Citizen Diplomacy in Cary

If you are watching the Sister Cities Association of Cary (SCAC), you will note that there is rarely a time without lots of activity going on.

Citizen Diplomacy is a high visibility program started by the Sister Cities Commission in 2008 with an ambitious weekend-long program featuring Mary Jean Eisenhower*.  (This was before the Town Commission was dissolved into the Association.**)

Side note: Thursday night was our latest 5th Thursday Social held at Mahoney's Pub.  Several people showed up who had attended the last Citizen Diplomacy event at the Cary Arts Center on March 15, 2012 and want to get involved.  Citizen Diplomacy is a great development tool for SCAC.

The Citizen Diplomacy committee held our first planning meeting at Bocci's for lunch.  Lots of good ideas, decisions and planning.  This will be our 5th program in the series.

We only have ~4 months until the event which will be on March 21, 2013 from 6:30-9pm.  Normally groups take a year planning something like this, but SCAC has event planning down to a seat-of-the-pants science!  Some preliminary work was done to get the announcement in the Town's quarterly brochure so we are locked in on several details which may be constraining, but we will work with those.

SCAC will have a dinner program with a panel of 3 speakers; one from Business, one from International (State Department?) and one from the Non-Profit sector.

I'm looking forward to another great Cary program in the spring.  Cary has a long history of citizen diplomacy, but I will leave that for another blog posting.

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* Mary Jean Eisenhower is the Executive Director of People to People International and is the Grand Daughter of Dwight D. Eisenhower who got the whole citizen diplomacy movement started with his summit on September 11, 1956.

** At their April 14, 2011 meeting, the Cary Town Council voted to approve Staff Report PR11-32 which included the removal of the Sister Cities Commission from the Town Ordinance. At that time the responsibilities of the Commission were transferred to the Association.

P-TECH: Innovation in Education

This morning I attended a talk by Stan Litow, IBM Vice President of Corporate Citizenship, at the Wake Tech Center for Strategic Futures.  What had interested me to go was that the talk was billed as: "Join us as Stan Litow presents a compelling presentation on how computers can and will revolutionize our society."

The focus of the talk was different in that it dealt with how IBM is working in Corporate Citizenship / Socially Responsible Investing, or "whatever you call it," as Stan stated simply.  The majority of the talk was about a way to change the education system to prepare students to start filling the gap of jobs going unfilled due to a lack of available skills in the workforce.

P-TECH
IBM has become very involved with the initiative at the P-TECH High School in Brooklyn.  This is a 3-way partnership between IBM, the local College and the Department of Education.

What is P-TECH?  Their website shows:

Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) is a new type of school that brings together the best elements of high school, college and the professional world.

P-TECH has an innovative grade structure of 9-14.  Students can begin taking college courses in 10th grade and they graduate with a High School Diploma, an Associates Degree and a qualified record of skills.

Each student is paired with an IBM mentor and is part of a 4-5 member team competing against the other teams on some project-based topic.  Curricula is taught more about how you can use it to bring value to a problem that you and/or your group is trying to solve.

Early College Model

The Early College Model is currently being looked at in North Carolina to solve the same skills gap.  

With another P-TECH school ordered up in NYC and 5 in Chicago, maybe the Wake County Schools, Wake Tech and some big employers in the area can look at the P-TECH model as well?

More Information

For more information about P-TECH and the issues Stan Litow discussed this morning, a good resource is this article in the US News and World Reports: "U.S. Needs New Educational Model for Economic Growth"

IBM released a playbook designed to outline "how to develop an innovative grades 9-14 school that connects education to economic development and good-paying jobs."

Cary Ranked #9 in Competiveness

Cary (actually the Raleigh-Cary MSA) just ranked #9 in competitiveness and job growth across the 100 most populous U.S. metros.

EMSI (Economic Modeling Specialists International) have just published an analysis using "a standard economic analysis method called shift share, focusing on overall job change from 2010 to 2012."

Richard Florida has also commented on this in his latest article "These Are the Cities That Can Show Us How to Create Jobs".

The hard work of Economic Development in the area is really paying off!