Last week's column on the Northwest Arkansas Council and its strategic planning efforts led to a handful of inquires from readers who wanted to know what central Arkansas (Little Rock) has in the way of its own planning body.
Much of the region's economic development, consensus building and long-range planning is handled by the folks at the Greater Little Rock Chamber of Commerce. If you're looking for something a little more analogous to the Northwest Arkansas Council, the answer might be Fifty for the Future.
Like the council, Fifty for the Future is a collection of company CEOs and community leaders interested in maximizing community resources to create more economic opportunities. Unlike its counterpart to the northwest, the organization (which actually totals about 70, not 50) operates less as a stand-alone entity and more as a subcommittee of the Greater Little Rock Chamber of Commerce.
Aristotle co-founder and CEO Marla Johnson is serving as the group's president this year and helped me get a little better understanding of Fifty for the Future during a recent chat. Johnson and I met at the Northwest Arkansas Council's winter meeting, and she agreed to give me (and y'all) some insight into who is in the group and what it hopes to accomplish.
Like many economic planning organizations in Arkansas and elsewhere, the focus in central Arkansas is on infrastructure and transportation, workforce development and quality-of-life opportunities. These are concerns regardless of what region of the state you're living in, naturally.
It is no surprise to hear that Johnson, co-founder of a tech-focused company, has a particular interest in improving education and technology opportunities for students. "This goes all the way down to pre-K. You have to open the funnel with kids when they're little," Johnson said.
Also critical, she said, is identifying sustainable sources of capital for startups and creating an environment where innovation is rewarded. Little Rock's planned tech park and its Innovation Hub are steps in that direction.
Johnson also pointed to fostering additional cooperation between Fifty for the Future and others during her year as president. Little Rock and its surrounding communities have a lot of entities working to make things better, but she'd like to see them pulling in the same direction with more unified goals more often. She is hopeful that Fifty for the Future can, like the Northwest Arkansas Council, help connect those efforts.
"How can we be a partner? How can we listen better? How can we join forces with the community? I don't know that Northwest Arkansas grapples with this as much, but we do have history where there is distrust," Johnson said. "Right now the business community here is learning to be more sensitive and more willing to listen to the many voices, and work with the people and the city of Little Rock so we can make it a better city. Sometimes it's easy for people in a position of leadership, when they have resources and s platform of a company, to assume they have all the right answers. That's usually going to lead to trouble. It really is about consensus-building and collaboration."
Johnson wants that spirit of collaboration to extend between the state's two strongest regions, as well. Members of Fifty for the Future and the Northwest Arkansas Council have met intermittently over the past three years and are talking now about identifying areas where they can leverage each other's strengths for the good of the state.
"We're greater than the sum of the parts when you can get two regions like this working together," Johnson said. "In this global economy we have to move faster. We're working toward a lot of the same goals."
SundayMonday Business on 02/01/2015