Speaker 2: 0:12

And now from the Blue Ridge PBS studios in Roanoke, virginia. It's the Virginians of Interest podcast, with your hosts Brian Campbell and Carthin Curran.

Speaker 1: 0:22

Thank you for joining the Virginians of Interest podcast. My name is Brian Campbell. I'm here today with my friend, carthin Curran, who's going to introduce our special guest.

Speaker 3: 0:29

Thank you, brian. We have with us this afternoon a good friend of mine and I'm so happy Grant Neely can be with us on Virginia's of Interest this afternoon. Grant, for our audience, can you share with us where you grew up and your background and those kinds of things?

Speaker 4: 0:47

First, thank you all for inviting me here. It's great to be here at Blue Ridge PBS in Roanoke. I'm a lifelong Virginian. My parents moved to Richmond the week before I started in the first grade and I've been here ever since. I grew up in Henrico County in the middle right, in the middle north side suburbs in the late 70s during a fascinating time in Virginia history. Obviously I didn't know it at the time as a little boy, but it really shaped who I am.

Speaker 4: 1:13

I went to Henrico High School public high school during the period after busing. It was the most fascinating and informative thing that I could have done. For the first time in my life I was surrounded by people who did not look like me and I was in a place where my family had not lived that long, so we didn't yet have deep ties in the community. So it forced me to get to know folks and to learn how to interact with people that I'd never met and who weren't like me, and it was a really formative thing. From there I went to the College of William Mary. I went to grad school in Miami of Ohio out south western Ohio on the Indiana border I studied politics and religion. When I got out of school, the thing I wanted most of all to do, the most fascinating thing I could imagine doing, was working on a political campaign. So I came back home to Virginia and helped a number of people run for office and lose and I've been there. It's a great learning experience.

Speaker 4: 2:20

Eventually I got connected with Senator Mark Warner in the late 90s, when he was first considering running for governor as a business person technology investor in Alexandria, and we got together and I worked for him for about five years, both personally for his political campaign and in the governor's office and Carson. That's how you and I first got to know each other. But I was really fascinated to work with him and get to know him and understand how he thought and made decisions and interacted with the world, because I did not come from people of substantial means, and so for the first time in my life I got exposure to people who had the ability to make things happen in a big way, and it changed the way that I look about that. I thought about my place in the world and what I could do to contribute. When he was done being governor, that meant I had to find a new job as well, so then I decided I was in my early 30s and decided you know, I love Richmond, I love Virginia, but big world out there.

Speaker 4: 3:23

So I moved to New York City, spent about 10 years living there, working on the corporate world. Worked for Pfizer, the drug company, doing communications work and strategy advising for the CEO and the executive team there. After that spent a little time in Europe doing a similar job for a similar company in Switzerland, in Basel, switzerland, and eventually at that point early 40s decided you know what I really want to go back home. It was really cool living in the big cities and fun places around the world great places to be when you're in your 30s. But New York City is a big place and I decided you know what, I'd rather be a medium-sized fish in a medium-sized pond than one of 8 million people in New York City. Moved back home. I've been doing all kinds of work ever since then. On the public side, I work for elected officials. On the private side, working for executive leaders. On the corporate community.

Speaker 3: 4:26

Right. In fact, you served as chief of staff to former Mayor Dwight Jones from Richmond.

Speaker 4: 4:33

Yeah, richmond has a unique form of government. In Virginia, alexa a mayor, statewide, sort of halfway between being a strong mayor and a more ceremonial mayor. He was the first Virginia has had now four mayors in that. Richmond has had four mayors in that form of government. Doug Wilder, of course, was the first. Dwight Jones served for eight years as mayor. I worked for him during his second term. Levar Stoney is now running for statewide office and the current mayor, danny Avula, just started in that role at the beginning of this year.

Speaker 4: 5:08

But it was a really fascinating time to be there. Richmond. As I said, I've been gone from Richmond for a long time. It was fascinating to come back and see my hometown from a new light and it was a time when people were moving in for the first time in my adult lifetime. It was a time when investment was happening. It was a time when things were being built in Richmond and that has only continued and accelerated and I like that. I think it's important for cities to continue to grow and to expand, to diversify. I hope that continues for a long time. But Richmond has struggled with that practically spiritually, economically.

Speaker 3: 5:49

Economically? Yeah, For a thousand reasons. And during the Jones administration there's an international flavor with your leadership and the mayors and others, because of this international bicycling race, which was really cool.

Speaker 4: 6:04

Yeah, that's my favorite example. I believe it's the best party we ever put on in Richmond. It's my favorite example. I believe it's the best party we ever put on in Richmond. It was the World Cycling Championships, which are held in a different city around the world every year. It had not been in the United States in 30 years and a number of folks in the corporate community Dominion Energy, Altria, others went and recruited this entity to come and bring these championships to Virginia and to hosted in Richmond.

Speaker 4: 6:33

It took close to six years and some $20 million to plan and execute the effort and it was like the ultimate small town exercise, Like so much of it felt like that show, Parks and Rec. Right, We'd be doing a big thing and five people from the community would come out and complain that the roads were being closed next Tuesday because they're being paved and improved right, but at the end of the day, everything that we said we were going to deliver on, that we did. More than 600,000 people attended this event over the course of a week and a half and it put the city and the Commonwealth on the national stage and, as a result, a number of companies first were exposed to Richmond and made the decision to come here. I think things like that are really important for economic development, but they're also a lot of fun, and it's now been 10 years ago and I still, every once in a while, bump into somebody around town. They'll say you know, that time we had those bike races. That was really pretty phenomenal, Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 7:33

So your work now is more of consultancy in the advocacy space, which is where I consider where a lot of politicians sort of go later in life. Tell us about what makes you tick in that. I know you mentioned some specific priority areas. First was you said it was foster care.

Speaker 4: 7:54

What happened to you to make that something that you really wanted to try to make a difference in? Yeah, it's a really fascinating and really complex topic. So foster care when you talk about foster care, you're not talking about something good happening. Right, kids are in foster care because something has gone wrong in their lives already, and in a lot of cases, it's gone really wrong.

Speaker 4: 8:16

We do a lot of things really well in Virginia. We're all proud to be the best state in the country for business. We're really proud to have some of the top public universities in the country. I think it's pretty cool that we got the best best day in the country for data centers right, the powering the internet in the Commonwealth. But we are less, historically, we are less good at the work we do when it comes to human services and helping people. It's really fascinating to look at 400 years of history and think about why that is, but today it is right. And so what does that mean in practical terms? There's not a lot of ways to measure these things, so we look at a couple of key data points and we find the story's not really good.

Speaker 4: 8:58

Best state in the country for business is also number 47, 48, 49 in the country for kids who age out of foster care. That is, they turn age 18, they're in the foster care system and they don't have a permanent place to go. What happens to them? There's a whole bunch of little programs that are cobbled together to help, but at the end of the day, kids are kind of on their own. Well, that's not cool.

Speaker 4: 9:20

So a number of my friends and I identified this problem and looked into it and said we've got to understand what's going on here. And what we've come to find is that there's generations of inefficiencies built into the social services system in Virginia. We are one of nine states in the country that runs the system in what is called a state-supervised, locally-administered way, and that is conceptually. The state lays out the rules for how we're going to run all the programs that help people in need, but it's up to 130 cities and counties around the state to actually execute that. Now, I'm not an expert on organizational structures, but that sounds to me like there's a whole lot of opportunities for things to not get done, accountability gets lost in that.

Speaker 4: 10:07

There can be zero accountability. Yeah Right, accountability gets lost in that a group called the Virginia Children's Partnership to dig into this issue, to understand it better, to work with the hundreds, the dozens and hundreds of private organizations, existing nonprofits that each do a little piece of the children's social services web around the state, and work with the state, current state officials, future state officials to try and bring some reforms to the system, and do it with a couple of things. Number one do it with a business person's eye. Right, like where can we bring efficiencies to the system? I'll give you an example.

Speaker 4: 11:01

If you look at the job description for a caseworker, there's like 37 different tasks we ask every caseworker to do. First of all, we ask them to go to college. We ask them to get a master's degree. We ask you to do 37 different things that range from data analysis to caring for kids who are being taken out of their home, and in return for all that, we'll pay you $32,000. Well, is it any surprise that people stay in those jobs for like three weeks and say I'm out of here, I got to go do something.

Speaker 1: 11:33

But you didn't mention the crummy caseloads either.

Speaker 4: 11:35

And that's on top of it, yeah exactly Like how hard is it for any of us to care for, you know, our own couple of kids, right, let alone to care for 30 kids who are all, by definition, in trouble. One of the things that we found is that, in addition to these policy realities and these operational realities, one of the things we've also found is that there's been so much change among the policymakers in Virginia, you know, changing 17 seats in the legislature eight years ago and another dozen the year after that. Right, there's not a whole lot of institutional memory on this issue in the legislature right now. There's no knock on anybody, it's just the facts on the ground. So what we're trying to do is bring attention to the issue, raise it up during this election season. Right, we want to make sure that the issue is on the hearts and minds of people running for office, whoever they are blue, red, urban, rural, suburban. We want to be able to say steps have got to be taken next year and for years to come to improve the system.

Speaker 4: 12:45

What does improve it? Look like Working with the commonwealth to figure it out. It's going to be some version of greater supports for parents in the system, both in training and in money support right, it costs money to raise kids. It's going to be greater support for caseworkers, both in, again, money and compensation, but also in training. It's going to be taking responsibilities off of their shoulders. Like these are the ideas that folks are exploring, and so the first asset that we bring to this table is that business mindset. But the second one is probably more important and that is a I hope, a good dose of humility right a, I hope, a good dose of humility right. There are dozens and hundreds of people who have given their lives to this line of work and we need to learn from them and we need to help them and be supportive of them and not look to supplant anything that anybody is doing. We expect this is going to be a 10-year proposition before we're able to see real sustained change and reform in Virginia, but we're prepared to make that commitment.

Speaker 3: 13:55

Isn't this a call as a former First Lady Ann Holton champion when the King administration was?

Speaker 4: 14:04

Yeah, exactly, a tremendously intelligent, capable and creative attorney, judge, member of the governor's cabinet, secretary of education. But yes, while she was first lady, she identified this problem and said, okay, what is one thing that we can do? And so she worked with the community college system, for example, and created a program called Great Expectations, which is literally it's partly a scholarship program but a whole series of supports for kids who are turning 17, 18, 19 and aging out of the system. Great Expectations is a way to help them plan for their future by going through the community college system, getting a credential, getting an associate's degree, but as well getting the personal support, emotional, physical place to live, food to eat, all that stuff. And Anne Holton created that when she was first lady and then later on and continued it throughout the years that have followed.

Speaker 1: 15:13

Well, we have never met before, but I was on the Social Services Board 30 years ago for seven years, and one of the things I was going to share with you why this is resonating with me was we spent the first couple of years working on welfare reform, because I was in the welfare reform era and pretty shortly after we got that sorted out, I I was pretty proud of the work. It was thoughtful, it was data-driven. I thought we had pretty good results. But then we started. We had some pretty high-level fatalities child fatalities in foster care, settings, issues right from a macro, because all we could do is promulgate policy at the state level and then we would literally bring local folks in to try to describe where the system had gone wrong.

Speaker 1: 15:55

And there was an immediate sense of friction that you don't work, you're not my boss, you don't tell me what to do, and yet we were just trying to establish some common ground, not even addressing the cost. By the way, back then it was some ridiculous amount of money that people got paid low amount of money to take care of these kids and we began to sort of address some of these issues that related to violence, where some of these kids were at risk and I felt like we only scratched the surface. Before then we got replaced by a whole other group of people who had to come in and didn't have our knowledge, and that has now gone on for 30 years. So it doesn't surprise me to hear that the system isn't much better than it probably was 30 years ago. It's not for not good people trying to do the right thing, but it just seems like the system is going to that we have in Virginia, and that is the notion that the governor cannot run for re-election.

Speaker 4: 16:41

We could talk all afternoon about why Pros and cons, pros and cons, but one of the cons is, when it comes to really hard issues like this, there's not time to dig in and understand them and figure out a path forward before you know.

Speaker 1: 17:12

And we're going to have a gubernatorial election. How sexy is it to say I'm going to be the foster care governor? Exactly.

Speaker 4: 17:16

Well, so that's the other half of this is this is a real problem in Virginia. It's also just, I believe, mathematically pretty manageable. We're talking about 5,000 kids in Virginia in the system across the country from over the course of a year. You know we all got spreadsheets on our desk that have more lines on it than that, right, if you do the math, just the arithmetic that works out to about 40 kids in each locality. That's just a back of the envelope made up, number right, but we're 8 million people, right? Good, decent, honest people in Virginia. We can figure this out. We deserve better. We deserve better. And one of the things that we found is that there's a whole lot of folks out there that just don't realize this is an issue, don't realize that there's a problem and have never been challenged to do anything about it. So those are some of the things we're working on.

Speaker 3: 18:10

Can you name some of the champions, because the Commonwealth is different in that respect to governors not being able to succeed themselves. Is the Speaker, for example, a champion on this call, as I would imagine having some leadership of the General Assembly now?

Speaker 4: 18:39

are they engaged? We are in the process of engaging with them. We have been engaging. Our group has been spending the last I don't know six or eight months going around the state, talking to stakeholders outside the government, initially just as part of our own education process. We want to go to policymakers at the time when we have a proposal to make, right. Well, one of the things that we have found but, having said that, we have talked to a number of legislators of both parties, of both House and Senate folks we have known for a long time and what we found is that this issue of turnover is a real issue, right? So I'll give you an example JLARC, the Legislative Watchdog Committee, did a report on the foster care system in Virginia in 2018, I believe.

Speaker 4: 19:18

So what is that? Seven years ago? Typical JLARC report. Here's a whole series of recommendations about what needs to happen next. So we said, okay, where's the scorecard? How do we know what has happened? Been kind of hard to find that right, because that accountability often comes in the form of another member of the commission coming back in a year and saying, okay, let's look and see what we did. There's been so much turnover on that panel. There's only, I believe, two members who were there when that report was written seven or eight years ago who are still there today. So we've got to raise that whole issue up again among everybody.

Speaker 1: 19:57

Go ahead, garth. Well, we're going to segue a minute, because one of the things you wanted to talk about was HBCUs. That's number two on your list. How did that get on your dance card?

Speaker 4: 20:06

So one of my I'm so fortunate I get to I run a small boutique consulting firm in Richmond called Neely Strategies and we do strategic work for all kinds of generally medium-sized organizations. And one of my favorite clients I get to work with is Virginia Union University, which is the HBCU Go Panthers, go Panthers exactly the HBCU Historically Black College and University in the north side of Richmond. I love them for a whole bunch of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I grew up about a mile away from there. But I also love them because they have a really fascinating history and because and the third reason I love them is because they have a collection of leaders right now who are looking to build a really exciting future, which is a hard thing to do for small and medium-sized colleges around the country in general.

Speaker 4: 20:57

30 seconds on the history of the place. One of the things that's so fascinating about Richmond and Virginia is the history, and one of my favorite physical places is in downtown Richmond, between the hill where the Capitol is and Church Hill where St John's Church is, and these are two of the places where some of the greatest moments in American history have happened. Right. This is where democracy was born and institutionalized. And of course, the church is where Patrick Henry, the first governor of Virginia, launched the revolution. Some would say by saying give me liberty or give me death. Give me liberty or give me death. And barely a half a mile away, the Capitol is where this was institutionalized. But the thing that I did not learn in history class growing up in Virginia is that right in between, there at the bottom of the hill in the Chaco Valley, was actually the worst part of American history was coming to life at the exact same time and that was the second largest slave trading market in the entire country was right there. It's largely today not memorialized. There's a lot of work and planning and fundraising going on to bring that to life and to properly commemorate it. But I say all this because that's where Virginia Union University was born and there's a really notorious place.

Speaker 4: 22:20

The worst, nastiest, meanest slave jail of all was run by a notorious slave trader named Robert Lumpkin. If you go down there right now there's a little bunch of crumbling parking lots but there's one little grassy area that has been cordoned off and that's where his slave jail was and over time he came to area that has been cordoned off and that's where his slave jail was. And over time he came to well others will have to find the right word but he had a wife who was an enslaved woman. Others will have to describe what that meant. When the Civil War ended, he fled, was presumably killed, never heard from again. She inherited his property there. She had been a resident of the slave jail and then became the owner of it. Uh, and then the days after, the immediate days after the war, a group of itinerant ministers from the North came to Richmond and we're looking for a place to start a school, to train recently freed African-Americans in the ministry. And she gave them her property. And over time that school evolved into Virginia Union University, all right there in the middle of Chaco Valley, halfway between St John's Church and the Capitol.

Speaker 4: 23:42

Over time, as it grew and expanded and merged with other smaller colleges that's a theme there Eventually they would move out to Lombardi Street on the north side and have a beautiful old, historic campus, beautiful historic buildings, things like that. I really like working there, working with the team A, because of that history, but also because it's fascinating to watch them wrestle with what is the future of small colleges, what is the future for small colleges in the United States. What are they doing? They're looking for today creative ways to expand access and reach more students and do more things. I'll give you a couple of examples. Historically, the college has had about 12, 13, 1400 students a year, and in the last 10 years or so it has grown to more than 2,000 total students. When graduation happened last month, earlier this summer, they had the largest graduating class in 160 years of history. They now also have more graduate students than undergraduate students, which is a sign of health for a university in general.

Speaker 4: 25:01

And then they are looking to expand into new markets, and that's showing up in a couple of ways. One is, like many schools, a pretty significant expansion of online instruction, number one. Number two, looking to open a facility in New York City in the next couple of years. I have an agreement for a particular property on 125th Street on the west side of Manhattan. And then, lastly, all that is good because it's about bringing more students, but the traditional model of selling a seat in the classroom to a student and running your school off of tuition payments is probably not sustainable over time.

Speaker 4: 25:42

Right, that whole world has gotten so intensely competitive and it makes it really hard for small schools, the big schools in Virginia Virginia Tech, george Mason, vcu they are growing at rates that are larger than the entire enrollment of places like Virginia Union and Radford and Christopher Newport and places like that. So these schools have got to think about new ways to bring in money and doing it while they're competing against the big schools. One of the ways they're doing that at Virginia Union is looking around and saying you know what? We are land rich. We've got a whole bunch of beautiful property that is sitting here unused right Not necessarily huge stores of cash in the bank to develop that.

Speaker 4: 26:28

So one of the things that they are doing is working with property developers to say hey, what if we work out a partnership where we provide the land, you come in and provide the investment capital and the development expertise and let's build income-producing properties on our existing land. Do it in a way that enhances the value of the property, that enhances the beauty of the setting and it incorporates with the neighborhood. This is really important for institutions like this. All over the country You're starting more and more to see churches do a similar thing. They have a similar reality. But it's really important because the cost of living, like the cost of housing, around the country is so high, and especially in places that are growing like Richmond. So that's a long way of saying I really like this. I really like working with Virginia Union because they are building on 160 years of history, while also looking to say we're going to be here for another 160 years, whether you want us to be or not, and we're going to figure out how to make it happen.

Speaker 3: 27:33

Thank you, grant, for that, because it is a wonderful institution. For that, because it is a wonderful institution. When you were reciting the story, its history, its origins, I had to think about it. It's probably most famous alum, a grandson of slaves. L Douglas Wilder is a graduate of Virginia, that's correct, and so is former Mayor Dwight Johnson, that's right.

Speaker 4: 27:58

And Henry Marsh, governor Wilder, studied chemistry thereight Jones, that's right. And Henry Marsh, governor Wilder, studied chemistry there Yep, that's right Before going on to law school and eventually on into public life. Fascinating guy, as you all know better than anybody early 90s, but he will tell you. I have heard him say many times I would not be who I am today were it not for Virginia Union. And it was a long time ago. Well, it's a cool question.

Speaker 1: 28:24

The third thing on the topic and I was just thinking about this that Carth and I historically were involved in Republican stuff Sounds like you've been historically involved in Democratic stuff and you're interested in civility and public life and public discourse and we've been sitting here for 40 minutes and we haven't argued about anything, we haven't disagreed about anything. So we I want to put forth the three of us as a perfect example of how people who may have different political views can come together and have really thoughtful discussions. So it sounds like you're pretty good at this. We think we're okay at it. Tell us also how this came to be something that you're passionate about and what are you doing to encourage more behavior like you see amongst the three of us? Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 4: 29:07

Like I said a moment ago, when I was younger I thought the coolest thing I could imagine doing was working on a political campaign, and that turned out to be true as I got a little older. I remember James Carville, the Raging Gage Still around. I remember him saying one time that politics is a business for people who are either really young or really rich. And I got to the place in my life where I was neither one right, so I had to go do something else right. And so that's how I got into working on the corporate side, doing the consulting work that I do today.

Speaker 4: 29:41

But I've always been interested in politics since I was like a little kid. I remember, you know, watching the both parties national conventions. You know they used to show them on every night, all week on TV back in the day, and I would watch them, fascinated by this nerdy kind of thing. But that's what I did, right, you know well, yeah, and so I say all that because it's always been part of how I think about the world and as I've gotten and I therefore assume that's how everybody is. But as I've gotten older, I realize most people don't, and so I've been able to make a living by helping people figure out how to navigate those waters. But it's also, you know it's a tough time right now.

Speaker 4: 30:25

Like nobody is happy in our country. Yeah, right, whatever your politics, wherever you live, whatever your background, like nobody is happy and we need more joy in our lives, right, yes, but when I look at the to try and actually answer the question, like I can't be around the constant outrage about something. Right, yeah, it's draining, it's draining exactly. And so the tendency I think a lot of people's tendency, including mine sometimes is just withdraw, and that's not cool. That leaves public life up to people that don't have such good, you know, perspectives, right, self-interest, right.

Speaker 4: 31:11

So more and more as I get older, I try and look around and say what is a thing that I can do? What can I work on? What can I make a difference? Maybe I'm not going to go change the world like we all wanted to in our twenties, but can I make a little difference on the foster care issue? I'm going to try, yeah, and and to get that done is going to require people from across the political spectrum, across the you know, faith community and the secular community. Like that's a real problem for our society. Uh, and it's not going to be solvable if we, if any of us, decides that we can't be friends with half the community.

Speaker 1: 31:46

Yeah, arthur, do you want to opine on that?

Speaker 3: 31:49

I'm not sure where to start. That was wonderfully put, I think. Well, I'm an optimist at heart. So I think about our history when at times we were in a dark period. I know that the McCarthy era in the 50s maybe or maybe not had something to do with John F Kennedy's rise, New Frontier, an exciting time to be alive. Or after again, I'm not saying this in a partisan way the Carter years just seemed to Well, he even said it himself the president we're in a state of malaise. And Ronald Reagan, this super optimist. We can do anything. And now we have not to get into the partisan part of this. We have our president who, insulting, seems to be the order of the day, which I don't think is healthy for the country or public discourse. So I just have hope that there's going to be a shift and that civility is not just a word but it's actually practice. And it has to start, I think, with folks like us, Ripples do have an effect and making a difference, and so we're getting to know people.

Speaker 1: 33:10

I think that's the other issue too. We just don't know each other like we used to. That's right.

Speaker 1: 33:14

And we don't have the interest. And part of this is social media, I think, because it's just far too easy to be detached from our feelings and so forth. But we're capable of great things. We're capable of really bad things. We're capable of not so good things.

Speaker 1: 33:31

I was thinking last week, as I was preparing to come on the podcast, about the idea of forgiveness and this idea of getting people back together again, and I remember what was it 20 years ago.

Speaker 1: 33:38

I remember there was a famous shooting at an Amish church in Pennsylvania and the first thing that this—I get emotional talking about it—that this commitment of people did, was, hours after their children had been killed, they went to the wife of the gunman and forgave her and helped pay for his funeral.

Speaker 1: 33:54

And I just thought I don't—and we used to think, okay, well, that's what we're capable of. And then you go back to our day-to-day sniping and go well, wait a minute. You know, if this is a number scale from zero to 10, let's get closer to where you know the Amish as an example in that particular case, where they were able to overcome what I would have thought would have been just a lifetime of anger and resentment to where they were immediately, but that's also the key to forgiveness and the key to happiness, I feel like, is this dialogue about? Why are we disagreeing? We're disagreeing because of something we saw on Facebook and because I like vanilla ice cream and you like chocolate ice cream, you know. So we're at each other's throats At the end of the day, it's just not that important.

Speaker 4: 34:33

We've had a lot of disagreements among a lot of folks over the last number of years. That don't mean a bit of difference, and that's why you can't sustain that outrage. Well, it's also not how I don't know about y'all, but it's not how my parents raised me.

Speaker 1: 34:50

Exactly, I talk about that a lot Sunday school and vacation in my case, bible school meaning we were raised better than this and there's a part of me that I just don't get. You know, what is it? What is in somebody's wiring that keeps them sort of the need to be ginned up? Part of it is we have a whole economic system. I mean not an economic system, but an entertainment Facebook the algorithms feed into, because more motivation comes from anger than it does from happiness. That's right. So there are people out there making money on misery and we've got to sort of be able to push ourselves back from that table, I think, and say we're just not going to do it.

Speaker 3: 35:34

I'm not going to participate and we need to get back to a bipartisan way of doing business. Not in every case, but in more cases. I had the privilege of serving four Virginia governors of both parties and I'm proud of that. But some of my friends on the Republican side of me you know you get pushback today on the fact that you did that Absolutely as if it were something bad, right yeah.

Speaker 4: 35:52

Yeah, I mean, I think, at the end of the day, it all comes down to respect and being quiet and humility and listening, right Like. Sometimes, if you say bipartisan, people hear some other thing. They will hear compromise, which I think is a good thing, but they will hear like, compromising my values, right, right, like. And which is one small step away from selling out. I actually think if we're going to be 8 million people living together in the state, we got to figure out how to live together in the state, right? So if my starting point is I'm right and you're wrong, it's a therefore, a small step to therefore, I must you know I got to eliminate you You're making me crazy in order to get what.

Speaker 1: 36:33

I want.

Speaker 4: 36:34

That's not. This is not going to last.

Speaker 1: 36:37

Well, both parties have people who are married, and if you've ever been married before, you know what the word compromise is all about.

Speaker 1: 36:43

It's a daily compromise, you know, to try to make a difference. I'll say this. You know you saw me writing a few minutes ago. Here's what I was writing I've never met you before in my life until about 30 minutes ago. I find you really interesting and I can't wait to grab lunch with you to go talk about foster care and about Virginia Union and a lot of other things. So I think this is the key to it is engaging people who you might not know, who you might not feel.

Speaker 1: 37:06

I use the term shirts and skins. It's an old athletic term where five people are playing basketball. You take your shirts off, the other five wear jerseys. We've got to get away from the shirts and skins thing. We've got to get more to where. Wow, that's really interesting. What can I do to help you with this foster care thing? Because the older I get, the less I'm concerned about doing bad things. I want to in my final days I hope they're a long time from now, but I want to say he had a pretty good record. He cared about his fellow human beings and I feel like if we all begin to get to that place, the disagreements will overcome the algorithms. The algorithms will not win Carthen. The algorithms.

Speaker 3: 37:46

The algorithms will not win Carthen. Amen. I hope you give me credit for inviting Grant to be here.

Speaker 1: 37:51

by the way, here's the thing about our guest there's nobody. You don't know. That's the great thing about me. I only know about half the people.

Speaker 3: 37:57

Let me switch gears. Let's go back to something we shared working for now our senior senator. He was a former governor. What was it like to work in the Warner policy office? Here you have this fellow. He never slept, gosh, he never slept.

Speaker 4: 38:11

Yeah, I like to sleep.

Speaker 3: 38:16

Well, I think the world. Let's go back. So Mark Warner, an outsider in a sense, he had been chairman of the Democratic Party of Virginia. He had been active in the Walter campaign. He managed Governor Walter's campaign. Managed well, not just active, he managed it so but he never held political office. The Republicans had him in the mansion for eight straight years. They're on a roll, yeah, they're on a roll, and a Republican General Assembly.

Speaker 4: 38:42

Yeah absolutely.

Speaker 3: 38:43

And so here comes Mark Warner, take it from there. General Assembly yeah absolutely.

Speaker 4: 38:45

And so here comes Mark Warner. Thank you for that. I first met him in 19,. The first time I remember meeting him was in 1999, when I just helped the Democratic legislators in Virginia lose control of the legislature for the first time in 100 years, and the environment was completely different in Virginia at that time. Right Like today, there are thousands of workers in. I'm thinking about running for governor. I said you're crazy. Democrats are going to lose Like that's what happens, he said, and he had lost. Pretty sure, I'm gonna do it. I need people to help me figure out. I said, well, that sounds like a really fascinating thing to do.

Speaker 4: 39:53

And, as I was saying earlier, like I, he also had the ability to make things happen and the ability to get people to move and to act and to make decisions and come together. And he did it through a combination of intellect and charm and smacking people around Like he's not, was not an easy guy, but I came to respect that and understand that. And he also looked around the world at that time and he said like look, I got one shot to do this. I'm not gonna miss my shot, as they say, uh, in the Hamilton musical Um. And so I worked for him personally, uh, at his business, uh, in Alexandria, for the first year or so, while he was trying to lay the groundwork and then formalize the campaign, you know, into an actual like kicked off, the actual campaign organization started bringing people on and there was just a real enthusiasm. I found it was not like a typical Democratic Republican, you know traditional race.

Speaker 4: 41:02

There was a fair amount of angst in Virginia at that time. On the one hand, the economy was doing well, on the other hand, there were starting to be signs of potential recession coming. This was the year when there was the General Assembly deadlocked and was not able to get a budget passed. That's a little more routine today, but it was the first time it had ever happened at that point. And then, of course, when he was running in 2001, 9-11 happened and I remember I was the policy director on that race and I remember we were supposed to do a big announcement that afternoon about children's health care and the insurance program that the Commonwealth was running at the time.

Speaker 4: 41:53

And I just remember thinking, oh my God, I'm not ready, I'm responsible for this thing, that's got to happen this afternoon and I do not feel good about it. And so we had our daily like 9 am, you know, all hands staff meeting kind of 15 minute, everybody check in thing and somebody's TV is on and I remember one of our folks who was not in the office, was out of town, said you know what we may need to cancel that press conference today. A plane just hit the World Trade Center. That's probably just going to dominate the news all day long. And I remember that's how everybody thought about like oh, oh, it's too bad. You know, I don't mean to be dismissive but for like the first few, minutes.

Speaker 1: 42:36

That's where we all felt the news thing right.

Speaker 4: 42:39

And then, um, a few minutes later, the second tower hit and everybody's like oh. And then we were working in an old warehouse in Alexandria and everybody at this point is just sitting around fretting like just trying to understand what's going on, and all of a sudden we hear this huge, other big noise, like not on the TV. And then it shows up on the TV a moment later and it was the plane hitting the Pentagon, which at that point was probably two miles from where we were. So we all went out and climbed up the fire escape onto the roof of this warehouse we were working at. We watched the smoke come up from the Pentagon, just like no clue what's going on, and we're all just sitting there staring at it, dumbfounded Mark Warner's with us, we're all just regular people standing there, and we do that for like 10 minutes and all of a sudden we hear this like sonic boom off in the way, because suddenly military planes appear out of nowhere and we're like holy hell we're going down, we're getting off the roof of this building, right?

Speaker 4: 43:48

Um, but it changed. It changed everything, right? Obviously I mean too, that's a cliche to say, but uh, for the, for that political campaign. It meant everything like literally turned off for like several weeks. Um, it changed the attitudes, it changed the way that people. It just changed the way that everybody communicated and interacted and thought about what are we all doing here. At the end of the day, he obviously won the campaign, uh, won the election, um, which is a cool thing and something to be proud of, and all that Um. But I believe one of the reasons that he won the race was because of the, the, that attitude and the seriousness and the stewardship and the sense of stewardship that he brought to the way he campaigned for him, because he I'll stop, he. He defeated um. A very serious person with an attorney general, a longstanding, long-time member of the legislature, a very serious guy. But at the end of the day, to have elected an outsider with no previous experience was a really big deal and it's a testimony to the campaign that he ran.

Speaker 3: 44:58

Yeah, and the Republican Party. There had been somewhat of a spirited convention fight between the lieutenant governor, John Hager, and the attorney general, Mark Early, and you talk about bipartisanship.

Speaker 4: 45:14

After the election was won, the newly elected governor, mark Warner, brought in former Republican lieutenant governor John Hager to be in charge of Homeland Security.

Speaker 3: 45:26

And had a cabinet rank. That's right. That's right. I recall it just occurred to me, Brian, when Grant was discussing Mark Warner's campaigning style. In some ways, he and George Allen have some similarities.

Speaker 1: 45:40

By then I had gotten out, but I was going to say I thought the key to it was the constituency building. I remember Sportsman for Warner, NASCAR for Warner, In other words. He went into what areas that most Democrats did not go into and he appealed to those people and I thought, well, that guy's going to win, that's right.

Speaker 4: 45:56

Yeah, and so all that stuff was really important and got a lot of attention and it was enough. It might not have been enough to win in Franklin County, but it was enough to yeah and a stale off 3%, and that all adds up. What was less visible was that that exact same type of work was going on in the DC suburbs in Hampton Roads where, for the first time, at least in my memory at that point, there was aggressive and thoughtful and methodical outreach to all those diverse communities as well. Right, so you know, campaign materials in Tagalog to the Filipino communities in Virginia Beach and Hampton Roads and a hundred different languages inside the Beltway.

Speaker 1: 46:44

He brought a business person's perspective too. Is that right? We've got to wrap up. So I'm done with my questions. Carth, do you have anything else?

Speaker 3: 46:52

I know you were active in Mayor Avula's race whose, god bless him, has inherited a hot mess which is Richmond City right now. Has inherited a hot mess which is Richmond City right now. Any thoughts about some areas, as we both live in the city and you know it's a great city, it's our capital city, but it just seems to not be able to get out of its own way. And he's a fresh face coming in, one of convincing victory when you think of how many people were involved in running, but just thoughts about that and how you see.

Speaker 4: 47:35

Richmond turning around. I think what you're, the way I think about it is. I think increasingly there's going to be a real issue for public officials all over Virginia and around the country that has to do with competence right, can you get the work done? And one of the reasons we're talking about this is there's been a little thing in the news the last several days and at the beginning of the year some problems with the water, drinking water supply in the city of Richmond. Knowing what that's all about is so far above my pay grade. I don't understand the science. I don't know. What I do know is that people, residents, are like I'm paying taxes. I expect the water to be here right.

Speaker 4: 48:23

Yeah, and that creates doubt. The first time it happened, at the beginning of the year, was the exact same time that the terrible wildfires were happening in Southern California. Exact same time frame and very different set of issues, but a lot of the perceptions were the same. People in Southern California were saying oh my God, there's a fire coming. I'm going to call the fire department. What if they don't show up? And that's a scary thing. If you can't get drinking water, if you don't have confidence, the fire department is going to be here. And this is going to be, I think, an issue for public leaders. Tremendous job of embracing communication and saying hey, citizens, we got a problem here. Specifically, is what we're doing about it? Right? If you've watched the last number of weeks, like Richmonders now can tell you about how many filters they got in the system and what the pressure levels are and what they need to be and how many rounds of testing before the restrictions can be lifted. I think Danny Ville is a great guy to do this work. One last thought and then I'll leave One last thought about him and then we'll move on.

Speaker 4: 49:39

In a previous life I worked in the governor's office with Dr Ralph Northam during the COVID period and similar set of issues. Covid, as everybody remembers, was a big fat mess for the whole country and around the world and after two intense years of dealing with it everybody was exhausted and so we needed to switch people out and Governor Northam turned to Dr Danny Avula and said come in and lead this for the state. And then he did and the results were tremendous. We had some of the best vaccination rates in the country On the good side. On the bad side, our bad numbers were better than other states around the country that we outperformed where we should have relative to other states. If we can do that on bad stuff like COVID, I believe we can do it on really long-term stuff like foster care as well. But it comes down to having good people in the roles, bringing the right combination of skill and humility and optimism to the work.

Speaker 1: 50:41

Thank you Well look, I can't get any better than that. Is there anything else you'd like to say before we wrap up?

Speaker 4: 50:47

No, I'm flattered that you all asked me to be here. I've been preparing, I've been listening to the very prominent people from Virginia. You've had over time and I've learned a lot from a lot of folks.

Speaker 1: 50:58

So keep doing what you all are doing, you're at the top of the list.

Speaker 3: 51:00

You've been terrific, Sam Wonderful. We'd love to have you come back. Maybe you can help me get the mayor to be on one of our shows together. That'd be great. Terrific Grant, thank you so much.

Speaker 4: 51:11

Thank you all I appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 51:13

Thank you for listening to the Virginians of Interest podcast. If you like what you heard today, please like subscribe and download our podcast. Thank you for listening to the Virginians of Interest podcast.