Spend a day or two in Chattanooga, Tennessee, asking longtime residents about the city’s history, and it’s sure to come up: that less-than-wonderful moment in 1969 when America’s beloved news anchor, Walter Cronkite, proclaimed it to be the “dirtiest city in America.” Men who went out for lunch brought an extra white shirt for the afternoon; the first would be gray by the time they got back to the office. A manufacturing hub for everything from Buster Brown socks to Chris-Craft boats—with plenty of steel and coal foundries to boot—Chattanooga was a victim of its own success.

An effort by business and civic leaders helped the city clean up its act, but by the early 1980s, most of the smokestacks had shut down anyway, as manufacturing jobs moved out of the area. People left in droves.

Visitors today see a different Chattanooga. The city’s waterfront and downtown are thriving, thanks to a $120 million redevelopment initiative completed in 2005. The Tennessee Aquarium—a soaring, impressive glass-and-brick structure—stands on the banks of the Tennessee River, now lined with high-end condominiums. People bike and stroll across the Walnut Street Pedestrian Bridge, starting in one boutique-filled neighborhood and ending in another. Over at Niedlov’s Breadworks, there are iced lattes and avocado toast—the litmus test for millennial happiness. And humming through it all is a citywide 10-gigabit network, courtesy of the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga.

This latest transformation came about over 25 years, the result of another civic- and business-led effort. And it’s wonderful, many agree. But there are still a good number of Chattanooga residents who’ve been left out of the picture. As in so many American cities, public education is working for some but not for all. The kind of economic development that lifts all boats isn’t quite happening—yet. The next wave of change that needs to take place in Chattanooga isn’t as straightforward as cleaning up the city’s air or developing its waterfront, impressive and successful as those efforts surely are; instead, it will demand investment in the city’s human capital, requiring work that is much more subtle, nuanced, and difficult to see.

This is Chattanooga’s, and the nation’s, toughest challenge to date—one that will require the collaborative focus of leaders from the business, nonprofit, and government sectors, all digging deep into planning, strategy, and available resources. It’s work that doesn’t come naturally, but the future of Chattanooga—and other US cities—depends on it.

The realization that better cross-sector collaboration would be key to generating shared prosperity in American cities sparked an HBS initiative with an unlikely acronym: YALP, the Young American Leaders Program. Launched in 2015 out of the School’s US Competitiveness Project and convening every June, YALP brings together 10 leaders from each of 14 cities across the country, throwing them into a full-on, nonstop HBS experience, from case discussions to speaker presentations to whiteboard sessions that ask participants to collaborate on solutions to a target issue their city is facing.

“In 2011, when the US Competitiveness Project got started, many people were talking about the not-so-great recovery from the Great Recession,” says HBS professor Jan Rivkin, who developed and leads YALP alongside faculty members Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Karen Mills, and Mitch Weiss; as well as Program Director Manjari Raman. “When we dove into the data, what came screaming back at us was the lack of shared prosperity in the country. The people running and investing in large companies were doing quite well. But working- and middle-class Americans were struggling, as were many small businesses. The most promising efforts we found to restore shared prosperity were local, cross-sector collaborations.” Launched four years ago to advance and spread such efforts, YALP is slowly but surely beginning to see on-the-ground results of the partnerships and innovation it’s designed to foster.

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, phrases like income inequality and economic inclusion gained a commonplace buzz, so much so that it’s hard to remember a time when they weren’t a regular part of civic conversation. But as Rivkin notes, the data pointed to such concerns long before 2016. “Those of us working on the US Competitiveness Project came to the perspective that the lack of shared prosperity was the number one economic, social, and political challenge facing the country,” he says. “This was back in 2011 and 2012, when that was still a fairly novel point of view.”

Participants in YALP are chosen by a senior city leader, based on their placement and ability to address that challenge. As school superintendents, city officials, nonprofit leaders, and business executives, they kick-start that process by coming together for four days—and learning to speak each other’s language—in a Hawes Hall classroom.

You can see it starting to happen in a discussion of YALP’s opening case in late June. “The Columbus Partnership” centers on a citywide effort to improve public education, led in part by an alliance of 50 business and community leaders. This focus on education is a new one for the partnership, which has historically worked on economic development. Its initial foray centers on a ballot measure to fund education reform by increasing property taxes by 23.5 percent, but is roundly rejected by 69 percent of the voters. So should the partnership return to its usual work of facilitating downtown revitalization projects and pitching Columbus as an attractive site for companies to set up shop? Or should it push forward on the hard nut of public education?

“Why do some cross-sector collaborations work and some don’t?” Mitch Weiss asks a classroom of 70 YALPers. (The program runs two simultaneous classrooms for its 140 participants.) “Is Columbus a successful city?”

Columbus has a vibrant downtown, a strong institution of higher learning in Ohio State University, and relatively robust economic growth for the Midwest as a whole, YALP participants point out. Yet 34 percent of children who arrive at Columbus public schools aren’t ready for kindergarten (compared to 19 percent statewide); 61 percent of third graders passed the state reading assessment (80 percent passed statewide). And in 2012, the Columbus Dispatch reported that district employees had tampered with enrollment and attendance records to artificially boost school test scores.

“Columbus is really successful for those who are already successful,” says one Miami YALPer.

Improving education for the city’s poorest populations could change that equation—but the ballot measure to fund the schools didn’t pass by a long shot. What went wrong? A participant from Minneapolis–St. Paul comments on the number of high-level executives heading up the effort. They’ve reached out to the community—but are they really in touch with it? Is the ballot effort really, as a Detroit YALPer suggests, just “important people doing important-people things?”

When the discussion winds down, participants from Columbus get a chance to weigh in, offering on-the-ground details—the relationships and history, good and bad, that make up the community landscape and that most likely played a role in the vote’s outcome. Increasing understanding of those subtleties and helping participants understand how to negotiate them while working outside their usual sphere of operations is a big part of what YALP hopes to impart.

“Typically, the public-sector lexicon can be mystifying to private-sector folks,” says Stacy Richardson, Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke’s chief of staff. “When I attended YALP in 2016, I could pick out the government employees in the first five minutes, just based on a person’s comments and how they responded to information. But by the end of the week, the distinction was much blurrier. It was fascinating to watch people’s points of view shift, based on the discussions we were having and the analytical frameworks we’d been given.” By bringing together people from the same city, some of whom may not have met before, YALP is designed to accelerate the sort of relationship-building that will make it easier to pick up the phone back home, ask for help, and bring about change more quickly.

“On a personal leadership level, YALP participants are at a point in their careers where they’re wondering how to step up, how to have more of an impact and navigate across organizational cultures they might not be used to,” says Weiss. “They love their cities, and they’re keen to make a difference.” YALP, in essence, is a means to that end: a boot camp in local, cross-sector collaboration toward the goal of a sustainable future through shared prosperity.

When Christy Gillenwater came to YALP in 2018, she was six months into her new job as president and CEO of the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce. During the city whiteboard sessions, Gillenwater pitched her group on tackling a visioning process to define Chattanooga’s priorities for the next two decades. With “inclusive” and “diverse” as the group’s watchwords, the YALP cohort returned to Chattanooga and launched the next stage of the process, reaching out to neighborhood leaders, church representatives, artists, and students, as well as the chamber’s expected members of the business community.

“YALP helped crystallize, A, that we had to do this work, no matter what the challenges, and B, that we had to include all walks of life from the community as we refined our vision,” she says, adding that YALPers across the city, both from her cohort and earlier years, made what would become Velocity 2040 a recurring touchpoint for the community as a whole. “We could’ve pushed this out through the chamber, but then it would have been ‘the chamber’s thing,’ ” says Gillenwater, noting that there was zero budget to promote awareness of the effort and encourage completion of its online survey. “Thanks to YALP, we were able to have the support and engagement of many other networks in the community.”

Educational excellence and attainment for all is one of Velocity’s five goals—“education” encompassing children from their earliest years to working adulthood. With roughly one-third of Chattanooga students enrolled in private school, the city is still grappling with the importance of a good education being available to all, not just those who can afford to go elsewhere. “Businesses have been calling for a prepared workforce,” says Sarah Morgan, president of the Benwood Foundation, a nonprofit partnering with area organizations to create shared prosperity in the region. “But that’s new for Chattanooga. As far as public education goes, the status quo has been good enough for ‘those’ kids.

“We’re a southern, midsize city that’s still struggling with race and how that unfolds around access to opportunity,” continues Morgan. “This is the moment for public education.” With the Benwood Foundation having served as a partner in selecting YALP participants over the past five sessions, Morgan can quickly outline the connections, energy, and results that have happened because of the program—many of them around education and all of them involving leaders from across the private, nonprofit, and public sectors.

One is the Chattanooga Basics, an early childhood initiative pulled directly from a presentation on the Boston Basics made at YALP in 2016 by Kennedy School faculty member Ron Ferguson. That year, Chattanooga YALPers made bringing the initiative home the focus of their whiteboard project. Just a few months later, Jared Bigham of Chattanooga 2.0, Lesley Scearce of the United Way, and Scott Wilson of Volkswagen led the rollout of a program emphasizing five interventions (including “talk, sing, and point”; “count, group, and compare”; and “read and discuss stories”) that positively affect the swiftly developing brains of infants and toddlers.

“Once you learn about the basics, you interact with children differently,” says Wilson. “It’s not a rich thing or a poor thing. It’s a knowledge thing.”

Jayden Rutledge (16), left, and Evan Gilliand (17) off-stack parts at the Gestamp automotive stamping facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee, gaining hands-on manufacturing experience while earning a high school degree. One of Hamilton County’s Future Ready Institutes, the program was inspired in part by a YALP case study.

Now director of community relations at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, Wilson is working on another education initiative, this one a bit further along on the cradle-to-career trajectory. Dubbed Project Blue Sky and scheduled to launch in 2021, it will condense a four-year bachelor’s degree in IT and cybersecurity into two years, combining coursework with an on-the-job apprenticeship. “Our fastest-growing department is IT,” says Wilson. “Every relationship, whether it’s a provider, a pharmacy, or a patient, involves data, often mobile data on phones.” BlueCross has had to outsource more than 100 of its IT jobs, he adds—not to save money, but because positions can’t be filled from the area’s available labor pool.

Wilson notes that his current project follows a similar initiative from his time at Volkswagen with automotive parts maker Gestamp—which was in turn inspired by a YALP case, “Southwire and 12 for Life.” The case tells the story of a Georgia cable manufacturer staffing its factory with at-risk high school students—the result being improved student outcomes and profits the company could reinvest in students.

At a Gestamp automotive manufacturing plant 20 minutes east of downtown Chattanooga, high school students wearing shirts emblazoned with “WBL” (work-based learning) are paid a starting wage of $9 per hour (with the potential to bump up to $10 based on performance and attendance) to turn out the door panels, bumpers, and other parts for vehicles that include the VW Atlas and Passat. With three plants in the area, all of which host WBL students, Gestamp represents one of 26 Future Ready Institutes of Hamilton County Schools (FRI). An initiative now in its second year, FRIs offer high school students the opportunity to complete standard high school curricular requirements while gaining access to hands-on experience and accreditation opportunities in fields that include robotics, architecture, and health care. It’s easy to see the contribution the students are making while walking around the factory floor. Tatyana, 16, has advanced to running two taillight assembly cells for the VW Atlas by herself; Jayden, 17, loads and unloads parts from the laser cutting machine; while Emanuel, also 17, runs the projection welder.

“We’ve had a 100 percent graduation rate over the past two years of running the full-immersion WBL program,” says Gestamp’s WBL coordinator Mandy Bohannon. “This program is a win-win for the students and the company.” 

“They’re not talking about workforce development, they’re doing it,” says Bo Drake, who attended YALP this year. In his role as VP of economic and workforce development at Chattanooga State Community College, Drake works with the school district as it develops additional FRI offerings. “Our intent is to create a seamless pathway from high school into the adult working world, keeping education a key priority.

“Student loan debt exceeds consumer credit card debt by $500 billion,” Drake continues. “We’re buying more higher ed than we are Amazon, which is just unbelievable.” Coupled with that is the large number of students who enroll in, but don’t complete, college, he adds. But new pathways are slowly opening to unfilled “middle-skills” jobs as employers drop the requirement for a traditional four-year bachelor’s degree. “If we’re going to address the talent pipeline issue, we have to create sustainable pathways that encourage people to go into these middle-skill career fields,” he says.

Respiratory therapist Michelle Powell (above) trains Howard School students Rudy Vasquez and Junior Juan in how to take a blood pressure reading; below, Shakaya Finley and Jamesha Owens practice those skills as part of the Erlanger Institute of Healthcare and Innovation. A result of YALP’s emphasis on cross-sector collaboration, the program is one of 26 “Future Ready Institutes” in the Hamilton County School District that combines job readiness skills and a high school diploma.

One of the most pressing needs for workers is in health care, with 2.5 million openings forecast over the next five years. At Chattanooga’s Howard School, where nearly 90 percent of the student body receives free or discounted school lunch, a classroom of sophomores enrolled in another FRI will be well-positioned to help fill that need in a few short years.

Today, they’re being drilled on how to measure and interpret blood pressure readings. “My blood pressure is 200/110,” says Mrs. Smith, a former nurse with 30 years of experience. “Am I hypertensive or hypotensive?”

“Hypertensive,” chorus the 20 or so 15-year-olds.

“Correct. And what is a heart rate’s normal range?”

Mrs. Smith continues her work of drilling students on the proper protocol for taking and interpreting a patient’s vital signs, and then has them practice using the blood pressure cuff on each other. The FRI, known as the Erlanger Institute of Healthcare and Innovation, was created in partnership with Erlanger Health System, where 2017 YALPer Don Mueller is CEO of Children’s Hospital at Erlanger. Recently, when the hospital closed one of its genetics labs, Mueller ensured that some of the equipment was repurposed for these students, who will complete four years of coursework alongside standard curricular requirements. By graduation they’ll have the option to complete a clinical internship as an EKG technician or certified medical assistant, in addition to being prepared to sit for certification tests. “We’ve partnered with Howard to help fill a workforce need, but we also wanted to create a career path and hope for this community,” he says.

The students may fill an acute need for workers in the near term, but that isn’t necessarily the endpoint. Jamaal, 15, plans to attend medical school. Waltkia, also 15, is often first in the class to raise her hand; she comes from a family of health care workers and is keeping her options open, curious to keep learning and see where she might fit in.

“So many times we approach business and say, this is what we want you to do,” says Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Bryan Johnson, a 2018 YALPer who has collaborated with Drake, Mueller, and Scearce on the district’s FRIs. “We need to ask where are your gaps, and how can we help you?”

As one of 14 cities sending participants to YALP this year, Chattanooga offers just one window into the program’s potential to jump-start innovation and cross-sector collaboration. In Columbus, Steve Lyons drew on the support of fellow YALPers to launch a successful bid to prevent the city’s professional soccer team from moving to Austin, Texas. In Salt Lake City, YALP participants enlisted area companies to commit to Parity.org’s pledge to interview at least one woman for senior-level positions. And in Minneapolis–St. Paul, last month the city saw the launch of a Minnesota-based YALP (see sidebar below).

Despite these outcomes, YALP’s faculty is clear: The participants and the senior champions who select and support them—and not the program—deserve credit for what has taken place in their cities. Nor do they measure success by how faithfully a city group implements its whiteboard project. (This year’s presentations included a pledge to increase participation in the 2020 census; an effort to close the skills gap for nursing professionals; and an initiative to engage and empower minority entrepreneurs.)

Instead, the hoped-for outcome is more difficult to see: It’s a shift in perspective in participants, 530 and counting, who will lead their cities through change and growth in the years to come; a way of seeing what’s possible when you reach out, connect, and collaborate across sectors. “I’m optimistic that in the future we’ll have communities that are knitted together more productively, tackling issues like inequality and economic opportunity more resolutely and creatively than they otherwise would have been—and that we’ll ultimately come to solve those issues,” says Mitch Weiss. “I suppose my hope for YALP is that it will have played some tiny role in that progress.”

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