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Dear Canvas Workshop Participants:  

Welcome to the 2005 Canvas Workshop, where we will visit the Raleigh/Durham area of North Carolina. This is our third year of bringing together a diverse group of 120-150 of Baton Rouge's civic leaders from the public and private sectors--educators, business people, nonprofit leaders, philanthropists, religious leaders, and government officials, both elected and appointed. But we all have one thing in common--we share a passion for our community. And we are all little "d" democrats who believe that we can make our community a better place by being involved.

We've learned a lot from our previous visits to Austin and Nashville about what makes a community successful. We've seen how civic leadership--long-term, committed leadership that stays the course during good times and bad--can transform a city. We've also seen that even in the so-called mecas, all is not perfect. Growth brings its own set of problems; rapid growth brings bigger problems, although, let me hasten to add, these are problems we would like to have in Baton Rouge.

North Carolina in general and Raleigh/Durham in particular have gone through what Baton Rouge and Louisiana are currently experiencing. North Carolina's economy was once based on tobacco, furniture manufacturing, and textiles. Two of those industries-furniture manufacturing and textiles--have abandoned the United States for the low-wage countries in Asia. We all know what has happened to the tobacco industry.

Raleigh/Durham's transition from a manufacturing- and agriculture-based economy to a knowledge-based economy has been painful. We will see how this transition has affected the Raleigh/Durham community and the people who live there. People with only a high-school education (or less), who in the past could earn a comfortable middle-class wage at the tobacco plants, have been forced to find jobs in lower-paying industries-an experience all too familiar to us in Louisiana with the decline of the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries.

This has impacted severely the lives of individuals and the communities in which they live. Some, individuals and communities alike, have been more successful in navigating this transition than others. We will see examples of this on our trip. One fact that I found amazing: Duke University, with a student body of only 10,000 or so, is the largest private employer in the state!

So, there are things to see and do.

The organizers of the Canvas Workshops have also learned from past experience. This year, we are making the panels "meatier." We will ask you to work harder on this trip. We will provide you with a briefing book with white papers on each of the panel topics. We will expect you to have read the materials prior to each panel presentation so that you can put what you hear about the North Carolina experience in context with where we are in our community.

I am honored to be your Canvas Workshop Chairman this year and look forward to participating in this exciting learning experience.

Eddie Ashworth
2006 Canvas Workshop Chair

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