by Sean McManus
Staff Writer
When JCCI Forward, the edgy but determined offspring of Jacksonville Community Council, Inc., gathers for burgers and pizza at the Loop restaurant at Regency Square next week, they’re going to pile a stack of recommended study topics onto a table and begin the month long task of staying just ahead of the curve in terms of what our city needs to know next.
The three topics that Forward tackled this year — Business as a Partner in Education, Developing Downtown as an Entertainment and Cultural Center and Pathways to Power: Moving Younger Adults into Political Leadership Roles, in many ways emerged as a success. Information was aggregated, experts were interviewed, action plans were drawn and there were meetings and more meetings.
And it is the action plans that are the group’s shining stars. Action plans — recommended solutions to community problems — turn a group of talkers into a group of doers and propel a think tank from the world of theoretical discourse into a tangible force for community change.
As Forward moves into its fourth year — with 13 completed studies — the new leadership is struggling to pinpoint the topics they think would be the most helpful to help inprove a community during a time of major change.
“One of the topics that seems to keep coming up is financial literacy,” said Michelle Simkulet, Forward’s program director, who is in charge of gathering the myriad ideas that come floating into her office by e-mail, telephone, in passing conversations, and occasionally, in interviews with reporters. “The economy is hurting and yet a lot of people in our generation are into buy now, pay later.”
Often, Forward, which doesn’t have the resources of its 26 year-old parent, JCCI, explores a topic within a topic — instead of education, it will explore how education impacts business.
“That’s called linkages,” said Carla Marlier, who is vice president of external affairs for WJCT and Forward’s chairperson. “We like to take topics and draw connections between them since most community issues are interconnected.”
Forward has developed five not very rigid categories of topics where most ideas reside. One is political leadership. There is also business climate and economic trends, community enrichment, human needs and community growth.
“But we’re not restricted to those categories,” said Simkulet. “The whole idea of this is that we’re receptive to all kinds of topics. We want to hear everything.”
Over 30 ideas have, in some form, made it onto the working list of the 31-year-old Simkulet. One is the role of the mayor and what characteristics Jacksonville should be looking for in the hazy waters of the post-Delaney era. Others have suggested that this might be a good time to revisit the concept of consolidation. Some have suggested that Forward explore teacher morale. Other topics include ethics, regionalism, Jacksonville as a motion picture hub and health care.
“The thing about regionalism is that it allows our members to extend their reach beyond the city and call on experts from all over the nation to get data,” said Marlier, who suggested that technology is enabling cities to sort of merge into each other and it’s important for governments to be cooperative. “We have been lucky in that so far we have gotten to know a lot of national players.”
One of the criteria that Simkulet and Marlier emphasize is manageability of Forward’s projects. The timetable for the three topics for next year is three and a half months. And the groups only meets every other week. Importance to the community, the necessity of the study, the effectiveness outweighs emotion, timeliness and linkages are the other criteria
“We like to get ideas from the media,” said Marlier. “You guys are constantly wading through topics and deciding what people want to know about.”
JCCI Forward emerged from a 1996 JCCI study called Leadership: Meeting Community Needs that concluded that Jacksonville needed emerging leaders. It conducted five issue forums the first two years and three this year.
A big part of its overall program is leadership training, including workshops on consensus building, how to run a meetings, successful community leadership and speech craft. Each committee for each issue will have anywhere from 40-90 members. There are over 300 active members of JCCI and over 1,000 people in their database.