U.S. needs community leaders to pull together

Call it what you will — voluntarism, brotherly love, benevolence, munificence, good will, charity, philanthropy, or whatever — it's time for us to come together. It's time to call upon the leadership of this community to pull together as it always has done in times of crisis — be it the floods, the fires or the locusts.

Philanthropy in America grew out of concern for one's neighbor, born out of deep values Americans held about caring for each other, and is rooted in voluntarism by individuals, religions and nonprofit groups. Now, President-elect Barack Obama and Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. are doing what some leaders in the past have done when our nation was faced with serious problems: They are calling for us to renew our commitment to those values. We are in a state of crisis, a failing economy with more of our people homeless and lacking health care, and with rising unemployment. We need to help each other.

Perhaps it's time to re-create what was done nationally when Americans faced an urban crisis when cities were burning in the '70s. At that time, John W. Gardner pulled together the leadership of America, including the corporate community, churches, unions, minorities and community and service organizations, to form the National Urban Coalition. It called for all segments of our communities to come together to work to solve the problems. The guiding principle was that the problems were too big to be solved by government alone and the leadership of the private sector had to be involved. Gardner, a former U.S. administrator, called upon the corporate sector to take the lead in convening the diverse leadership within their respective communities to solve their problems. In doing so, he often met privately with top CEOs in their corporate boardrooms and his message was simple and straightforward. He told them it was a shortsighted CEO who didn't make an investment in his/her community — it was their marketplace and if it weren't stable they would soon be out of business. They got the message and began exercising their corporate social responsibility.

Businesspeople soon understood they had to do more than just be content to give money to perpetuate existing programs and allow government agencies to founder. They found out that by bringing together the diverse groups of their communities they could work together on common problems without having to change minds or give up their independence — that's the essence of coalitions. They supported public officials and questioned when needed. They also did things governments do not do well — created new solutions and used their political capital to make existing programs change the way they did business, be it housing, health clinics, revitalizing inner cities, starting small businesses, creating jobs or reducing crime.