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Issue: 1174 Date: 2/21/2013
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Joe Reagan of St. Louis Regional Chamber on the way forward
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| Joe Reagan, president and CEO of the St. Louis Regional Chamber, speaking at the 2012 Salute to Excellence in Business, co-sponsored by the St. Louis American Foundation, the St. Louis Regional Chamber and the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis. (Photo by Wiley Price) |
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By Chris King (The St. Louis American)
At its recent 176th Annual Meeting (January 30th, 2013), the St. Louis Regional Chamber - formerly, the RCGA - shared its strategy for collaborating throughout the bi-state region to create a prosperous future for St. Louis.
Joe Reagan, president and CEO of St. Louis Regional Chamber, said, "Our One Plan will help us achieve this by promoting educational attainment, economic inclusion, innovation and entrepreneurship throughout the bi-state region."
The American asked Reagan to elaborate upon this strategy, asking in turn about educational attainment, economic inclusion, innovation and entrepreneurship, and bi-state regionalism.
Educational attainment
"Our strategy, very succinctly, is we are an organization united to promote economic prosperity for the entire region, and we have a strategy with two objectives, one for today and one for tomorrow. How do we recreate St. Louis for tomorrow? One way is to become one of most educated metropolitan areas in country," Reagan said.
"Education is the surest path to economic prosperity. We know this - we can track directly from education level to per capita income. In the recent recession and historically for the past 30 years, the population least effected by down cycles are those with a BA or higher. In the last recession, unemployment for those with a BA or higher hovered around 4 percent. That's virtually full employment. Those who have greater educational attainment take greater part in the economic benefits of this country and place themselves in positions to drive better policy."
Economic inclusion
"We operate in a talent-driven economy. To the extent that we are able to welcome and include people from all over the world and every neighborhood in our region - if we do that, we will be a success. If we don't, we are chasing off the resources that are the keys to our economic success," Reagan said.
"I get excited about this, because it marries the social imperative and moral imperative with the economic imperative. We literally can't afford to leave anyone out. We literally can't afford to exclude anyone."
Innovation and entrepreneurship
"We need to celebrate risk-takers and people on the edge of the arts and business," Reagan said. "We need to embrace new startups and corporate innovators - that's how we will be able to replace the major employers today who are going through cycles of change as businesses are sold, which is how wealth is created. We've got to embrace the new."
Bi-state regionalism
"We look at it as a global economy, because that's how we compete - we compete as a metropolitan region in a global economy - and the brand of our region is St. Louis. It's like Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Paris, Singapore, Dublin. This is who we are: St. Louis, a metropolitan region in a global economy," Reagan said.
"We happen to have two states in our metropolitan area. That presents challenges, and it presents opportunities. Different states have different strengths. But people look at St. Louis as a whole community and we need that whole community; we need every neighborhood and every part of the region to be the best we can be in order to be competitive. The reality is political jurisdictions are not economic jurisdictions. While political jurisdictions are important, they are not always relevant to how people make decisions."
Drilling down on inclusion
The American asked Reagan to elaborate further on what the Chamber is doing to promote minority inclusion in the region.
"We are building a team to make sure we have the leadership capacity to move forward with people who walk the talk on inclusion. We brought in Valerie Patton as a VP who reports to me directly and who will guide our team as part of the top management team," Reagan said.
"It's not enough to have a diversity program. We need to take inclusion and diversity into everything we do. So Valerie came on and set inclusion measures and targets to reflect how our businesses spend our money, who our customers are, who serves on boards, how do we make positive change and reach positive growth in these areas."
Valerie Patton leads the successful St. Louis Business Diversity Initiative.
"We are trying to build upon the very successful St. Louis Diversity Fellows Program to make sure those leaders we have invested in so they have leadership training and access actually get seats at the table so we can benefit from their leadership," Reagan said.
"Inclusion first starts in our heads, attitudes, approaches. It's not a soft issue. It has to be real."
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