November 21, 2024

The Essential Work of Being Curious

My Leadership Greater Madison Experience

By Andy Davey

From September 2023 to June 2024, I was part of the 30th annual cohort to go through Leadership Greater Madison (LGM), a civic engagement and experiential learning program for local leaders. This fall, I was invited back to share reflections on my experience with the incoming 31st cohort. I focused on a few different themes, including the importance of root cause or “upstream thinking” (stay tuned for another blog post on that topic) and the essential role of curiosity. Below is a modified version of my thoughts on curiosity.

Andy Davey at the graduation for the 30th cohort of Leadership Greater Madison.

“I realize now that I live in a bubble.” This humble admission was offered by one of my fellow LGM cohort members after a day of touring around Madison neighborhoods. We were huddled together in the dimly lit back room of an Atwood neighborhood bar, together with 30 of our peers, reflecting on the tours. We came from diverse professional backgrounds including architecture, nonprofit fundraising, tech, law, human services, policing, engineering, higher education, arts and banking.

One of the things I found most valuable about LGM was how it encouraged all of us to be in a constant posture of curiosity, to push outside of our professional bubbles. Through the thoughtful facilitation of Lynn Wood, the program director, we were encouraged to be curious about critical issues in our community and about each other, about the very different fields and organizations we came from and build relationships grounded in a shared civic commitment to Madison. I worked hard to stay curious, and it led to some great connections.

Exploring New Issues, Meeting New People

Each month, we explored a different issue, which exposed us to lots of smart and knowledgeable people and brought us to an eclectic variety of places.

Andy posing next to "Resources of Wisconsin" by Edwin Howland-Blashfield at the top of the Capitol rotunda while on a tour.

One month we visited the Madison Gas and Electric training facility where we witnessed an electrician weighed down by 50 pounds of gear scamper shockingly fast up a telephone poll to practice rescuing a colleague (a 200-pound dummy in this case).

We spent a day visiting with elected officials, viewing up close the rotunda mural in the dizzying heights of the capitol building, and participating in a mock City Council meeting at City Hall. (I dubbed myself “Alder Rad Ical” to help add some sparks to the affordable housing issue we were assigned to debate.)

Another month we wrestled a giant steering wheel on a virtual reality machine to experience what’s it’s like driving a semi-truck, part of a Latino Academy of Workforce Development training program.

Touring Northside Neighborhoods

On the day of the neighborhood tours, we split up into small groups of four or five people, and my group went to Madison’s north side. LGM arranged our first visit, which involved talking to Justin Markofski, the executive director of the Northside Planning Council, over delicious brisket and pulled pork at Beef Butter BBQ. The restaurant is a successful small business that was incubated by the Northside Planning Council through its Feed Kitchens program. We were then encouraged to explore the neighborhood however we chose as a small group.

I had spent a fair amount of time on the northside – partly through the privilege of being on MCF’s Community Impact team – but the rest of my group hadn’t, so I offered to take them to some places I knew.

We started at Rooted’s community gardens and urban farm (where I worked for two summers), and then went to the Kennedy Heights Community Center, where their leader, Elsa Caetano, generously offered to give us a spontaneous tour. One dynamic we discussed was the change in recent years from a predominately southeast Asian community (many Hmong folks) to a predominately Black community.

We ended by driving around much of the neighborhood and talking about housing. We drove through the mobile home park off Packers Ave, by the stately mansions of Maple Bluff, past the “tiny houses” built by Occupy Madison on Aberg Ave, and along many streets lined with modest homes that are increasingly expensive.

Sharing My Experience, and Learning From Others

On the neighborhood tour, I got to expose my cohort members to some of my professional world, which involves working with lots of nonprofits and addressing things like community development and equity. Other days, it was my turn to be curious and exposed to new things.

Pretending to be morning show hosts at WKOW while learning about the state of local journalism.

One LGM session involved taking a tour of the Overture Center – a place I was quite familiar with. But the tour didn’t focus on the typical performing arts experiences. Instead, it brought us into the guts of the building to view the labyrinth of heating, cooling and electrical apparatuses that allows the building to function throughout the year.

One fun fact I learned was that the main theater stage is kept very cool (around 60 degrees) so the actors galivanting around don’t overheat. The audience seating in front, however, is kept around 68 degrees so theater patrons don’t get a chill.

Sparking Deep Connection

It was while observing the vast network of pipes, hulking water softeners and other infrastructure that my curiosity helped build one of my favorite LGM connections. During the tour, I leaned over to Laura Blood Velotta, Director of Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing for Findorff Construction, and whispered: “You could be giving this tour, right?” She silently nodded. It wasn’t that our Overture tour guide wasn’t great – he very much was – but I was impressed by how attentively and humbly Laura was listening and observing while I imagined so much technical knowledge and expertise was spinning through her mind.

Putting in some volunteer hours at Badger Prairie Needs Network food pantry with LGM colleagues Draesen Mueller, Laura Blood Velotta, and Tom Hickey.

Over the coming months, Laura and I would regularly discuss each other’s day-to-day work, our chosen professional fields and personal lives – fascinated by what was foreign but also where we had common ground. She told me about various construction projects, gave me a tour of the very cool Findorff office building, and openly told stories about the challenges of being female in a traditionally male industry. I talked with her about the world of philanthropy and nonprofits and Madison and some of the research projects I’d done.

One area of regular conversation, however, was the realm of policy and advocacy, especially regarding children and families and childcare in particular. This was partly because we both had two small kids in our two-working-parent households that needed childcare, and we’d experienced the broken system first-hand (despite amazing educators and caregivers). But it also was because Laura was part of the LGM team investigating childcare – including the need for better public policies - and I had professional experience engaging in related policy and advocacy work.

Through this, I discovered that you never know where you might find allies in learning and civic engagement for social change. Since the program ended last June, we’ve stayed connected, and our friendship continues.

Another aspect of our conversations that I’m grateful for was Laura’s connection to her colleague Ben Austin, the Sustainability Manager at Findorff. Ben played a role in helping build renewable energy and other environmental sustainability features into Centro Hispano’s beautiful new building, among others.

Implementing these features depended, in part, on securing funding from the federal government through the new renewable energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. Leveraging this kind of public funding for our local community is something we’re trying to do more of at MCF, so Ben is an excellent resource as well, and I’ve found in him another person with a curiosity mindset to dialogue with.

More Than Just Networking, Building Social Capital

These experiences may just sound like good old-fashioned “networking,” and to some degree they are, but they also feel like something more. They represent an opportunity to build genuine relationships rooted in shared lived experience, common purpose and civic values, but also across some aspects of difference. As the sociologist Robert Putnam has shown for decades – most prominently with his book Bowling Alone (now featured in a Netflix documentary “Join or Die!”) – this kind of relationship building, this kind of forging of beneficial “social capital” has become sparser in American society to the detriment of our communities and our democracy.

The full LGM 30 cohort after our meeting in the Capitol with local state senators, Kelda Roys and Melissa Agard.

This is not to say my experience of building social capital in LGM represents some sort of utopian kumbaya moment – far from it. Our curiosity and relationship building won’t magically transmogrify the powerful and often problematic structures and systems that govern much of our lives. Moreover, while there was job and gender diversity in LGM – and some racial diversity – we were probably, to a person, members of the middle or upper middle professional class, almost by definition of who participants in the program. So, still plenty of bubbles to break out of and bridges to build.

Nevertheless, I think the core value of curiosity undergirding much of the LGM experience is critical for creating the necessary broad coalition of civic actors and creative approaches needed to address our community’s concerns. It’s also hard work – it takes intentional focus, a balance of humility and courage, and willingness to take some risks (which I’m not always good at) – to stay curious and go where the learning takes you.

To have had the opportunity to be part of an eclectic group of Madisonians encouraged to stay curious, I am grateful, and plan to keep at it.