Hugh Ballou: This is Hugh Ballou, and I have the honor today. I am in Lynchburg, Virginia where I live. I have the honor of speaking to a native.
Treney Tweedy: Yes, I am a native Lynchburger.
Hugh: Burger. Treney, it’s a mouthful for me. Mayor Treney Tweedy. Hugh Ballou has its own challenge.
Treney: Well, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me as your guest. We’re talking.
Hugh: This is part of what we call The Nonprofit Exchange. We talk to people in social benefit work. They might be in government work, education, running a community for-purpose organization. We like reframing nonprofit to for-purpose. This is a live interview, but we are also recording and transcribing, preparing for the next issue of Nonprofit Performance 360 Magazine, which is going to be about partnerships and collaborations. I moved to Lynchburg 13 months ago. It’s been a very welcoming community. I noticed unlike a lot of places, people do work together in some communities, but here there is a whole community spirit of let’s attack the issues that are holding us back. Back in history, before the Civil War, Lynchburg was one of the wealthiest cities in the country.
Treney: We were. We do understand our place in history. A lot of that was because of industry, because of being located by the river, and the tobacco industry, and many areas of utilization of the river alongside the city. Families and businesses grew along with it.
Hugh: Lynchburg comes from John Lynch.
Treney: Yes, who ran the ferry. The businesses back then utilized him. He helped develop Lynchburg. I know people don’t understand that. They often don’t get where Lynchburg comes from. It does come from the founder John Lynch.
Hugh: It’s a great story. A lot of great stories here. Our story today is about how leaders in this city, and it’s a right-sized city. Not too big. We have 80-something thousand?
Treney: It’s about 80,00 residents. We are in a region of 250,000. Lynchburg is the anchor city with surrounding localities. We are a city of 80,000 strong. Numbers are going up. We are a city we feel is compassionate and caring and innovative in how we think and work together. It wasn’t difficult to say we have a problem. Previous leaders before myself looked as issues, tackled things as they came along. There have always been community dialogues around issues. It wasn’t unusual for us to look at our current issue, which was our poverty rate, a high poverty rate we have among families and children living in poverty, and say, “We are just big enough to have the problem, but small enough to do something about it.”
So that started the conversation amongst the previous Mayor Joan Foster. When we were on the campaign trail, the poverty numbers came up. When we were talking about education and work force, the actual percentage rates, when they hit you in the face, that almost a quarter of the population lives under the poverty threshold, we think of ourselves as being that formerly wealthy city, a city of opportunity, a city where you have a church on every hill. We also have restaurants. We love to eat. We love economic development. We have a thriving downtown. So what’s going on that we still have a quarter of our residents living under that poverty threshold? Of that 24%, 9% of those are children who are living in that.
Once you get the numbers, you understand where we are, many cities, we drive by poverty every day. Do we actually have the wherewithal or the gumption to say we are going to do something about this? We have a lot of faith leaders, faith communities, faith houses. We think we have a strong education system. We know we have a thriving economic system here and development. It’s not getting to everyone. Everyone is not seeing that opportunity. That is when the city manager, the previous mayor, Joan Foster and I sat down and just said, we are going to commit to talking about poverty every two weeks during our meetings. We are going to look at how to develop our plan of ta