Profile: Ted Abernathy ’01, USA
August 2005
Ted Abernathy immediately felt at home in Ireland. Not only did the Irish Fellows, North and South, offer warm hospitality throughout his 2001 Fellowship, even arranging a dinner with President Mary McAleese, but also they showed him situations and problems remarkably similar to those he faced as an economic development professional in North Carolina.
Abernathy had recently become executive vice-president of the Research Triangle Regional Partnership (RTRP), a public/private alliance of economic development agencies with a mission to market world-wide a 13-county region of North Carolina. Like Ireland, Research Triangle Region had experienced enviable growth in recent years, especially in the research and technology sector but, again like Ireland, development was uneven, with some sectors left behind. The traditional small farms were no longer profitable while mill and factory jobs had moved to less developed countries. Some urban areas had grown rapidly while others languished. Globalization had removed many investment decisions from local control, and that great engine of recent growth, information technology, had begun to sputter. Abernathy knew that the Celtic Tiger had ridden similar transitions with some success. He wanted to learn how.
Abernathy’s understanding of economies in transition is more than just professional; it is rooted in his personal experience as a native North Carolinian, the descendent of generations of farmers and mill workers like those recently displaced. His parents were the first in their families to graduate from high school, and although his father was a star major-league baseball player, the low salaries of that time required him to work off-season driving an oil truck. Abernathy thanks his parents for insisting that he and his brother go to college and for the example of their optimism, work ethic, and egalitarian outlook.
His first job tested this inherited optimism. Working with a public manpower agency in inner-city Baltimore he encountered severe urban poverty and the hopelessness it engenders. He tried to help, convinced that providing people with the opportunity to work would enable them to take responsibility for their families. After ten years, marriage, and a graduate degree from Johns Hopkins earned at night, Abernathy returned to his home state for more than ten years at economic development jobs, first in Orange County and then in the city of Durham. Six months before his Fellowship, he changed his focus from urban to regional problems when he moved to Research Triangle Regional Partnership.
In Ireland, observing a variety of models and approaches to economic development in communities of all sizes, Abernathy found much to admire and to apply in his new position in North Carolina. Meetings with Irish planners confirmed his view that the structure of an organization is much less important than the personnel and that it is the risk-takers who make things happen. Many projects impressed him, especially the small enterprise programs that strengthen faltering communities and are custom-designed to the scale of each. And Ireland’s National Development Plan offered a significant lesson because, unlike the plans in Abernathy’s experience, it integrated multiple sectors - housing, mass transit, education, and job training—into an inclusive strategy. Feeling he had received a “booster shot of knowledge,” he returned to North Carolina with ideas for specific initiatives and an expanded professional perspective.
Shortly after his return he began to draw on his Fellowship experience as his organization orchestrated the development of a competitiveness plan for the Research Triangle Region. From this two-year process emerged, in March 2004, a five-year, $5 million strategic plan, entitled Staying on Top, Winning the Job Wars of the Future. Under it, over 60 area organizations agreed to cooperate through 30 actions designed to nurture the growth of industry clusters, generate 100,000 new jobs and promote the region worldwide. RTRP was assigned a leading role in the implementation of the plan.
Staying on Top immediately received national recognition. In May the U.S .Department of Commerce praised the initiative and named RTRP a co-winner of its 2004 Regional Competitiveness Award for Excellence in Economic Development. Just one year later the Council for Entrepreneurial Development honored RTRP with an award for outstanding service to entrepreneurs, and Abernathy could report that 20 of the plan’s 30 action items had been launched. “Our economy has stabilized,” he said, “and continues to improve while the region shifts to a higher-skill, higher-wage technology economy.” Clearly the region was competing for jobs and opportunity on a global scale.
After his program Abernathy’s life also acquired a global dimension. In 2003 he traveled to Sweden with a delegation from RTRP to identify economic development partners, and he has sat on development panels elsewhere overseas. With the cohort of Fellows from the Research Triangle Region he helps recruit candidates and support future Fellowships. He has maintained a consistent dialogue with Fellows in Ireland and Northern Ireland and welcomed with southern hospitality the Fellows visiting North Carolina. At the EF conference in Germany and the 50th Anniversary celebration in Philadelphia he made connections to the wider EF network. His long-term professional goals now include international economic development, helping communities in other countries to evaluate their economic situation and develop a local strategic plan.
Abernathy sees great potential in the worldwide network of Eisenhower Fellows. “I believe,” he says, “that innovation occurs where expertise, diversity of thought, and the opportunity for interchange come together. Expertise has always been dispersed throughout the world, so diverse points of view rarely had the opportunity to interact. With today’s changes in technology, individuals anywhere in the world have instantaneous opportunities to share thoughts, discuss new solutions to problems, and even provide the human, organizational, and financial capital needed to implement solutions. This can all occur both in real time and across borders. Only one barrier remains: the reluctance to trust a stranger—and the EF experience eliminates that barrier.” Ted Abernathy is convinced that if Eisenhower Fellows work together, empowered by modern communications and encouraged by mutual trust, they will be formidable innovators and problem solvers.