems,” said Swain. “But when the numbers come in and the stories follow, it can really change the way you look at the world.”
Of course, Swain can recall times when some people’s worlds were changed for the worse.
“I remember when our staff became so frustrated with trying to change the school system that they just came back and said, ‘We give up.’ But our efforts eventually led to the New Century Commission,” said Swain, referring to the manifesto delivered to the School Board a few years ago that led to school-wide revamping of policy and a new superintendent.
JCCI will revisit public education next year with a two-part study, including one called Beyond Reform which hopes to answer questions about vouchers, charter schools and the structure of the School Board.
Peppered throughout all if this is a fundamental democratic philosophy that says that it’s one thing for government to make laws but it’s another for policy to actually reflect the thoughts, desires and mood of the citizens. That’s the concept that Swain and JCCI are selling to the world, the thing that drives them.
In the coming years, JCCI will be grappling with topics such as neighborhoods in transition and rivers and waterways. Participating in some of those studies will be the semi-retired Swain, who said he may stay away just long enough for everyone to realize he’s not actually working there for real any more.
“We’re spending two weeks in Costa Rica in December,” said Swain. “Then we’re going on an extensive camping trip to the Baltic Sea.” Swain also rattled off East Africa, Antarctica, South America, Nepal and the Himalayas without blinking.