Focusing on Key Priorities to Move Our Region Forward

Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, Stephanie Coleman

A recent article on the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) website highlights three takeaways from this year’s CEOs for Cities conference, which brings city leaders together to discuss common themes and challenges. These themes are all familiar topics and priorities among Nashville’s business community. They are:

1. Leverage your anchor institutions, such as corporate headquarters and education, medical and cultural institutions. At the Chamber, we know how critical it is to partner with our important community resources to further economic prosperity in the region. It’s what we do every day – we facilitate community leadership to create economic prosperity. It’s also why we created Partnership 2020 (originally Partnership 2000), Middle Tennessee’s public/private economic development initiative responsible for recruiting businesses to the region, facilitating expansions and creating new jobs. In addition, we take a group of more than 100 business and community leaders to another city each year to study best practices during our annual Leadership Study Mission. Through these initiatives, we have seen great progress in moving our city and region forward toward a more prosperous future.

 

2. Education is the most important factor in driving economic growth. Education is the Chamber’s No. 1 priority because we know that today’s students are tomorrow’s workforce and will, in large part, determine the future prosperity of our region. We work closely with Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools to engage the community in public education and create opportunities for business leaders to contribute to the success of our students. We also know that most of the high-growth occupations of the next decade will require some post-secondary education, so we’re working with our high schools and higher-education institutions to make sure our high school graduates are college and career ready. We are fortunate that Nashville’s Mayor Karl Dean also identifies education as one of his top priorities and has made a goal to double the number of Metro Nashville Public School students who go onto attend college and receive a post-secondary degree.

 

3. Attract the “creative class.” Many cities are working to lure what is now commonly called the “creative class,” which includes innovative, energetic and increasingly mobile recent college graduates. Fortunately, few cities do this better than Nashville. With our strong creative culture centered on the music and entertainment industry, Nashville is a natural magnet for young, creative minds. Often, those creative individuals go on to be entrepreneurs, coming up with innovative ideas and boosting the local economy through capital investment and jobs. Nashville has often been touted by Richard Florida for our creative class, which helps place us in a position of economic growth and resiliency.

While we continue working to improve economic prosperity in our region, it is reassuring to know that we are one step ahead of many other cities across the nation. Our community leadership set a vision years ago that brought us to this point. Today, we must continue to cultivate visionary leaders who will do the same for future generations of Nashvillians.

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