ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Saturday, October 12, 1996             TAG: 9610140023
SECTION: EDITORIAL                PAGE: A-9  EDITION: METRO 

THE RESPONSIBLES MUST GET TOGETHER

REGIONAL leadership is as important as it is lacking today in the Roanoke and New River valleys. The question is: How to develop it?

Writing in the current issue of Governing magazine, John W. Gardner offers some helpful clues - in a discussion of what he calls "the Responsibles."

The Responsibles are people who lead the way in helping to shape community consensus about priorities and values, and in defending those values when they're threatened. They're also the ones who look for big but fitting regional goals, and who make sure that projects of importance to the community get done.

While they may include local-government officials, they also include businesspeople, neighborhood organizers, crusaders or others - those, at all levels, who worry about civic problems and work to correct them.

Historically, these typically influential, mutually acquainted people haven't always reflected the diversity of the community and its interests. But another sort of problem afflicts the Responsibles of today: They lack a coherent network and shared purpose - certainly across the region.

In our region, the New Century Council is attempting to fill the gap, but is finding the way difficult. It needs more support and a clearer direction.

The challenge, says Gardner, chairman of the National Civic League and founding chairman of the Alliance for National Renewal, is to continue working to make community leadership more diverse - yet also working to reverse the segmentation that diversity and regional fragmentation inspire.

He calls for building networks like the ones by which leaders of various communities once forged a common agenda and worked together to achieve it.

That means crossing boundaries, including between classes and races and political jurisdictions. It also means simultaneously pursuing the objectives of inclusiveness and consensus-finding. The task is made harder, in a kind of Catch-22, by the lack of existing regional leadership.

Yet, as Gardner says, "It has to be done. There is no other path to social cohesion or community stability."

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