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The annual member luncheon provides an opportunity for the NCPN leadership to say thank you to the organization's members, especially those who have been members for several years, and to congratulate the winners of the Hull-Parnell Partnership Excellence Award. This year's Hull-Parnell winners (depicted below) were (1) a healthcare partnership in Brunswick County, North Carolina; (2) a money, banking, and business program in Winsted, Connecticut; and (3) an aerospace program in Savannah, Georgia. Congratulations again to our winners, and many thanks to the NCPN advisory board members who served as judges in the competition. (To see descriptions of these exemplary programs, see issue 19-4 of Connections or pages 43 and 44 of the conference program book. For more group photos of the winners, visit http://www.cord.org/photos-and-video-2009/.)
The luncheon's featured speaker was Gus Whalen, chairman of the Warren Featherbone Foundation, headquartered in Gainesville, Georgia. As expected, Whalen's remarks were touching, funny, and inspiring.
The entrepreneurial spirit runs deep in Whalen's family. The Warren Featherbone Foundation gets its name from two sources—E.K. Warren (Whalen's great grandfather) and the spines of turkey feathers—featherbones. According to Whalen, Warren began his career as a "philanthropist with no money." But with hard work and a keen business sense, he achieved great success in retail, banking, agriculture, newspaper publishing, and, of course, featherbone. Whalen's most recent book explains how the featherbone idea came about:
"E.K. [Warren] started his career as a clerk in his father-in-law's dry goods store, and after several years became a partner. Watching one day as a clerk worked to fix a piece of broken whalebone in a ladies' corset, he began to explore ideas to replace whalebone with some other sort of elastic material. On a visit to the Chicago Feather Duster Company, he saw large piles of turkey wing pointers being burned. Upon inquiry, he was told that the company had no use for them. His creative mind put the two dilemmas together and came up with a solution for both problems. The 'worthless' turkey feathers could be used as a stay material to replace whalebone. Thus in 1883 the Warren Featherbone Company was formed." (Hooked at the Roots: The Evolution of the Featherbone Communiversity, 2009, p. 3. Each luncheon attendee received a copy of the book.)
The Warren Featherbone Company thrived for years but was forced to reinvent itself when, in 1938, plastic made featherbone obsolete. In response to changing circumstances, the company turned to the material that had put featherbone out of business—plastic—and became a highly successful manufacturer of plastic baby pants—until the advent of disposal diapers. From there the company transitioned to Alexis baby clothes, which it manufactured in Gainesville—until financial circumstances forced it to offshore its 10,000 manufacturing jobs to China in 2005. The company weathered each of its transformations because it followed an old Dakota Indian saying: "If the horse is dead, dismount."
Today the company exists as the Featherbone Communiversity, an educational facility in Gainesville that promotes collaborative, real-time, intergenerational learning. Working in partnership with Brenau University, Lanier Tech, Georgia Tech, and the University of Georgia, the Communiversity houses a business incubator, a nursing school, and a broad range of hands-on learning opportunities for youngsters. On some days the facility has as many as 2000 visitors.
Whalen's message to the luncheon attendees was that, like the Warren Featherbone Company, we must all look upon crises as opportunities. One of today's most pressing crises—one to which educators must respond—is that the United States is losing its manufacturing base. We need a new kind of workforce, one that is globally competitive.
And we must work together, Whalen said. Just like communities of California sequoia trees, we are all "hooked at the roots."
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