I made my first visit to a Leadership Austin event, their “farewell finale” of their Engage speaker series. As this was the last event of the series, the panelists revisited the previous events and talked about the upcoming schedule. The panelists were:

• Jim Walker, who served as moderator throughout the year
• Judge Eric Sheppard, who will be the incoming chairperson
• Heather McKissick, President and CEO of Leadership Austin)

The group, as a whole, was utterly inspiring. Heather really is a great speaker (this was the second time I saw her speak, the first was a couple months ago) and, as Judge Sheppard mentioned, the raison d’etre for a speaker is to motivate, inspire, and incite change. If a speaker can help you feel empowered enough to change, support, or help someone for the better, then the speaker did his or her job. The speaker should make you feel good about helping even one person, because in fact, this does make a difference.

So, if I was the only person who was inspired (I have a feeling that’s a very conservative count), the entire panel can be counted as great speakers. Here’s some specifics on what was discussed.

Jim, as moderator, kicked off the heart of the conversation by recapping the previous events and brought along his own notes and take-aways from all the previous panels. Here are the ones that really stuck with me:

• This generation (and the next) are going to be the first ones that do not have any extra capacity built into their inherited infrastructure. Think about that for a moment; that is a sobering thought.
• A panelist from the March event predicted the current recession will end in about 18 months; that puts  it at August 2010.
• At another event, the idea was brought up that we are now entering an age where coordination and collaboration will become more and more critical to the success of any venture or idea. This idea of coordination and collaboration was best illustrate by a conversation on housing. At a previous event, one panelist saw housing through a specific lens: that of units, mortgages, zoning, etc. Another panelist at that event saw it through a different lens, namely people and the stories they bring. Truly, both of these perspectives need to be brought to the table if there’s going to be any change in this area.

Judge Sheppard then took the mic and shared with us parts of Barbara Jordan’s address to 1976 Democratic National Convention, which still remains poignant even today. Judge Sheppard paraphrased a specific segment of her address for brevity, but I’ll present that same segment here in its entirety (read her entire address):

Many fear the future. Many are distrustful of their leaders, and believe that their voices are never heard. Many seek only to satisfy their private work — wants; to satisfy their private interests. But this is the great danger America faces — that we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual; each seeking to satisfy private wants. If that happens, who then will speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good?

This is the question which must be answered in 1976: Are we to be one people bound together by common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor; or will we become a divided nation? For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future. We must not become the “New Puritans” and reject our society. We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done.

There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals, and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.

Judge Sheppard also shared with us that it is so important to challenge what we know — don’t assume you know, challenge what you know so you can discover what you need to know. I think this becomes an incredibly powerful thought when combined with the realization of the heightened importance of coordination and collaboration.

At the end of the event, Heather instructed each of the attendees to write down a goal to achieve by the end of September/beginning of October 2009. Conveniently, Leadership Austin provided postcards on which to write these goals, and to make sure you live up to it, the post cards will be mailed back to us in a few months.

My goal is to get Aperio Marketing more involved in the community, affecting change on whatever scale we can, even if it is only one person at a time. So let it be known that Aperio Marketing is looking to form a partnership with an Austin-based non-profit, one that fits our values and mission, where we can assist when and however we can to affect real change in our community.