by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
The short version: Pete Jackson is an “idea man.”
But that’s not even half the story.
As a community activist and minister, Jackson isn’t all that interested in accumulating ideas and stacking studies on top of each other, creating towers of babble.
He needs to see how those ideas work in the hands of the people they’re supposed to help.
And he needs to be down there in the middle of it all, spreading oil on troubled waters or building bridges over them.
“I think I’m particularly talented in assembling what may appear to be dissimilar pieces,” said Jackson, the chief community officer in Mayor John Peyton’s administration. “I understand the connection, whether it’s subtle or more of a potential connection.
“Then we bring those pieces together to synthesize concepts, focusing so that everybody recognizes the connection and the skill sets they can pool and bring to an issue.”
Jackson was born in Jacksonville and was 16 years old when he graduated from Matthew Gilbert High School. His mother sent him to Pepperdine University in Los Angeles because, at that time, it was a Church of Christ school, “and she wanted me to be in a religious environment.”
“It was, different,” Jackson said. “It was culture shock. It was an issue of pace, an issue of diversity, both at the educational and social level.”
Jackson credits his teachers with enabling him to drain a lot of voltage from that culture shock, in which the young man found himself for the first time attending class with white students.
“I think we received a very good education [in Jacksonville],” he said. “That was primarily because we had our teachers in our communities and they were concerned about how we would perform outside the Jacksonville community.”
Jackson majored in engineering administration with a minor in American family counseling. He worked for a time for Fluor Corp., a California engineering firm that did petrochemical engineering design.
His last project was at a Baytown, Texas, oil refinery, “which was in line with my field. It was very intellectually stimulating, very challenging. But it was not very people-oriented.”
Jackson went into business for himself, contracting attic insulation jobs with Southern California Edison. He also did “very well” with his own house plant business that decorated and maintained plants for office space.
He worked his way up to manager of a Burger King restaurant that, under his guidance, became the chain’s first million dollar store.
But the job that gave him some of the most satisfying rewards of his handiwork came during the seven years he and his wife, Marsha, spent in Watts, directing the Church of Christ’s community center.
“It was called Kairos Youth House, a Greek term for ‘now is the time,’” said Jackson. “We did tutoring, reading and math. We did job interview preparation and took older kids out for job interviews. I did some intervention with families. Just total immersion in the social dynamic.”
He coincidentally trained three store managers who had come from the Watts neighborhood, “which was very rewarding. I had the satisfaction of seeing their lives change for the better. And we still keep in contact.
“I guess I have this strange mix of academics and this human side of me that always has to stay in proper juxtaposition.”
In 1983, Jackson returned to his hometown to take over the ministry at Northside Church of Christ. Seven years later, he moved to Westside Church of Christ, where he is senior minister.
The ministry became focused on urban outreach, and Jackson was named to a host of councils and boards. He also became a leader of the faith-based initiative for the City.
That initiative was sponsored by Calvin Ross, who was the secretary of the Department of Juvenile Justice at the time.
“He saw a need for a partnership between the faith-based community and the Department of Juvenile Justice to bring that spiritual overtone to the department’s clients,” Jackson said. “That brought me into a broader base of exposure to the outreach ministry.”
As Peyton’s chief community officer, Jackson has identified five areas that need a lot of work: literacy programs, economic development in Empowerment Zones, maximizing the use of benefits in those zones, racial reconciliation and affordable housing.
“A lot of it has to do with bridging the reality, or at least the perception, of the racial divide,” he said. “And there is my personal conviction that the faith-based community ought to be as involved as much as possible in the processes of government without necessarily sharing the same ideologies.”
Jackson will provide the mayor’s office with as much information as possible about the faith-based community’s concerns as well as the hopes and fears of neighborhoods across the city.
He is convinced Peyton will put that wealth of information to good use.
The new mayor “appreciates honesty; he values integrity and courage,” said Jackson. “That is the basis of our relationship, which is very honest, very open.
“We haven’t always agreed, but our friendship has been emerging out of that kind of honest interaction.”