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The State, Columbia, S.C., C. Grant Jackson Column: Liberty Fellows Praise Program

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 June 2006, 06:00 CDT

By C. Grant Jackson, The State, Columbia, S.C.

Jun. 6--The Liberty Fellowships, the brainchild of Upstate businessman Hayne Hipp, seeks to promote outstanding leadership in South Carolina and to improve the state along the way.

Listen to the Columbia members of the inaugural class, and you'll come away convinced that the program will do just that.

"We started off with Hayne suggesting to us that South Carolina is not a state, but a community," said Jimmy Addison, chief financial officer of SCANA Corp.

After being with the other fellows, Addison said he sees South Carolina "as small enough to get our hands around to do something about in a positive way."

"I think there is some potential that Hayne Hipp will have changed the course of this state for the next 50 years," said Terry Brown, chief executive officer of commercial real estate company Edens and Avant.

The Liberty Fellows clearly are willing "to sacrifice to give back to South Carolina," said David Dukes, managing partner for Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough.

"Hayne has sort of been building his army of the willing as it were, and we're the first foot-soldiers, so to speak," said Dalhi Myers, a shareholder with Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd.

Myers, Addison, Brown, Dukes and the 16 other initial Liberty Fellows are finishing their final five-day seminar today at Wofford College in Spartanburg.

The program began as a partnership between the former Liberty Corp., the Aspen Institute in Colorado and Wofford, where the program is based.

After the sale of Liberty Corp., Hipp, former chairman and chief executive, endowed the program with $2 million to ensure its continuation.

The class of 2007 is halfway through its program, and the class of 2008 will be announced in July.

The Liberty Fellowship program is designed to allow young, proven leaders in the state the opportunity to reflect on what it means to live an exemplary life.

"It really does focus on the heart of a life well lived. That you have to give to others; that you have to make an impact, positively, on the lives of others," Myers said.

The ultimate goal of the Liberty Fellow is to move South Carolina forward.

The two-year program includes four advanced leadership seminars, totaling 23 days. The first and last seminars are held at Wofford. The second seminar -- The Executive Seminar -- is a seven-day program at The Aspen Institute. The third seminar, a five-day Leadership Development Seminar, is held on Pawleys Island.

Each fellow must undertake an individual community service project, and each fellow is provided a mentor, an experienced senior state leader.

COMMUNITY PROJECTS

For his project, Addison created a mentoring program for rural school districts. The program addresses high-potential students who otherwise might not find themselves challenged or might not know about potential career choices.

Dukes, with the input and aide of volunteers from his law firm, created the Hispanic Immigrant Free Tax Clinic. With the assistance of USC, the IRS and the Catholic Charities Immigration Project, volunteers spent an entire Saturday helping members of the area's Hispanic immigrant community file their taxes.

Brown and Myers are in the early stages of long-term projects.

Brown is working to create a template to attract new residents, largely retirees who can no longer afford Florida, to South Carolina's "stagnant and deteriorating communities" to revitalize them.

Myers' project will be "a conversation between the three axes of power in our society: race, sex and class." She plans to engage students at a couple of the state's colleges and universities for three days of discussions.

The projects are the first tangible results of the fellowships, but they certainly are not expected to be the last.

Dukes expects that as the program generates a critical mass, you will see Liberty Fellows taking on hard issues politically such as education.

"I really do think that it has the potential to be a very diverse, focused-on-South-Carolina kind of think tank," Dukes said.

DIVERSITY OF OPINIONS

The strength of the program comes from diversity, the participants said. Each class is chosen to be a mosaic of complementary and conflicting views. But classmates also form close personal bonds.

"They hit the target by selecting extremely diverse folks, but folks who are able to carry on conversations with people they disagree with without being disagreeable," Dukes said,

"I have philosophical, political, human differences" with some of the fellows, Brown said. "But the beauty of it is in the openness and acceptance and understanding of the different views," he said.

Addison ranks among his most memorable Liberty moments such frank discussions. "We will always end up in these evening sessions where we are talking with these folks that really care about making a difference in the world and trying to find where there is some synergy and frankly debating our differences."

The essence of the program might come from an e-mail that Myers recently received from a fellow class member.

He wrote that he didn't think the two of them could be more different. But he also said "that he didn't think that he ever would have heard as much from someone whose ideas are so different from mine, and you are now part of my circle of dialogue," Myers said.

"It was kind of funny because he was absolutely right. I refer to him as my favorite wildebeest. And I will not tell you who he is."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The State, Columbia, S.C.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The State (Columbia, S.C.)

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