Transcript of Remarks of Governor Mark Warner
The Phoenix Project’s
“Accelerating Social Entrepreneurship in Virginia” Luncheon
July 25, 2007
Falls Church, Virginia
[Greg Werkheiser: Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to please help me welcome to the podium the 69th Governor of the great Commonwealth of Virginia and our “social entrepreneur in chief,” Mark Warner.]
[Applause] That was pretty cool. I don’t normally get the standing ovation. I miss a lot of things about being Governor. One of the things I miss the most is the fact that Virginia is the only state in the country—and this is important for you students in the room—the only state where the title of the Governor is not simply “the Honorable;” it is “His Excellency.” I was never able to get Lisa and my girls to call me that. [Laughter]
First of all, thank you, Greg. Thank you for your energy and for your commitment. I have known Greg Werkheiser since he was a student and have seen his evolution and dramatic rise as leader in Virginia, beginning at the college level at William and Mary, through his tenure helping me on various political forays, to his activities in youth leadership education, to now this next foray in social entrepreneurship. It is really a tribute to you and your energy and commitment that you managed to help assemble this board and the commitment of the amazing folks in this room. So, Greg, congratulations. [Applause]
I see the esteemed Chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, Gerry Connolly, has joined us. [Applause]
Let me say to all of you in the room—I see many, many friends and this audience is a really interesting combination of elected officials and higher-ed folks, business leaders and nonprofit leaders—and it is going to take all of us to get it right. And, Greg, since he had been a speechwriter for me in the past, wrote up comments which I proceeded to dispose of. [Laughter] So you are going to hear my brief comments, and then we want to hear from this panel and, most importantly, we want to turn this into a conversation.
A couple of background points: I am here today not so much as a former elected official, but as someone who, in a modest way, was a social entrepreneur himself. I think back to fifteen years ago when my dear friend Leigh Middleditch and I started the Virginia Healthcare Foundation, and I was proud to have been involved in the start of four or five other social entrepreneurial ventures here in the Commonwealth. I have also, as have a number of us here in this room, been a funder of such ventures. So I have worn a variety of hats.
Greg made mention of the fact as we were talking beforehand that we need to help define what it means to be a social entrepreneur. “Social entrepreneur” is a term that has arisen in the last fifteen to twenty years. It is someone who comes to the nonprofit sector with not only a desire to do good, but who also tries to bring a whole series of business concepts that distinguish their ventures from old style nonprofits. It is the notion that a business mindset and a commitment to innovation and sustainability must be brought to an entrepreneurial venture with a social mission.
I would admit, in full disclosure, that sometimes social entrepreneurs, especially those who have been successful in private business, bring a certain arrogance to the table—a “why can’t it be done yesterday” approach that can be productive and unproductive, and which sometimes fades as they learn about how difficult are some of our social challenges.
I would also make the case that Virginia is not yet on the cutting edge of the social entrepreneurship movement, but we need to be. The movement is coming out of communities like Boston, San Francisco and New York. It seems that what those places have is a mix of old and new money, where philanthropists have said, “the old ways are not working; how do we get folks coming out of our universities and out of business schools and high-tech firms to make mid-career choices to switch over and become social entrepreneurs to help address some of the intractable problems that we face?”
So I think there is an enormous opportunity here with the Phoenix Project to do two things. One is to create a network across the state, not just here in Northern Virginia, but statewide, of social entrepreneurs and to connect them with public and private-sector leaders. It is great to see Mayor Annie Mickens here. As Governor, I spent a great deal of time in Petersburg, and we must recognize that our challenges and the need for entrepreneurial leaders are not just in Northern Virginia. Role number one.
Role number two is for the Phoenix Project to help universities work creatively together in responding to one of the pieces of legislation that many of our legislators worked very hard on over the last couple of years. It didn’t get a lot of public attention, but when Alan Wurtzel [chair of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia] and higher education policy experts write the history of Virginia higher education in recent years, one of the things that will be important is the restructuring of the relationship between the state and Virginia’s higher educational institutions. The legislation gave our universities additional freedom to operate independently of some state regulations, but the quid-pro-quo was that we asked higher education to get out of the ivory tower, to get further off campus and deeper into our communities. I am so pleased to see that at this luncheon we have twenty-one institutions that are engaging in one form or another with the Phoenix Project. Our higher education system is one of the single greatest assets we have to help lead the social entrepreneurship movement, from both an institutional level and in terms of preparing our next generation of leaders. The challenge posed by the Phoenix Project is for us to do a better job engaging higher education in a partnership together and with our most distressed communities.
Where does this movement stand overall? The nonprofit sector in America is the fastest growing sector of our whole economy. You can take our national economy and look at it as composed of the public sector, for-profit sector and nonprofit sector. The nonprofit sector is the fastest growing. In the last fifteen years, we’ve seen the nonprofit sector grow by 43%, in Virginia it’s actually 71%, an impressive number. That is critically important because at the same time the nonprofit sector has been rising, God bless it, there has been an opposite and equal reaction—a sometimes greater than equal reaction—from government. Government investment in solutions to the social ills that we face in our communities has actually dramatically dropped. When we look at overall public spending, government spending on education, or on those most in need in our society, as a percentage of GDP, has actually dropped by 50% since the 1960s. Couple that with an increasing sense from many Americans that government doesn’t have the answers, and you have this increasing burden that is being placed upon the nonprofit sector to carry the ball in giving hope and opportunity to the least fortunate in our society. That is why we have an increasing demand for social entrepreneurs.
So, where do we go from here? I think there are a few meta-challenges that we have to think about.
First, how do we marry the new energy and enthusiasm that is being brought to the sector by social entrepreneurs and their “why isn’t is done yesterday” approach with the folks who have been in the trenches for 20 or 30 years leading existing nonprofit and governmental organizations?
Second, how do we ensure that we recruit the next generation of nonprofit leaders and make their professional experience not simply a temporary stop-off, but a long term career? Baby Boomers are starting to retire and many of our larger nonprofit organizations are run by Boomers, so there are enormous challenges and opportunities before us. I spoke at a United Way dinner a few months ago in Charlottesville and literally 70% of the executive directors of all the United Way-sponsored organizations in Charlottesville had left their positions in the last eighteen months. Often in the nonprofit world we put that last dollar into extending programmatic coverage for that one additional child, as opposed to investing in institutional capacity building to improve or sustain leadership in the organization.
The third challenge is one I address to those in the room who have been funders. We’ve seen enormous new wealth in our country and terrific generosity by new and increasing numbers of people who want to help do and fund the right thing. Yet one of my greatest sources of frustration, and I can say it without hesitation, is that it’s a heck of a lot easier to get Republicans and Democrats to work together than it is to get foundations to work together. Because every funder wants to have their own stand-alone project, getting foundations to collaborate to take a good, successful project to scale is an enormous challenge. I was chairman of the National Governors Association and we had a major high school reform initiative. We had fifty governors engaged, very high policy leaders, yet we could only get eight of the over fifty national education foundations to actually collaborate together in a joint effort. Under these circumstances, how do we take successful projects to scale?
And finally, a point that brings us full circle back to the intersection of the nonprofit world and the public policy world. This may seem a little contradictory given my earlier point about the declining investment from the public sector, but unless nonprofits and foundations engage with the public sector, they are not really going to accomplish sustainable change. All of the money the Gates Foundation has spent on education during its entire existence wouldn’t fund public education in Virginia for six months. Too often, foundations and nonprofits—and I am going to be a little controversial here—they have this kind of holier-than-thou attitude towards anyone involved in politics. They say, “We want to be pure. We don’t want to intersect with politics.” The fact of the matter is that nonprofits can provide critical cover to policy makers as those policy makers struggle to enact important legislation. But nonprofits and foundations must be willing to be a little bolder than what they might otherwise be. Our nonprofits should be our leading social innovators. But too often nonprofit funders are willing to fund the good idea, but not willing to take the next step and allow their nonprofit leaders to engage with the policy makers on how to take this good idea and build it into a public policy framework.
So, we see great opportunities and enormous challenges, and I believe that the responsibility and the burden on the nonprofit sector will continue to grow. But as Greg has mentioned, we have this bubbling cauldron all across the Commonwealth. We have strong evidence of the desire to accelerate social entrepreneurship in Virginia in the group of leaders from all sectors who have come together behind the Phoenix Project in just a few short months. There is a real desire to get it done.
What we will now do is hear from four of the folks who are on the front lines of trying to get it done. Since I am usually one of the speakers on the panel as opposed to being the moderator, I am not used to this role. So I am going to be one of those real pain in the neck moderators who will try to keep you to your time…unlike what I have done. [Laughter]
I would ask our panelists to say a little less about their individual projects and more about how we in Virginia can make sure that we engage a social entrepreneur network and how we can think through some of the challenges facing the nonprofit world. Four or five minutes to each of you and then we will turn this into a conversation. And with that we will start with Robert.
[End of Transcript]