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Published November 15, 2022
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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with David Brown. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.

Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.

Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

I’ll your host, he speaks one language. He’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Before we jump into this episode, I wanted to let everyone know about our Chamber Pros Planner giveaway raffle that we’re doing this year we did it last year but Izzy West has been kind enough to partner with the podcast again to give away five Chamber Pros Planners for 2023. So any of you listening if you leave a review for the show, either an apple podcast or even on Facebook under the Chamber Chat Podcast page, and send me a screenshot at Brandon@chamberchatpodcast.com I’ll enter you into a raffle to win one of Izzy West’s 2023 Chamber Pros Planners.

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Diane Rogers, President and CEO of the Rancho Cordova Area Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers have provided value for her.

Diann Rogers 1:20
As a medium sized chamber, we recognize that it’s absolutely critical to have a well qualified and well trained membership development person. Holman Brothers trained that person, recruited that person then they even trained me on how to manage that person. We’re grateful for the support we got.

Brandon Burton 1:33
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Our guest for this episode is David Brown. David has recently joined next generation consulting as lead consultant. He is the retired president and CEO of the Greater Omaha chamber, one of the largest and most highly accredited chambers in the nation. Some of you may remember I had David on the podcast back in episode 71. We’re on episode 199. Now to give you some perspective, it’s been a little bit backed by 30 years of experience and economic development and chamber administration David led the chamber with bold vision and contagious enthusiasm. The organization advocated for strong business, climate and community building created opportunities for member visibility and business connections pursued investment and jobs for the region strengthen leaders and the community and enhance the region’s brand and image. Under his leadership, the Chamber partnered with the United Way of the Midlands and the Urban League of Nebraska to develop Omaha 2040 a 20 year vision for the region. initiatives focused on Diversity Equity and Inclusion, regional mass transit, redevelopment of the urban core economic development and talent attraction and retention. During his tenure in Omaha, the Greater Omaha Economic Development Partnership, Omaha’s regional economic development effort led by the Chamber successfully landed 972 projects representing 56,433 jobs and nearly $15 billion in capital investments since 2004. David began his career in organization management in Michigan in 1983, as President of the Monroe County Industrial Development Corporation, and director of the port of Monroe. He served 10 years in Indiana as a fourth grader Fort Wayne Chamber of Commerce, versus vice president of economic development and then as president, his next assignment took him to South Carolina where he was president and CEO of the greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce. David assumed the role as President CEO of the Greater Omaha chamber in October 2003 is a graduate of Dartmouth College with academic specialties and industrial location and environmental studies. David, I’m excited to have you back with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.

David Brown 4:47
Are you brand new thanks for having me. I I knew he’d been on not so recently, but I didn’t realize that it was back in 2020. That was in the height of all things disruptive happening in the world. So Good to be here when things are a little bit more subtle than they were back then I think we all learned a lot about ourselves and about our world and a lot our communities in the last few years, you know, I’ve been fortunate to have been married to a terrific woman for 40 years. Maggie and I met in 81. And we’re married in 82. We have two sons, 28 and 38. The older one is a videographer, and photographer by trade, and my youngest son was an opera singer. So I’m not exactly sure how we ended up with such artsy kids, considering I’ve been in the chamber world, how life but it’s been remarkable to see them express their talents. And when they perform or showing showcasing things, you can’t be proud or so lots of folks don’t really know that about my family. So that’s a way to kind of see and maybe how I think and why I think we why I think the way I do. So it’s been it’s been a great career. And again, a great life. And as I was told just earlier today, you really haven’t really retired, you just sort of started years that one career and have to decide kind of what’s your how much time you’re going to be spending retiring versus how much time you’re going to be spending working. So that’s been an interesting challenge figuring this out.

Brandon Burton 6:19
That’s right. And well, I’m sure touch on that a bit more in our conversation today. It is great to see your kids, you know, develop their talents or skills and watch them flourish. And it doesn’t, you know, you can’t help but have a sense of pride

David Brown 6:34
as you see them do this. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, everyone, as they should be, are so proud of what their kids accomplishments are. I’m just amazed by skills that they have that I can’t even get close to. So I’m wondering how they’ve got the interest and found all this energy and artistic ability. But it’s, I think just getting a more gratified by the fact that I know I can’t do what they do. So it’s really interesting to watch them do their thing.

Brandon Burton 6:58
Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned in your bio, that you are retired now as president, CEO of the Greater Omaha chamber. And now you’re the lead consultant at Next Generation consulting? Sure, would you take a minute and tell us a little bit about next generation consulting and what that is how you guys, you know, who’s your ideal clan clients who you work with type of work you do? perspective.

David Brown 7:26
So next generation consulting is the consulting firm that was started by Rebecca Ryan, who was a futurist 1517 years ago, and I met her in 2003, when she helped us establish our first young professionals Council in Omaha when I got there. And she came in and just talked about what best practices were and how to make an effective yp group, which is now I think, one of the largest in the country, it definitely has the largest blind key events where we’ll get 16 1700 People at an annual yp Summit. And we’ve really converted what started out as a networking opportunity for young professionals to kind of build their network into not just that, but also leadership training, opportunity, and knowledge opportunity to get young people engaged in strategic discussions around the community. So we really went from Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t do more of a young professionals to now there are a dynamic part of virtually every strategic discussion that happens in your law community. And in our community, their last count that I when I was still there was about 50 or 60 young professional organizations, within companies and within other nonprofits and with other industries that grew out of initial work that we did with Rebecca back in 2003. So, you know, Rebecca is a force of nature. If you’ve met her or have seen her speak, you know, that she can handle a crowd and motivate a community like just about nobody else that I’ve ever seen. But she’s also a pretty significant, a very significant player and help helping communities solve problems. So over the years after 2003, we started calling her whenever there was something that something that just wasn’t quite clicking. And then finally, in 2017, we called her and said, Look, we’ve been doing strategic planning, the same way. We’ve been doing it for decades, and we need to do something different if we want to have different results. And so can you give us a hand thinking through this? And so as a result of that, we went through the Strategic Foresight process that is a futurist process that helps communities figure out what they want to be 1020 3040 50 years from now. It’s been a an industry norm for utility companies and for communities who have to build big infrastructure to use futuristic concepts. To get their stuff done. But for communities, it’s kind of difficult to think I’m going to try and figure out what my community is going to be like 20 years from now. So for the first time, we did that in Omaha, and we’ve created, as you mentioned, Omar 2040, which was a fascinating process. And what’s really intriguing to me is that it helped us think about what we needed to do differently, given the fact that the community was going to change over the next 20 years. And the work that we did to figure out how it was going to change help us figure out what we should be doing to accommodate that change. Or if we needed to create disruption, that would stop some kind of change and create something else, we could figure out how to do that. So it worked for us, it was a great process for us. And over that timeline, I got to know Rebecca really well, she got to know me really well. And we realized that maybe there was a role that I could play when I whenever I retired at the time, it wasn’t something that was going to be imminent. And then I might be able to be helpful to other communities with the experience that I had in the communities that I’d been in. So when I finally realized that I was probably going to be retiring sometime in the spring of 22, we started talking, and that was about 18 months prior to retirement happening, just trying to figure out if there was a fit, or not, I had, and you know, for her, and we’ll talk about the process of getting there. But next generation consulting does work with communities and helping them build visions for the future. We can talk about that process, if you like as we move on here. But they also work with industry, utilities, etc. And helping them try and figure out, you know, their future process. And they really do a lot of training of teams and staff so that they can become adept to thinking like a futurist too. And using these this methodology to make a lot of decisions throughout their time. So it’s a interesting fit. And so far, I’ve done a couple of projects with her and, you know, it’s working, it seems like so far, so good.

Brandon Burton 12:08
That’s good. I love that futuristic mindset, you know, is it reminds me of the great Wayne Gretzky, you know that those quote of you got to skate to where the puck is going, you know, you can’t go to where it was, because then you missed the boat.

David Brown 12:20
You use that term before, it’s a great analogy, because that’s really what we’re doing, right? I mean, think of anything that you’ve set as a goal. It usually isn’t a goal for tomorrow, it’s a goal for something substantial down the road, you got to figure out how to get there. But you got to know where you’re going first. Exactly. And that’s always been a challenge. If if you do strategic planning as the way it’s traditionally been done, you look back five years, see what happened, what worked, what didn’t work, discard the stuff that didn’t add some more stuff on the front side, you look at some new trends you might be aware of, and you build a five year plan and figure out a way to pay for it and implement it and do it again, five years later. And we’ve all done it that way. This instead says let’s put a mark in the sand about where we want to be and what we want to be. And then let’s backcast from that a series of opportunities to make differences in the community. So you actually get to that end goal. And it’s a fun process. It’s a lot of work. But it’s well worth it because it becomes that foundational context. And that was the one thing I found in Omaha is our chairman looked at that and said, Now I know why we do what we do. Because I can look at 2040 and see where we’re going. And I can see the steps we’re taking to get us there. Yeah, he used it in every speech there on it saying context is important. You got to know why you’re doing what you’re doing and where you’re going. So it’s a great tool for communities to use.

Brandon Burton 13:40
Absolutely. Well as we get into our topic for discussion today. We’re going to focus on what life is like you know, going through retirement so life after retirement as a chamber exec and the nuances with it and different mindset changes. We’ll we’ll dive into this discussion as soon as I get back from this quick break.

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Izzy West 15:14
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Brandon Burton 15:47

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All right, David, we’re back. As it is, before our break, we’re going to talk about life after retirement. So you kind of alluded to it a little bit into how you ended up with next generation consulting. But what was that transition like? And as you go through explaining, I want to try to keep in mind for maybe the younger chamber professionals that are listening, the things that they can do now, as they prepare, you know, down the road talk talk about 20 years down the road, where that puck is going, what can their retirement look like and start planning now as they go that direction? How’s it been for you so far?

David Brown 17:30
Well, it has been terrific, but I must admit it, it’s harder to be retired than it is to be working. Because your natural inclination is to work. And so even just sitting here in my office at my house, my inclination is to find out what else is there out there that I can work on. And I’ve got to constantly remind myself that yeah, that’s not what this is supposed to be about your work when you want to work, but you play when you want to play. So when my granddaughter shows up, the computer turns off and we go do stuff with my granddaughter. So you know, there’s a there’s there is a transition time you got to play in there. I will tell you your intro though, started really interestingly, you really do have to start thinking about your retirement 20 years in advance. And I say that because chamber world is not the most lucrative world and a world to to make work to be become wealthy. And so you got to be thinking about how are you going to support yourself and your spouse and your family, when you finally decide to hang up the Spurs and actually retire. And so you have to do a lot of financial planning, find somebody you trust in the community and just start thinking about, what is it going to look like, when you moving forward? Now it sounds basic, but it’s always kind of the last thing and the to do list, you know, call that financial person and see what they think. And then implementing that plan is not never real simple, because there’s to take some courage, number one, it takes some focus number two and some commitment that you’re going to make some decisions that will you’ll benefit down the road from so the first thing I would tell chamber executives, if you hadn’t been thinking about yet, you how you’re going to invest your money and how you’re going to have money there for your retirement. You can’t start soon enough, and you start started engaging in that in that process, and then doing what you commit to do. I’m actually going to do these things, I’m going to have the specific reason to do it. And I’m going to actually get that work done. But you know, I think then when you actually start getting closer to the time that you’re going to retire, I found that I had to kind of fit it in between the next big items that I knew were coming down the road. So for us it was a five year fundraising campaign and development of a new five year strategy. And so even though those all related to the vision that we had, there are steps along the way to get there as all as you chamber execs figure you know you don’t start a new five year plan the year before the plan supposed to take effect that you started three years earlier and you start are trying to figure out all those steps. So. So for me it was about did I have it in me to do yet another five year plan? If I did, I needed to probably stay two or three more years because the money had to be raised. And the plan had to be built and had to be sold to investors and finally realized that while I could do it, I’m not sure that I wanted to do it. And I was old enough that I could make that choice if the timing was right for me to retire. So. So first off, I started really thinking about five years before I made the decision to retire, what’s coming up, that is going to be hanging out there that I need to make a decision about my engagement in it, because I can either retire this year and retire Three years later, but what’s it going to be? So you got to do some forward planning of your own about what’s coming down the pike that you’re gonna be responsible for?

Brandon Burton 20:53
It’s a little different than other careers where you can decide, yeah, give it six more months or end of the year and retire? I mean, if you commit to stick around, you’re committing, you know, like you said, like, another three years, yeah, be able to get to that next, or that next big event, or hurdle, or whatever it

David Brown 21:08
is never six months is always Yeah, because those things take years to get done. So as always, okay, three more years of this, yep. When you weigh the financial benefit, versus the psychological benefits or downs, and you’ve figured out what, what you want to do, but then I think, I don’t know chamber exec, that is gonna go to the public park and observe their naval for the next 25 years, once they retire, you know, they’re just not going to sit there and contemplate life, they’re going to be busy, they’re going to do things and you got to plan for them. Because you’re right now you’re busy doing nonprofit boards that you’re engaged in are carrying out activities that you need to get your job done, or raising money or networking, doing something. And then all of a sudden, you’re not gonna be doing that. And so the next phase was good now that I realize I want to retire. And I think I know what I want to retire. And I’ve done the financial planning to allow me to retire. What’s retirement gonna look like? And do I want to keep working at least part time for a few years just to keep using my contacts, keep doing the things that I did well, and trying to kind of take that to the next level? Or do I really want to do something totally different? Or do I just basically want to do nothing and just spend time traveling with family etc. And those are all options that you need to consider. And you got to really think about those hard because if you haven’t figured it out, by the time you actually close your office for the last time, the next day is pretty stark. If the phone doesn’t ring, you don’t have another project meeting to go to even

Brandon Burton 22:45
wide open.

David Brown 22:46
All of a sudden, it’s like, you know, I thought I had 1000 people that just needed to talk to me every day. And they did when I was the head of the chamber. But now there’s somebody else there and your time is over, those calls don’t come. And so you’re really dependent upon yourself to figure out what you’re going to do next.

Brandon Burton 23:05
Right. So how has that transition worked for you with staying busy after leaving the chamber? And do you have a clear enough vision? Yeah, looking back. I mean, it’s been a little bit now to be able to look back and say, I feel like I plan? Well, and

David Brown 23:19
I think so for me, I said, Look, I think I want to work about 25% of the time, and I want to make about this much money. And I had to see if that was possible. And so I’ve got a couple of clients that I’m working with in the Omaha area, and I’ve got work with Nebraska, I mean, next generation consulting with Rebecca. And that feels about 25% of my time. And I’m, it’s working well, I’m enjoying what I’m doing. What I really had to figure out is, as I mentioned earlier, pulling back away from this computer and turning everything off and just going to do sometimes nothing. Many most times something but still just realizing that retirements about 75% of my time right now. And it’ll be that way for probably five years, I think. Then five years from now we’ll reassess and to say, you know, is it something that I really want to keep doing? Or is it time to really sort of hanging up and by then I’ll have figured out all the other stuff that we’ll be doing that I’m missing by having 25% of my time, taken up by consulting, but I must admit I’m having a blast. Rebecca and her team are fun to work with. They have really fun projects. I’m working in Des Moines right now with her on a project. I’ve worked a little bit with her on the Iowa City project. There’s a whole bunch of projects coming up down the pike for communities that are doing 20 year visions. And I’ve got an interesting perspective because I was the customer of this for a long time. Now I’m learning about what’s behind the curtain. How’s the sausage really being made and how is it actually happened? And those two blended together, I think add a nice complement to Rebecca and her team.

Brandon Burton 24:58
Yeah, well and you also come from a unique perspective where you’ve been in different parts of the country, Indiana and South Carolina and Nebraska to be able to see how different things work and taking ideas from what’s worked in other communities. And of course, your network of other chamber professionals you’ve met throughout your career, I mean, great resources to be able to rely on and really develop a good strategy for for change very

David Brown 25:23
much. So I think the work in ACCE that I did when I was in that on that board are involved in committees, you meet a lot of great people there. And so naledi able to use those, that network that you’ve created. But you really, really think about who are the thinkers in this business, and they were the ones that I can call and say, Hey, what would you do about this, or something happening in your community that would help us resolve that. So this network is still there. Chamber execs move around is that they do in every profession, but I keep track of them, they make sure that I’m talking to folks on a pretty regular basis, just to make sure I know what’s going on out there that don’t get stale, by it has been a lot of fun to see peers out there in the field doing this work. And to see the kind of issues that they’re coming up with, you know, they’re dramatic and dynamic and really forward thinking that can change communities and most communities do need to change just because 20 years from now is gonna be different than it is today. So it’s so far it’s work.

Brandon Burton 26:22
Right? So you brought up an important thing to discuss, I believe, is that chamber execs that move from one chamber to another and it happens a lot. You talked about the transition of leaving chamber world and going into retirement. What how about the transition of, you know, exiting one chamber going to another Are you still looking at the timing should what sort of things should be considered here before someone leaves one chamber to another?

David Brown 26:50
Well, I’ve always I went, as you mentioned, I went to from four or five different organizations. And for me, it was always about maybe a larger community with different challenges. In one case, as you mentioned, geography was important, we had an opportunity to do some work in the south, and we had my wife and I had never lived there and never worked there. So it was an opportunity to kind of experience what was going on there. Which is, you know, each of the regions of the country do economic development differently. I think, weather brother says a lot about that. But we were able to learn a lot, you need to go different places. So so for me to make a decision to leave it was always about am I gonna get to something bigger, maybe something better, I didn’t want to be at a place that was so big, that chambers couldn’t have an impact. So I kind of moved around to I got to a point where I was picking the right size city with the right size chamber that had the right level of gifted authority, even if it wasn’t official authority to get things done. So you have to think about that it is not a matter of just lateral moves, I think you got to think about where you want you where your skill set might be the most useful. And then, you know, when you when you do make a transition, one thing you really got to keep in mind, your contact list doesn’t help you a little liquid you move to the new town. The things that give us strength as chamber execs is the network that we build automatically. And your contact list was was my contact, this was the envy of just about everybody in town, because I had, I knew millions of people that seemed like and knew how to get in touch up, I didn’t know the number off the top of my head, then you move to another town, it’s like, well, I know 12 People, six of them were on the search committee. Six of them ran the executive at the board. And nobody else it takes a lot of than focus energy to get to know people and and make that network another part of that that resource that makes you so valuable in the community. So that’s that was the one thing that surprised me. Every time I left somewhere, I figured this is going to really be valuable. Take my rolodex with me. And

Brandon Burton 28:54
yeah, so we’re seeing a lot of changes in chamber world right now. You know, transitioning from one chamber to another, any tips on how to build those networks in the new community? Yeah, I

David Brown 29:05
always thought and I think in his last gig, even though it was back in 2003, it was about just being everywhere at once for that first 100 days. And it had to be everywhere talking to everybody. They had to I always thought that they had to see that my level of energy was going to be far greater than anyone else’s, that I was going to be aggressive about meeting people. That was gonna follow up on things that I said I would do mean that building the network with the key decision makers, and maybe even the next tier was just crucial. And so I would, despite what communities might put in front of you and say, Here’s we want you to get done 100 days, in that first 100 days, the most important thing you can do is become part of the community. People got to know you, they got to see you. They’ve got to shake your hand. And they’ve got to know they can actually call you and you’ll remember them make a difference. There’s no greater compliment you can pay it anyway. And then you remember them when you see them or remember them when they call you. And that’s work. You know, it isn’t like you’re going to be networking, you are going to be networking, you know, 1215 hours a day. But you need to remember who you met. And you need to know, we have to have a system in place to do that. And so if you can do that, that makes everything else work. Now, people will say, Well, yeah, he’s part of the community, he’s working really hard to become part of the community. And let’s, let’s give him a chance to see if he can really do what he says he can do. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 30:28
like that. So I’d like to ask just in general, for chambers listening, what tip or action item might you have for them if they’re looking to try to elevate their chamber up to the next level?

David Brown 30:43
So I have found that I mentioned a little bit earlier, chambers have no authority to do a damn thing, right? I mean, we weren’t elected. We weren’t appointed, you know, we got we’ve got momentum behind us because of our membership or because of the projects we work on. But, frankly, we have no legal reason why anybody would listen to us come to a meeting and do anything like that. For me, the way we engage the community and other leaders was what made us the big convener that we were. So I found during COVID. And during the social unrest following the George Floyd’s death, and since then, that the biggest resource I had was the number of other leaders, particularly in nonprofits or government entities, that I counted as more than just acquaintances that trusted me and I trusted them. And then we did things together. Because during COVID, that meant that we picked up the phone and call each other and met as a group and said, How can we help solve this, and we’ve problem solved together because we trusted each other. But trust doesn’t just come overnight, and not just based on need, because there’s a catastrophe around. It’s something you build over time. So I think, you know, chambers can’t do everything, and they’re not supposed to do everything. But United Way’s are the same way. They’re not supposed to do everything. But they’re important parts of the social fabric of a community. We mentioned the Urban League in Omaha, we used them as a partner, because we knew that we were becoming more and more diverse. And we needed to have a diverse voice telling us what was going on in the community. So we ended up with about 75 partner organizations that we worked with on any given day. And I could tell you, which of those organizations were interested in what issues and we constantly pulled them in. And those discussions and they did the same thing. You gain sort of sort of a mutual credibility. So if they get the chamber involved, they can say the chambers were this and that all of a sudden, the Chamber credibility is layered on top of their own. And vice versa. You know, if you say United Way, as a partner with us, all of a sudden, all those folks that are united way fans and maybe not too terribly engaged in the chamber, all of a sudden become people that want to be involved with you, too. So I think a way you can help build your chambers ability to get things done, is engaging with other leaders, and building a network and a collaborative process and engaged leaders of other organizations who might also not have any authority to do anything. But just by virtue of the organization they represent and the numbers they have and the commitment their boards have, you can get more done together,

Brandon Burton 33:10
strengthen numbers, for sure. So going back to the analogy of skating to where the puck is like asking everyone how they see the future of chambers going forward.

David Brown 33:24
Yeah, you know, I’ve always thought that chambers are. They’re underestimated by how much they can get done by in building a community. All the things we’ve talked about here, from identifying resources to dealing with other leaders to doing strategic planning and thinking big picture. Those are really about building your community. And chambers have historically, maybe not been in that space. But if you do it right, you can be about the business of making your community successful for the next 2030 4050 years. And sometimes that means changing things being the disrupter. And I think that’s the future of chambers chambers are have to be able to create and a sense that they are more than just an organization that helps build networks. They have to be more than the other the organization that does economic development, if your chamber does economic development or public policy or via whatever those things are, that you’re focused on. Because chambers need to be thinking big picture about what that community needs to be like. And there’s nobody out there really that is paid to do that. You know, they’re if they’re an a planning organization within a community, they get caught up in the same things that chambers get caught up in the minutiae of getting something done out the door on deadline. Chambers, I think have the the ability to bring all kinds of resources to the table to think about what needs to happen next. And then to be about the business of building it. So Having the chamber the future is one that’s in the middle of major conversations and all their communities and talking about the future, and then seeing that future become reality.

Brandon Burton 35:09
I love that. No, it goes back to having that vision, you know, seeing what your community can become, and then back backtracking that into today and then making the steps to get there to the future. So,

David Brown 35:21
you know, it’s important that that vision isn’t just yours, it can’t just be able to change. And is this the United Way’s vision is that and your believes is that there needs to be a community, and really a regional vision that people realize is put together by lots of voices and are supported by lots of different folks that they can relate to?

Brandon Burton 35:39
Yeah, and the regional emphasis is becoming more and more important to

David Brown 35:42
our reasons really big. I think we all learned during the pandemic that there were no local answers. There were all regional, state and, and federal, or even large region answers. And I think you can go back and look at a lot of those different scenarios that happened over the years. And we’d all be surprised by how many times we went to a regional response, rather than just a local response. You know, parochialism is dead. community pride isn’t by being proactive about your decision and your actions really isn’t going to be an effective way to function moving in the future,

Brandon Burton 36:15
I don’t think, right? Absolutely. David, it’s been fun having you back on the podcast with us, I’d love to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for anyone who wants to reach out and connect with you or next level consulting, what would be the best way to reach out and

David Brown 36:31
I’m going to give you two ways to do that. I’ve got a Rebecca Ryan, email address. So it’s real simple. It’s DB@RebeccaRyan.com. So you can you can reach me there whenever you want to, if you want to chat about what we’ve done, or how we do it, or how you might be able to work with next generation on a project. And I’ll give you my cell number every most everybody in the world has it. So it’s 402-616-4175. Feel free to text me or call me and I’ll be happy to reach back out and talk to you.

Brandon Burton 37:04
Alright, David’s phone, he said has not been ringing since he retired. So let’s make a new order up and stay right. David, thank you for coming back on the show with us. It’s great to hear about this transition into retirement to still have that fire for community development. And glad to see you’re still heavily involved with the work of helping to develop communities.

David Brown 37:29
Appreciate that. Thanks for having me on again, Brandon. I appreciate it.

Brandon Burton 37:33
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