South Carolina needs more visionaries and dreamers to engage South Carolinians of all shapes and sizes in ways we can leap forward.
That’s exactly what the College of Charleston’s George Benson and consultant Phil Noble are doing with Envision SC, a “bold experiment” through which people can have their say about the state’s direction.
“Envision SC is unique in that it uses new technology to connect everyone – individual citizens, media companies, students, businesses, colleges – to all share their individual visions so that we can create a shared South Carolina vision of what our state’s future can be,” Noble said. “No state has ever used the new technology to try and do this before. This is just the beginning – and no one knows what will happen.”
Benson, whose college is sponsoring the project, adds, “Envision South Carolina is intended to help us take action – to think about how South Carolina can be a leader on the world stage.”
Envision SC (EnvisionSC.org) offers videos from a dozen state leaders on their dreams and ideas of how the state can move forward. It also allows people to submit ideas through the Connect-Learn-Share project, which must be submitted by April 15. In the middle of May, the project will celebrate what it’s churned up.
Through the project, world-class cyclist George Hincapie, who has ridden in a record 17 Tour De France races, tells why he picked Greenville as his home.
“When you get here to South Carolina, you immediately see that the communities are so friendly,” he said. “It’s a great place to raise families. The cities are so full of culture. We have big international companies like Boeing and Michelin that also bring in culture and smart, successful people.
“There’s just so much the state has to offer. I think the state needs to do a better job of putting that message out worldwide and promoting what we have more. I could live anywhere in the world that I want to. I’m not really tied to South Carolina or Greenville, but I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
Charles Bolden, the retired Marine Corps general and astronaut whose hometown is Columbia, says South Carolina made him who he is.
“I tell people all of the time, despite the segregation I faced, the standards of living, respect and discipline were just incredible,” he says. Bolden currently is the administrator of NASA, the nation’s space agency.
Emmy-award winner Kerri Forrest, back in her hometown of Charleston, observes that the state needs to deal with remnants of segregation to become world-class.
“Laws are in place to put down overt segregation and we’re still fighting some of that today. But what I think concerns me more is this subconscious segregation that ‘we can’t do that,’ or ‘we can’t hang out there,’ or ‘we can’t go there,’ or ‘we can’t achieve this, unless someone gives us permission to do it.’ And the reverse of it is ‘they don’t come here, so we shouldn’t worry about them.’ A lot of people move down from the north and love Charleston and automatically get separated into these two groups or social circles and very rarely do they ever mix.”
Several interviewees pushed the need for better education as a linchpin for the state’s future success. Business leader Linda Ketner of Charleston suggests the state’s leaders need to do more than pay lip service to education.
“First, we need to stop selling ourselves to business and industry as ‘we’ve got a cheap labor force,’ and start being and selling ‘we have a highly educated workforce.’ The source of our economic problems, our poverty problems, our crime problems begins with education.
“I think the political body doesn’t understand education as the source of the problem. They would rather give tax breaks to a company to come here, which costs us as taxpayers to fund those tax breaks, than focus on the source of the problem. In order to take advantage of our natural resources and have a long-term economic success story, we must without a doubt have laser focus on the part of the political body to fix the educational system. I don’t see that happening.”
Send your dreams for South Carolina to Envision SC today.
