Future-Focused Community: Fayette County, Georgia

By Virginia Gibbs

The Fayette County, Georgia, story started with a simple question that emerged from a chamber board retreat: What must chamber leadership do to ensure that the organization will continue to be relevant for the future?

From that question emerged a new focus: How can the chamber grow from a successful event planning and networking organization to a dynamic entity at the center of a collaborative and transformational community movement? How can the organization bring people from disparate functions across the community together to think, learn, and develop new systems and processes to prepare Fayette County for a rapidly changing economy?

Step one involved a year-long process of transformational leadership development. The chamber brought together 30 leaders representing large and small businesses, K-12 and university leadership, economic developers, nonprofits, and civic leaders to study Master Capacity Building principles with Rick Smyre, president of the Center for Communities of the Future (COTF).

The group learned about systems thinking, parallel processes, “and/both thinking,” and the process of creating interlocking networks. Most importantly, they saw firsthand the power of framing any issue or dialogue within a futures context. The group moved from trying to find the one right answer or the “silver bullet” to finding possibilities and innovative approaches never before imagined.

Upon conclusion of the formal instruction, roughly half of the Master Capacity Builders continued to meet informally and began to develop self-organizing efforts to seed collaborative, future-focused projects in the community.

One of the first examples was a “Future Fayette 2030” art and science contest for high-school students, sponsored by the Rotary Club. Students were asked to envision Fayette County in the year 2030 in areas such as health, transportation, recreation, and energy and to share their vision through a model or artistic representation. Entries were displayed to the community at the chamber’s annual EXPO tradeshow. The first year’s winning entry was “Dr. John,” a smart toilet that could instantly analyze key health metrics and communicate instantaneously to an individual’s doctor or caretaker. The contest was a wonderful inaugural effort to bring youthful innovation together with a traditional community event like the EXPO.

Another example of a collaborative and future-focused project is an ongoing series of Community Conversations hosted by the chamber for alumni of their 30-year-old leadership development program, Leadership Fayette. These conversations bring a panel of thought leaders together to begin a dialogue with the Leadership Fayette alumni and others in the community on emerging trends or concepts central to Fayette’s future.

The first such conversation included a panel composed of the local school superintendent, university president, technical college president, an industry leader, and a young professional, brought together to ponder the question, “How can we prepare students for careers that don’t yet exist?” The meetings have been designed to connect ideas, people, and new processes or methods with critical community functions like education and economic development.

While Fayette County’s transformation to a Creative Molecular Economy is still in its infancy, the framework for creating innovative and future-focused points of engagement for the community have been seeded and the momentum is tangible.

Virginia Gibbs is president and CEO of the Fayette Chamber of Commerce, Fayetteville, Georgia, www.fayettechamber.org.