Marriott Marquis-Imperial Ballroom
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Good morning, as mayor of the City of Atlanta, which has over 8,000 employees---we work to embrace diversity, overcome cultural obstacles and to build our global relationships.
In the next 20 years, the City of Atlanta is expected to attract an additional 200,000 residents with diverse demographics, interests and incomes. Atlanta has a history of human rights and inclusion.
Former Mayor, Maynard Jackson was dedicated to instituting affirmative action programs and opportunities for minority contractors. By his second term, minorities were receiving more than 30% of the city contracts. He was also instrumental in the successful expansion projects at Hartsfield International Airport, which were finished ahead of schedule and under budget. Of course, you all know that airport is now the busiest in the world.
Today the City’s Office of Contract Compliance reports that of the over $1 billion paid to date on Clean Water Atlanta projects, there has been 29.5% MBE and 13.9% FBE participation, (excluding sole source or emergency contracts). We are also moving forward with programs to provide training and technical assistance to enable small, minority and female businesses to be able to compete for City business.
The City’s Department of Watershed’s program is the Small Business Development Program. In our first class, 30 small businesses received training to prepare them to work on the $3.9 billion Clean Water Atlanta program. In the first class, all were either minority or female-owned firms.
Those are just some of the initiative we have implemented to date and we can thank Maynard Jackson for his visionary and committed leadership in making minority business in Atlanta more than a dream.
Policy leadership is guided by a personal philosophy of citizenship and community. Core values underlie public policy, and value-based conflict is the most difficult to resolve
If you are committed to making things happen it requires skills in consensus building, partnership development, and working with diverse perspectives……that is beyond, race, culture, class, gender and generational.
I don’t know how earned it is but I have a reputation for building consensus.
That is because I believe that government – and I mean effective government – has to be able to lead change in a community.
And if that is the case, government’s role, in my view, is to ensure that our public institutions adopt and help to guide that change. It is important that the core values to which we subscribe are able to survive and thrive. Inclusion and diversity must be one of those values.
And this is the rub.
It is at this intersection of change, where people invested in the past and those investing in the future can come into conflict. And this conflict is often about the impact that this change will have on our values.
You see this everywhere.
People are not upset about escalating CEO compensation because they don’t like rich people; they are upset because a core value of our nation is the notion that if you work and play fair in this country, you can expect an ever-improving quality of life.
With so many people out there working hard and playing fair and seeing their wages stagnant over 15 or twenty years while the richest 1% of the country add huge sums to their wealth, a core value seems threatened.
The economic changes in this country may be delivering new wealth to wealthiest, but, in my opinion, government has failed to direct and guide that economic change in a way that preserves and advances a core value of our country.
As Jimmy Carter said, “Our values are not luxuries but necessities – not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself”.
I think diversity is an asset in bringing different ideas to the table to maximize the best in all of us.
Well, all I can tell you is how I have approached issues in my public life.
To begin with, I have always believed in the importance in clearly stating the values that I believe define our community. These values may be different depending on whether you are talking about our nation, our state or our city.
The City of Atlanta, for example, has a deep set of values that are a product of its history and the events that have unfolded here.
We are a city that embraces outsiders and newcomers, which is a product of our beginnings as a railroad center.
We are a city that believes in reinventing itself – rebirth is a core value rooted in our emergence following our near destruction at the close of the Civil War.
We are a highly commercial city that values entrepreneurship, which reflected in the diversity of our business and industrial place.
We are a philanthropic city – one of the most philanthropic cities in the country – that is a result of the combination of the great wealth that has been created here combined with a spirit of and commitment to social progress.
We are a city of reconciliation and progressive advancement – our city was the cradle of the civil rights movement because of not only the leaders that emerged here – Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young – but this city was a place where such leadership could be incubated and nurtured. The City of Atlanta is now a center for civil and human rights thanks to that history and organizations – like the Carter Center, the SCLC, and others - that have found this land to be a fertile place to advance those values.
These values are always top of mind for me. They serve as a mental reference guide.
I don’t care what the issue is, or how small it might seem in the great scheme of things, I find that by placing the problem in the context of these underlying values, the right answer or approach often simply suggests itself.
That may sound like a rather simplified way of dealing with complex issues, and I don’t mean to belittle the art of analysis. I don’t think you’ll find an administration as focused on data driven decision making as mine.
But while analysis can help you understand issues and evaluate options, my experience is that the way to persuade people is to begin by explaining how an approach or solution to a problem advances our shared values.
For example:
- the civil and human rights center
- King Papers
- Mayor’s Youth Program
But what will win the day is if I can demonstrate how these initiatives, ideas, programs are an expression of this city’s history and commitment to our shared values…….how investing in the Center, the King Collection and our young people is a way of reinforcing those values.
You know, James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, I believe it is #10, that a large nation comprised of many different types of people was more likely to succeed in a democracy than a small, homogeneous one.
He argued that the high level of diversity (that’s my word, I don’t think that term was in general use in the 1780s) would mean that the only thing that a majority could ever agree on would be those things that closely aligned with our shared values.
The funny thing is, Madison’s views on that topic were largely ignored at the time, but in many ways it was the key insight at our nation’s founding.
Good governance recognizes the value of our differences and acts accordingly.
As Madison predicted, our country, and for that matter our state and our city, has thrived because we have focused on those things that bind us together, not the things that drive us apart.
Let me leave you with an anonymous quote…..
“Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common. Celebrate it every day.”
Thank you for inviting me.