Supporting the Leaders of Today and Tomorrow with Tammy White
On this episode of ConnectTheKnox Tammy White, President & CEO of Leadership Knoxville, came to Knoxville in 1990 and has been working to shape the growth of the city ever since.
Tammy White, President & CEO of Leadership Knoxville, came to Knoxville in 1990 and has been working to shape the growth of the city ever since. On this episode of ConnectTheKnox, she describes the incredible work that Leadership Knoxville is doing in our community, including the many programs they offer for UT Students, business executives, and the leaders of tomorrow - the youth of Knoxville.
Highlights:
00:00 Intro
01:06 How Tammy came to Knoxville and what it was like as a newcomer and now
03:40 The history of Leadership Knoxville
06:53 Ad - Dr. Joe Chiro www.goseedrjoe.com
07:25 Tammy walks through the programs that Leadership Knoxville offers and their focus on diversity as an organization
11:56 Tammy describes a partnership with UT Knoxville called Leadership Knoxville Scholars
13:37 Leadership Knoxville’s fourth program, Youth Leadership Knoxville
17:09 Tammy describes Connect Knox, a civics solutions lab, started by Leadership Knoxville
18:57 What is The Big Table program, and how it brings people together throughout the community
22:58 Ad - Just Homes Group
24:01 How people can get involved with Leadership Knoxville and find more information on their programs
25:56 Julia takes Tammy through a lightning round of questions about her favorite spots in Knoxville
Links:
- Leadership Knoxville: https://www.leadershipknoxville.com
- Email: https://twhite@leadknox.com
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Transcript:
Julia: Welcome everybody to another episode of Connect the Knox, connecting the nation to Knoxville, Tennessee. I am your hostess with the mostest, Julie Hurley, and today’s guest is a true leader in the Knoxville area. You will want to connect with her, promise when this is all done with. Who we are interviewing today is the president and CEO of Leadership Knoxville, in itself one of the coolest entities in the Knoxville market, Mrs. Tammy White. How are you today? And thank you for being here.
Tammy: I’m doing awesome, Julia. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you.
Julia: Absolutely. Tell us, aside from number one just signing your daughter to a lacrosse scholarship who got recruited—congratulations, Courtney—aside from all that amazing that’s going on, you stay so busy. Tell me about Leader—tell us all, tell us all about Leadership Knoxville and how you found your way into that, and kind of your backstory of Knoxville.
Tammy: Yeah. It’s kind of a crazy story. So, I will tell you I came to Knoxville in 1990. I was born and raised in South Carolina, and yes, I’m a Gamecock. That was my—I grew up really close to Clemson, right, so, so I still don’t wear orange just because it’s sacrilegious at this point, you know from that Penn State rivalry of Carolina/Clemson.
But I do pull for UT every game except for this one game every year that when they played my Gamecocks and I have to pull for my alma mater. So, needless to say, this past weekend, I was very surprised. I didn’t see a single play because I was in Dallas with my daughter at a lacrosse tournament. So, we never saw any of it.
But anyways, I came to Knoxville in 1990, and I remember coming up and visiting a friend when I was in college and I remember thinking, “Wow, Knoxville is, like, this really cool, fun place I would love to live here.” Never had any thought, you know, that like, six years later, I would end up here. And I did. And it was just, you know, it’s just kind of been a God thing and I love it. It’s been a great place to live and to work and to raise my daughter.
And my parents actually retired from their jobs in South Carolina when Courtney was born and they moved here, and they just live up the street from me in my neighborhood. So, the family came, right? So, it’s been a great place. So, I worked for a company out of Wisconsin, I was doing sales for them when I first came here. And ended up leaving that company and doing sales for Bell South at the time, so that shows you how old I am. It’s now back to AT&T [laugh], right?
At the time, nobody knew who AT&T was when I went to work for Bell South. It’s kind of funny how all of that comes full circle and makes you dated. But anyways, and then I did a lot of political work throughout the years and just made a lot of friends, a lot of connections. And that’s one of the things I’ve loved about Knoxville is that, you know, being an outsider, it was truly easy to get plugged in here. I mean, people were very welcoming.
You know, and Knoxville has really changed a lot. I think back to that 1990 timeframe when I first moved here, and that I was somewhat bored as a single person, I didn’t feel like there was a lot to do. And now there is just a plethora of opportunities every night, you know, and every weekend, you could go and do something in this town, where it wasn’t always like that when I first moved here. But it’s evolved into a phenomenal place, again, to live and work.
Julia: Well, tell us a little bit because I don’t know—has Leadership Knoxville always been an entity here?
Tammy: Yes. Yes. So—
Julia: Okay—
Tammy: So, this is kind of a good history lesson. And I may not get the dates exactly right, but I’m going to be pretty darn close. But it was around 1957 that the first leadership program in the country started and it was in Philadelphia. And then the second program was Savannah, Georgia, around 1962. And then Atlanta, Georgia was around 1965, ’67.
And so, there was value in doing this. And the reason why they started was really to prepare people for change and things needing to change in these cities. And then you had a whole swath of leadership programs that really evolved in the 1980s. And I believe Leadership Nashville started in 1978. We started in 1984.
And it was really the result of Jim Haslam and Honey Alexander being on a trip, an economic development recruiting trip to Japan when Lamar was governor, and Honey said to Jim Haslam, “Does Knoxville have a leadership program like Nashville?” And he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And so, they had this conversation and then Mr. Haslam came back to Knoxville and put together a steering committee, and then Leadership Knoxville started in 1984. And so, you know, we’ll be celebrating our 40th anniversary in a few more years.
But typically, there’s about 800 leadership programs around the country today, and practically every city has some sort of community leadership development program. The vast majority of the programs that exist today are based through a Chamber of Commerce. We have always been a standalone 501(c)(3). We just happen to, at this point, lease our space from the Knoxville Chamber, which they’re great partners. And they were one of the three founding partner agencies, along with United Way and Junior League, when we started to support leadership Knoxville’s evolving.
And so, you’ve got 501(c)(3)s, you’ve got the chamber-based model, and then you have a few that are based through a university or community foundation. By and large, what I will tell you, while there are lot of really strong chamber-based programs, the vast majority of the, you know, chamber-based programs are also in smaller rural communities, and so they’re not necessarily as big. And so, most of your bigger city programs are standalone 501(c)(3)s. And right now, we consider ourselves just based on the affinity groups that we’re in at a national level, we participate with Austin, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Denver and Seattle and Louisville and Baltimore. And, you know, so it’s pretty big cities compared to Knoxville, but we’re on par with a lot of them, based on the size of our staff and also the size of our budget and the number of programs that we offer. So, that puts us in about, probably, the top 10% of leadership programs, nationally. And right now we are the largest leadership program in the state.
Julia: As well it should be. I feel like there’s a lot of leadership in Knoxville.
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Julia: You said programs within it.
Tammy: Yes.
Julia: So this, in and of itself, is the 501(c)(3), what are the programs inside of Leadership Knoxville?
Tammy: Okay. So, I’m glad you asked. So, I don’t want to miss any of these. So, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about the first and I’ll walk you through where we are today. So, the flagship program started in 1984 and it’s a ten-month program, and that’s what the vast majority of leadership programs have is that type of program.
And that’s really geared for people who are, like, seasoned C-suite leaders or nonprofit directors. We’re very intentional about creating a very diverse group, and that’s from racial, you know, from male, female, from gender, to sexual orientation to religious beliefs, et cetera. I mean, we really need to have, for the best experience possible, we need to have a group of committed leaders who really look like in our entire community. And so, that’s really important. And that’s what gives it, I would say, the depth in making relationships because people were coming together for this ten-month process and they’re spending an incredible amount of time getting to know people that they would probably never ever cross paths with otherwise.
And that’s where the richness happens. It’s where people change jobs, or they start organizations or they start businesses or they work to find solutions on issues that are happening in the community. So, it is more—it’s an in-depth. And our focus is teaching servant leadership in the flagship program. But we are also very intentionally designing the program to talk about our biggest community issues and challenges and then what are those opportunities> and so it’s, you know, carries—you know, we think servant leadership carries this ethical and moral obligation as a leader to do something, right? To be a positive change agent. And that’s what that program is really about.
The second program that we have is called Introduction Knoxville and it started in 1993. And Natalie Haslam was actually the person who started that program for us. And that program is really geared—it’s a six-week, one day a week for six weeks. We now run that program. Initially, it started, you know, just that one time every year. In 2010, we changed it to be twice a year, and then in 2017, we’ve added a third program.
So, we run it in the spring, in the fall, in the winter. And so, three times a year. So, we have about 150 people a year go through that program. And it’s geared for people who are either new to the community in a new management positions who need to quickly learn a lot more about the community. And it’s a great networking opportunity as well.
And so, people sign up and they’re in. The flagship program is much more challenging to get into because we have about 400 nominations and about 200 applicants every year, and we only have 55 seats. And so, it’s a selection process because we want that diverse makeup, right? We want diverse makeup in all of our programs, but the others are, more you sign up, you pay, you’re in. But Intro Knox has been a really fun program.
And we actually—you’ll appreciate this Julia—but we actually worked with our friends in Nashville to help them start Intro Nash a few years ago. We served as a consultant in helping them. With the growth in Nashville, I kept saying to them, “You guys need a program like this.” And they’re up and running and doing fantastic. So, that’s a really important, you know, piece to the puzzle of everything we’re trying to do.
And when you look at the growth of our city, if we just had the one program, we’re not building to scale for impact. And so, that’s really the other piece here is to think about, you know, what’s missing? What can we do? How can we best impact? And so, what used to be just two programs when I started, and we would have approximately 85, maybe 90 people you’re going through Leadership Knoxville program—two programs—we now have other programs and we have about 250 alumni coming through every year.
Julia: Wow. I mean, still 250 people in the grand scheme of Knoxville is not a lot of people, but for Leadership Alumni Association, that’s big.
Tammy: Bingo. Bingo. And so—
Julia: Yeah.
Tammy: —so here’s the other the beautiful part of it is, so the other programs that we have, in 2013, we launched our third program, which is called the Leadership Knoxville Scholars. And it is a partnership that we have with the University of Tennessee, for the Jones Center for Service and Leadership at UT. And it’s a two-year cohort. And again, they have to apply, they have to compete for the seats, but there’s about—it’s two years, so they apply their sophomore year, they go through their junior and senior year. And so, we have guest lecturers from our alumni that go and go to their classes, which are credited classes, but we also work to pair each scholar with one of our LK alumni to mentor them in their, you know, career field.
What do they want to do? So, we’re trying to—how do we keep this best and brightest talent in the region after they graduate? So, that’s really the intent of the program. Our retention rates been around 50 to 55%. I mean, we’d like for it to be higher, but a lot of these kids I mean, we’ve had—
Julia: What do you mean, retain [crosstalk 00:12:57] graduate rate, or stay in the program?
Tammy: How many are staying in Knoxville after they graduate.
Julia: Got you.
Tammy: And so, what’s interesting, though, a lot of them, you know, they’re really bright students and a lot of them are going to grad school and other states or they’re going to do Peace Corps or Teach for America, but the indicators are that they want to come back to Knoxville, which that makes it a higher percentage, which is great. But we’ve got work to do. I mean, we’ve still got, you know, to work to keep them here, right? But the beautiful part of that is in our—so that was in the ten years that we’ve had it, we’ve had 23 Torchbearers come from our program. So, we love that. That’s the highest academic honor at UT.
Julia: Wow.
Tammy: Yeah. And one year, all seven torchbearers were from our program, which that was kind of unheard of. But um, yeah, so we love that. So, then the fourth program, we started in 2014, and that is Youth Leadership Knoxville. And this is for, the students apply their sophomore year and it’s about February timeframe of their sophomore year, and they go through their junior year of high school.
And about three years ago, I approached Pellissippi State with this idea because I thought, you know, we’ve got this great partnership with UT and we love Pellissippi State, and we love Dr. Wise, and how can we do something that would work with them, too? And had this idea approached him with it and he didn’t hesitate. He jumped in, you know, all in, which I love about him. But the idea was, you know, could we change our curriculum somewhat for the youth and could we partner with Pellissippi State and have one of your college professors who teaches leadership, teach the leadership curriculum to the youth and make this an accredited class?
So, the beauty of this—
Julia: Yeah. Okay.
Tammy: We have about 50 to 55 students every year. They come from all Knox County public high schools and private schools, and we have a few home school students every year as well. But again, once they’re selected, they have to register as a student at Pellissippi State. And so, then they do their classwork online as if they were a full-time students at Pellissippi. They are having the experience of communicating with a college professor.
So, it’s kind of giving them a leg up. If they’ve never done dual enrollment, this is giving them that opportunity to experience what taking a college class is going to feel like. And at the end of their youth leadership year, they earn three hours of college credit from Pellissippi State. So, we love this program. And it’s a lot of fun.
I will tell you, Courtney was actually in last year’s class and she still talks to her classmates. And I love hearing the stories of these kids and how they’re coming home from college and they have groups getting together. And it’s all because their friendships, you know, formed in youth leadership. And I’ll tell you my favorite story was probably about three years ago. It was pre-Covid; I guess it was in 2019.
I was with our kids and we’d gone to volunteer at the Knoxville area Urban League Shoes for Schools. We’re one of the largest volunteer groups, we take our kids every years the volunteer service project. They’re wearing their youth leadership t-shirts and they help whatever needs to be done, we do it, whether it’s picking up trash, interpreting for some of this lost kids to help them find their parents, giving out waters, you name it. And I happened to come across a booth and it was a senior who had just graduated. And she had been in the cla—no, actually no. She was going into her senior year, forgive me. But she had been in the previous year’s youth leadership class. I’m like, “What are you doing?”
And she said, “I loved this event so much last year that I’ve spent the last year collecting 2500 books and I’m giving them away today. And I’ve categorized them by ages for the kids.” So, that’s one student and that impact of that exposure to this event and how it moved her to action. And that’s just a simple example, though, of the things that we see happen. And sometimes we know the stories and sometimes we don’t, but that’s the beauty of it, right? And when it connects in the servant leadership kicks in, and they want to give back and they want to be a change agent. So, that’s that program.
So, then in 2017, we actually started a civic, what I call is a civic solutions lab. And it’s called Connect Knox and—not Connect the Knox, but Connect Knox—
Julia: [laugh].
Tammy: —[laugh] and what we’ve done in this is we were identifying through—we did some report cards for the community, and we did those in ’17, ’18, and ’19, where we had the data guys from the chamber and from the city and the county and from UT worked together—they had never met, never worked together—and so we put them together to help us measure some key factors, you know, to see as a city are we thriving? As a city and a county are we thriving? And then how do we compare on these indicators to the 865, the region? And then how do we compare to the state? And what it gave us were green, yellow, or red lights of where we’re doing good, where we need to be looking out, and where we’ve got work to do to move the needle in a different direction.
And so, we’re in the process of maybe reconstituting that work—again, Covid put everything on hold—but when we were identifying issues, part of our work was also, you know, it was trying to identify, like, early childhood literacy was one of the huge indicators for us, right? And so, one of the things we did was identify who are the stakeholders that are doing all of this work around literacy. And then we would invite them to meetings. Nobody had ever been inviting them all together to be in one space to talk about what everybody’s doing and to talk about where we are and where we need to be and how can we collaborate. How can we work better together to get us, you know, to move that needle?
And so, that’s really the role of Connect Knox. And then, in addition to that, another thing that we launched in 2017—and we did it 2017, 2018, and 2019, and I’m committed to bringing it back in 2023—but it was called the Big Table. And what I loved about this, I got this idea from Cleveland, Ohio—actually, I’m sorry, Columbus, Ohio. Sorry, to my Cleveland friends. It was from Columbus. And they had actually—they are the ones who launched this, but there are cities all across the US that are doing some sort of event like this. They may call it different things.
But what we would do is we would identify a day for the Big Table. And let’s say it’s—I’m going to make up a date—it’s August 23rd. On August 23rd, leading up to that time, we would ask people all across Knoxville to be a Big Table host. And so Julia, if you are Big Table host, I’d say, okay, you get to choose what time you want to do it on August 23rd, if it’s in the morning, if it’s early morning, mid-morning, noon, night, whatever. If it’s around, you know, lunch, or if it’s around drinks, or if it’s just around water and lemonade, whatever that looks like for you.
And you want to do it at your home or your place of business or in a community library? You choose, right? That the concept was, you would invite four people that you know, that probably don’t know each other, and you would ask each of them to bring someone that you don’t know.
Julia: Wow.
Tammy: And so, the idea was to have 10 to 12 people sitting around a table for about an hour, hour-and-a-half, meeting each other, probably for the first time. And just talking about what are the things you love about our community? What do you love about Knoxville? And, you know, then if there are things that you could change, what would those things be? And I’ll tell you, I hosted—and you’ll love this as a realtor—I hosted some guys in my neighborhood that had moved here from Chicago several years ago. And they came in 2019, that was the last year that we did it.
And one of the things they told me is when they moved from Chicago, they knew they were moving to the south, and it was either going to be—they were looking at Asheville, North Carolina, Knoxville, Tennessee, or Nashville. They had only been to Asheville, they’d never been to Knoxville, and they’d never been to Nashville. So, they went to Asheville and they were kind of iffy. They didn’t know that they liked it as much as they thought they did. So, they came to Knoxville and Bill says, “Gary and I are driving down Kingston pike and we see a Jewish synagogue.” And he said, we looked at each other and thought, “Wow. We thought this was the Bible Belt. There’s a Jewish synagogue here. This is great.” And then he said, and not even, you know, half a mile later, there’s a second temple. And he said, “This is amazing. This has to be”—their thoughts immediately went to—“This has to be a welcoming community.” And I completely paused because I thought I’ve lived here 20 to 30 years and I’ve never looked at the diversity of religion and how we have it and that for a same-sex couple was viewed as a way of welcoming them.
Julia: Yeah.
Tammy: And that really was—that really blew my mind. Long story short, they had a house under contract in Knoxville within four hours of being here.
Julia: Wow.
Tammy: So, you know, little things like that we can’t take for granted, right? They didn’t talk to anybody. They just went and found a house and made an offer, and it happened to be in my neighborhood. So anyways, those are things, those are the kinds of stories that I love hearing. And I don’t think we get there and get deep enough, necessarily, unless we’re intentionally in relationship with people who are very different from us. And so, it takes work.
Julia: Well, we only have eight minutes left. So, I feel like we need to do a podcast on each of the programs—
Tammy: Yeah, I’d love that.
Julia: Because I feel like each one of those in and of itself is a—yeah, I would, too, actually. Do, like, a leadership series on Connect the Knox. I think that’s a big deal. So, we have eight minutes left.
Tammy: Yeah because I’ve got two things left to tell you.
Julia: Well, we’re going to have to—we’re going to—we’ll have to bring them back because we need to talk about how people can get in touch with you—
Tammy: Sure.
Julia: Where they can go to learn more about it, websites, information. Let’s get into that a little bit. So, that way we can ask just a few more questions.
Tammy: Absolutely.
Julia: How can people find you and find more information?
Tammy: Absolutely. They can call our office or they can email me. My email address is twhite, T-W-H-I-T-E—at leadknox.com. And our website address is www.leadershipknoxville.com. And then our main office number—and you know, I never call it—oh, it’s right here. It’s [laugh] 865 I knew you were going to laugh—523-9137.
And I do have to tell you, we are launching another program next June and it is going to be called Encore, and we are targeting people who are either close to retirement or in retirement and looking for ways that we can really plug in for their talents of these sages and get them better engaged in community.
Julia: You’re going to have to make that a year-long event that can’t be just six weeks. There are so many retirees here. I get asked that all the time. “What can I do? What can I do?”
Tammy: Yeah.
Julia: I’ve got a whole book of people to send to you.
Tammy: Okay, awesome.
Julia: You already got—I’ve got a built-in volunteer base for you for your very first time.
Tammy: That’s awesome.
Julia: Seriously.
Tammy: And then hopefully we can toss you some business Julia because we’re going to be hosting our national conference, people who do what I do and our team does. I have an amazing team at Leadership Knoxville that our colleagues from across the country are coming to Knoxville next July for our national conference. So, we’ll be hosting them here. So, maybe there’ll be some of them might be wanting to stay.
Julia: Yes. And some people to interview.
Tammy: Yeah, absolutely.
Julia: Yeah. We got the podcast, so we thought—yeah, and at that point, they will be connected to Knoxville. So, a lot of their conversations can get out. We’ve got about 175,000 followers on TikTok channel—
Tammy: Awesome.
Julia: So, we kind of we tend to, like, push out our local content very hard. It’s very relative.
Tammy: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen it. It’s awesome.
Julia: All right, four minutes left. This is my favorite round of every podcast. It’s my absolute favorite—
Tammy: Oh, this has to be the favorites stuff.
Julia: Okay. It is my favorite. So, this is the most difficult question I always ask.
Tammy: Okay.
Julia: When people visit you that have never been here before, what place do you take them that if any—like, no one else really knows about? Or maybe you think no one else knows about? What’s your secret spot to entertain out-of-area people?
Tammy: Oh, my secret spot. Oh, gosh. Okay, I love the Botanical Gardens. I think that is an amazing place. And I love Ijams, as well. And then always go to the KMA, the Knoxville Museum of Art, and then the East Tennessee History Center.
Those are probably my four favorite things, favorite places to visit and take people. And in fact, we’re always taking our classes from Intro Knox to all of these venues because it’s they’re so important. And they’re little hidden gems to a lot of people.
Julia: Our mutual good friend, Glory Johnson said the same. The Botanical Gardens was her very first one. I was like, “Man, that’s a good one. That is such a good one to add to the list.”
Tammy: Yes.
Julia: Favorite restaurant?
Tammy: Any Randy Burleson concept. I love Randy, I love everything from Aubrey’s to the—
Julia: I need this man on my podcast.
Tammy: Yes. It’s a—
Julia: Oh, my gosh. Every single person—not a joke. Even people that aren’t from here. I interviewed a guy from Johnson City. Not from here. I said, “What’s your favorite restaurant?” He said, “Aubrey’s.”
Tammy: Yeah, I love Aubrey’s, I love Bistro, Sunspot, Fieldhouse Social. Like if you want if you don’t want to watch a game at home, go to Fieldhouse Social. It’s amazing. Yeah. Any anything he does is awesome. And he was an LK alum, too, so I got to talk good about him [laugh].
Julia: Oh, that’s fantastic to know. I’m telling you, though, every single person has said Aubrey’s. Hands down, Aubrey’s. So, I think that man has definitely got a talent for pleasing people. All right.
Tammy: I love it.
Julia: Favorite grocery store?
Tammy: Butler & Bailey, hands down. Rocky Hill, that’s my hood. I love it. And it’s so small but it’s got everything you need. In and out. You’re in and out. It’s awesome. But because it’s so small and it’s so popular, you don’t want to go looking haggard because you’re going to run into somebody you know, always [laugh].
Julia: [laugh]. I learned that the hard way. I learned that the hard way. I would go out and I would just be normal, you know, ponytail, hat, and I would always run into somebody. And then I would dress up and no one would ever be around. I’m like, “Listen.”
Tammy: [laugh]. Love it. Love it.
Julia: Favorite bar. It can also be a restaurant, but favorite bar.
Tammy: Okay. I do love, if you want to drink with a view, the Five Thirty Lounge rooftop at the Hyatt Place downtown. It is spectacular.
Julia: Oh, my gosh, yeah. I totally forgot about that.
Tammy: Yeah. You’re looking at the amazing mountain view of East Tennessee. And then if you want a little privacy and you don’t want to be seen, the speakeasy bar which is called the Library at the Oliver Hotel downtown. Love it that it’s limited capacity, like, 40 people.
Julia: It is. All right. One minute or less, so I’m going to sign off here. This is Connect the Knox. I’m your hostess with the mostest, Julia Hurley, connecting the nation with Knoxville, Tennessee. And today’s guest—and we are having her back to talk about every single one of these leadership programs—Leadership Knox CEO, Tammy White, one of the most important people in Knoxville, and she claims that she’s not, which tells you servant and humble leadership is at the forefront of Knoxville. Tammy, thank you. Hug Courtney for me. I’m very excited for her future. Very big congratulations. Thank you for Connecting the Knox.
Tammy: Appreciate you, Julia. Thank you.
Julia: Welcome everybody to another episode of Connect the Knox, connecting the nation to Knoxville, Tennessee. I am your hostess with the mostest, Julie Hurley, and today’s guest is a true leader in the Knoxville area. You will want to connect with her, promise when this is all done with. Who we are interviewing today is the president and CEO of Leadership Knoxville, in itself one of the coolest entities in the Knoxville market, Mrs. Tammy White. How are you today? And thank you for being here.
Tammy: I’m doing awesome, Julia. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you.
Julia: Absolutely. Tell us, aside from number one just signing your daughter to a lacrosse scholarship who got recruited—congratulations, Courtney—aside from all that amazing that’s going on, you stay so busy. Tell me about Leader—tell us all, tell us all about Leadership Knoxville and how you found your way into that, and kind of your backstory of Knoxville.
Tammy: Yeah. It’s kind of a crazy story. So, I will tell you I came to Knoxville in 1990. I was born and raised in South Carolina, and yes, I’m a Gamecock. That was my—I grew up really close to Clemson, right, so, so I still don’t wear orange just because it’s sacrilegious at this point, you know from that Penn State rivalry of Carolina/Clemson.
But I do pull for UT every game except for this one game every year that when they played my Gamecocks and I have to pull for my alma mater. So, needless to say, this past weekend, I was very surprised. I didn’t see a single play because I was in Dallas with my daughter at a lacrosse tournament. So, we never saw any of it.
But anyways, I came to Knoxville in 1990, and I remember coming up and visiting a friend when I was in college and I remember thinking, “Wow, Knoxville is, like, this really cool, fun place I would love to live here.” Never had any thought, you know, that like, six years later, I would end up here. And I did. And it was just, you know, it’s just kind of been a God thing and I love it. It’s been a great place to live and to work and to raise my daughter.
And my parents actually retired from their jobs in South Carolina when Courtney was born and they moved here, and they just live up the street from me in my neighborhood. So, the family came, right? So, it’s been a great place. So, I worked for a company out of Wisconsin, I was doing sales for them when I first came here. And ended up leaving that company and doing sales for Bell South at the time, so that shows you how old I am. It’s now back to AT&T [laugh], right?
At the time, nobody knew who AT&T was when I went to work for Bell South. It’s kind of funny how all of that comes full circle and makes you dated. But anyways, and then I did a lot of political work throughout the years and just made a lot of friends, a lot of connections. And that’s one of the things I’ve loved about Knoxville is that, you know, being an outsider, it was truly easy to get plugged in here. I mean, people were very welcoming.
You know, and Knoxville has really changed a lot. I think back to that 1990 timeframe when I first moved here, and that I was somewhat bored as a single person, I didn’t feel like there was a lot to do. And now there is just a plethora of opportunities every night, you know, and every weekend, you could go and do something in this town, where it wasn’t always like that when I first moved here. But it’s evolved into a phenomenal place, again, to live and work.
Julia: Well, tell us a little bit because I don’t know—has Leadership Knoxville always been an entity here?
Tammy: Yes. Yes. So—
Julia: Okay—
Tammy: So, this is kind of a good history lesson. And I may not get the dates exactly right, but I’m going to be pretty darn close. But it was around 1957 that the first leadership program in the country started and it was in Philadelphia. And then the second program was Savannah, Georgia, around 1962. And then Atlanta, Georgia was around 1965, ’67.
And so, there was value in doing this. And the reason why they started was really to prepare people for change and things needing to change in these cities. And then you had a whole swath of leadership programs that really evolved in the 1980s. And I believe Leadership Nashville started in 1978. We started in 1984.
And it was really the result of Jim Haslam and Honey Alexander being on a trip, an economic development recruiting trip to Japan when Lamar was governor, and Honey said to Jim Haslam, “Does Knoxville have a leadership program like Nashville?” And he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And so, they had this conversation and then Mr. Haslam came back to Knoxville and put together a steering committee, and then Leadership Knoxville started in 1984. And so, you know, we’ll be celebrating our 40th anniversary in a few more years.
But typically, there’s about 800 leadership programs around the country today, and practically every city has some sort of community leadership development program. The vast majority of the programs that exist today are based through a Chamber of Commerce. We have always been a standalone 501(c)(3). We just happen to, at this point, lease our space from the Knoxville Chamber, which they’re great partners. And they were one of the three founding partner agencies, along with United Way and Junior League, when we started to support leadership Knoxville’s evolving.
And so, you’ve got 501(c)(3)s, you’ve got the chamber-based model, and then you have a few that are based through a university or community foundation. By and large, what I will tell you, while there are lot of really strong chamber-based programs, the vast majority of the, you know, chamber-based programs are also in smaller rural communities, and so they’re not necessarily as big. And so, most of your bigger city programs are standalone 501(c)(3)s. And right now, we consider ourselves just based on the affinity groups that we’re in at a national level, we participate with Austin, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Denver and Seattle and Louisville and Baltimore. And, you know, so it’s pretty big cities compared to Knoxville, but we’re on par with a lot of them, based on the size of our staff and also the size of our budget and the number of programs that we offer. So, that puts us in about, probably, the top 10% of leadership programs, nationally. And right now we are the largest leadership program in the state.
Julia: As well it should be. I feel like there’s a lot of leadership in Knoxville.
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Julia: You said programs within it.
Tammy: Yes.
Julia: So this, in and of itself, is the 501(c)(3), what are the programs inside of Leadership Knoxville?
Tammy: Okay. So, I’m glad you asked. So, I don’t want to miss any of these. So, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about the first and I’ll walk you through where we are today. So, the flagship program started in 1984 and it’s a ten-month program, and that’s what the vast majority of leadership programs have is that type of program.
And that’s really geared for people who are, like, seasoned C-suite leaders or nonprofit directors. We’re very intentional about creating a very diverse group, and that’s from racial, you know, from male, female, from gender, to sexual orientation to religious beliefs, et cetera. I mean, we really need to have, for the best experience possible, we need to have a group of committed leaders who really look like in our entire community. And so, that’s really important. And that’s what gives it, I would say, the depth in making relationships because people were coming together for this ten-month process and they’re spending an incredible amount of time getting to know people that they would probably never ever cross paths with otherwise.
And that’s where the richness happens. It’s where people change jobs, or they start organizations or they start businesses or they work to find solutions on issues that are happening in the community. So, it is more—it’s an in-depth. And our focus is teaching servant leadership in the flagship program. But we are also very intentionally designing the program to talk about our biggest community issues and challenges and then what are those opportunities> and so it’s, you know, carries—you know, we think servant leadership carries this ethical and moral obligation as a leader to do something, right? To be a positive change agent. And that’s what that program is really about.
The second program that we have is called Introduction Knoxville and it started in 1993. And Natalie Haslam was actually the person who started that program for us. And that program is really geared—it’s a six-week, one day a week for six weeks. We now run that program. Initially, it started, you know, just that one time every year. In 2010, we changed it to be twice a year, and then in 2017, we’ve added a third program.
So, we run it in the spring, in the fall, in the winter. And so, three times a year. So, we have about 150 people a year go through that program. And it’s geared for people who are either new to the community in a new management positions who need to quickly learn a lot more about the community. And it’s a great networking opportunity as well.
And so, people sign up and they’re in. The flagship program is much more challenging to get into because we have about 400 nominations and about 200 applicants every year, and we only have 55 seats. And so, it’s a selection process because we want that diverse makeup, right? We want diverse makeup in all of our programs, but the others are, more you sign up, you pay, you’re in. But Intro Knox has been a really fun program.
And we actually—you’ll appreciate this Julia—but we actually worked with our friends in Nashville to help them start Intro Nash a few years ago. We served as a consultant in helping them. With the growth in Nashville, I kept saying to them, “You guys need a program like this.” And they’re up and running and doing fantastic. So, that’s a really important, you know, piece to the puzzle of everything we’re trying to do.
And when you look at the growth of our city, if we just had the one program, we’re not building to scale for impact. And so, that’s really the other piece here is to think about, you know, what’s missing? What can we do? How can we best impact? And so, what used to be just two programs when I started, and we would have approximately 85, maybe 90 people you’re going through Leadership Knoxville program—two programs—we now have other programs and we have about 250 alumni coming through every year.
Julia: Wow. I mean, still 250 people in the grand scheme of Knoxville is not a lot of people, but for Leadership Alumni Association, that’s big.
Tammy: Bingo. Bingo. And so—
Julia: Yeah.
Tammy: —so here’s the other the beautiful part of it is, so the other programs that we have, in 2013, we launched our third program, which is called the Leadership Knoxville Scholars. And it is a partnership that we have with the University of Tennessee, for the Jones Center for Service and Leadership at UT. And it’s a two-year cohort. And again, they have to apply, they have to compete for the seats, but there’s about—it’s two years, so they apply their sophomore year, they go through their junior and senior year. And so, we have guest lecturers from our alumni that go and go to their classes, which are credited classes, but we also work to pair each scholar with one of our LK alumni to mentor them in their, you know, career field.
What do they want to do? So, we’re trying to—how do we keep this best and brightest talent in the region after they graduate? So, that’s really the intent of the program. Our retention rates been around 50 to 55%. I mean, we’d like for it to be higher, but a lot of these kids I mean, we’ve had—
Julia: What do you mean, retain [crosstalk 00:12:57] graduate rate, or stay in the program?
Tammy: How many are staying in Knoxville after they graduate.
Julia: Got you.
Tammy: And so, what’s interesting, though, a lot of them, you know, they’re really bright students and a lot of them are going to grad school and other states or they’re going to do Peace Corps or Teach for America, but the indicators are that they want to come back to Knoxville, which that makes it a higher percentage, which is great. But we’ve got work to do. I mean, we’ve still got, you know, to work to keep them here, right? But the beautiful part of that is in our—so that was in the ten years that we’ve had it, we’ve had 23 Torchbearers come from our program. So, we love that. That’s the highest academic honor at UT.
Julia: Wow.
Tammy: Yeah. And one year, all seven torchbearers were from our program, which that was kind of unheard of. But um, yeah, so we love that. So, then the fourth program, we started in 2014, and that is Youth Leadership Knoxville. And this is for, the students apply their sophomore year and it’s about February timeframe of their sophomore year, and they go through their junior year of high school.
And about three years ago, I approached Pellissippi State with this idea because I thought, you know, we’ve got this great partnership with UT and we love Pellissippi State, and we love Dr. Wise, and how can we do something that would work with them, too? And had this idea approached him with it and he didn’t hesitate. He jumped in, you know, all in, which I love about him. But the idea was, you know, could we change our curriculum somewhat for the youth and could we partner with Pellissippi State and have one of your college professors who teaches leadership, teach the leadership curriculum to the youth and make this an accredited class?
So, the beauty of this—
Julia: Yeah. Okay.
Tammy: We have about 50 to 55 students every year. They come from all Knox County public high schools and private schools, and we have a few home school students every year as well. But again, once they’re selected, they have to register as a student at Pellissippi State. And so, then they do their classwork online as if they were a full-time students at Pellissippi. They are having the experience of communicating with a college professor.
So, it’s kind of giving them a leg up. If they’ve never done dual enrollment, this is giving them that opportunity to experience what taking a college class is going to feel like. And at the end of their youth leadership year, they earn three hours of college credit from Pellissippi State. So, we love this program. And it’s a lot of fun.
I will tell you, Courtney was actually in last year’s class and she still talks to her classmates. And I love hearing the stories of these kids and how they’re coming home from college and they have groups getting together. And it’s all because their friendships, you know, formed in youth leadership. And I’ll tell you my favorite story was probably about three years ago. It was pre-Covid; I guess it was in 2019.
I was with our kids and we’d gone to volunteer at the Knoxville area Urban League Shoes for Schools. We’re one of the largest volunteer groups, we take our kids every years the volunteer service project. They’re wearing their youth leadership t-shirts and they help whatever needs to be done, we do it, whether it’s picking up trash, interpreting for some of this lost kids to help them find their parents, giving out waters, you name it. And I happened to come across a booth and it was a senior who had just graduated. And she had been in the cla—no, actually no. She was going into her senior year, forgive me. But she had been in the previous year’s youth leadership class. I’m like, “What are you doing?”
And she said, “I loved this event so much last year that I’ve spent the last year collecting 2500 books and I’m giving them away today. And I’ve categorized them by ages for the kids.” So, that’s one student and that impact of that exposure to this event and how it moved her to action. And that’s just a simple example, though, of the things that we see happen. And sometimes we know the stories and sometimes we don’t, but that’s the beauty of it, right? And when it connects in the servant leadership kicks in, and they want to give back and they want to be a change agent. So, that’s that program.
So, then in 2017, we actually started a civic, what I call is a civic solutions lab. And it’s called Connect Knox and—not Connect the Knox, but Connect Knox—
Julia: [laugh].
Tammy: —[laugh] and what we’ve done in this is we were identifying through—we did some report cards for the community, and we did those in ’17, ’18, and ’19, where we had the data guys from the chamber and from the city and the county and from UT worked together—they had never met, never worked together—and so we put them together to help us measure some key factors, you know, to see as a city are we thriving? As a city and a county are we thriving? And then how do we compare on these indicators to the 865, the region? And then how do we compare to the state? And what it gave us were green, yellow, or red lights of where we’re doing good, where we need to be looking out, and where we’ve got work to do to move the needle in a different direction.
And so, we’re in the process of maybe reconstituting that work—again, Covid put everything on hold—but when we were identifying issues, part of our work was also, you know, it was trying to identify, like, early childhood literacy was one of the huge indicators for us, right? And so, one of the things we did was identify who are the stakeholders that are doing all of this work around literacy. And then we would invite them to meetings. Nobody had ever been inviting them all together to be in one space to talk about what everybody’s doing and to talk about where we are and where we need to be and how can we collaborate. How can we work better together to get us, you know, to move that needle?
And so, that’s really the role of Connect Knox. And then, in addition to that, another thing that we launched in 2017—and we did it 2017, 2018, and 2019, and I’m committed to bringing it back in 2023—but it was called the Big Table. And what I loved about this, I got this idea from Cleveland, Ohio—actually, I’m sorry, Columbus, Ohio. Sorry, to my Cleveland friends. It was from Columbus. And they had actually—they are the ones who launched this, but there are cities all across the US that are doing some sort of event like this. They may call it different things.
But what we would do is we would identify a day for the Big Table. And let’s say it’s—I’m going to make up a date—it’s August 23rd. On August 23rd, leading up to that time, we would ask people all across Knoxville to be a Big Table host. And so Julia, if you are Big Table host, I’d say, okay, you get to choose what time you want to do it on August 23rd, if it’s in the morning, if it’s early morning, mid-morning, noon, night, whatever. If it’s around, you know, lunch, or if it’s around drinks, or if it’s just around water and lemonade, whatever that looks like for you.
And you want to do it at your home or your place of business or in a community library? You choose, right? That the concept was, you would invite four people that you know, that probably don’t know each other, and you would ask each of them to bring someone that you don’t know.
Julia: Wow.
Tammy: And so, the idea was to have 10 to 12 people sitting around a table for about an hour, hour-and-a-half, meeting each other, probably for the first time. And just talking about what are the things you love about our community? What do you love about Knoxville? And, you know, then if there are things that you could change, what would those things be? And I’ll tell you, I hosted—and you’ll love this as a realtor—I hosted some guys in my neighborhood that had moved here from Chicago several years ago. And they came in 2019, that was the last year that we did it.
And one of the things they told me is when they moved from Chicago, they knew they were moving to the south, and it was either going to be—they were looking at Asheville, North Carolina, Knoxville, Tennessee, or Nashville. They had only been to Asheville, they’d never been to Knoxville, and they’d never been to Nashville. So, they went to Asheville and they were kind of iffy. They didn’t know that they liked it as much as they thought they did. So, they came to Knoxville and Bill says, “Gary and I are driving down Kingston pike and we see a Jewish synagogue.” And he said, we looked at each other and thought, “Wow. We thought this was the Bible Belt. There’s a Jewish synagogue here. This is great.” And then he said, and not even, you know, half a mile later, there’s a second temple. And he said, “This is amazing. This has to be”—their thoughts immediately went to—“This has to be a welcoming community.” And I completely paused because I thought I’ve lived here 20 to 30 years and I’ve never looked at the diversity of religion and how we have it and that for a same-sex couple was viewed as a way of welcoming them.
Julia: Yeah.
Tammy: And that really was—that really blew my mind. Long story short, they had a house under contract in Knoxville within four hours of being here.
Julia: Wow.
Tammy: So, you know, little things like that we can’t take for granted, right? They didn’t talk to anybody. They just went and found a house and made an offer, and it happened to be in my neighborhood. So anyways, those are things, those are the kinds of stories that I love hearing. And I don’t think we get there and get deep enough, necessarily, unless we’re intentionally in relationship with people who are very different from us. And so, it takes work.
Julia: Well, we only have eight minutes left. So, I feel like we need to do a podcast on each of the programs—
Tammy: Yeah, I’d love that.
Julia: Because I feel like each one of those in and of itself is a—yeah, I would, too, actually. Do, like, a leadership series on Connect the Knox. I think that’s a big deal. So, we have eight minutes left.
Tammy: Yeah because I’ve got two things left to tell you.
Julia: Well, we’re going to have to—we’re going to—we’ll have to bring them back because we need to talk about how people can get in touch with you—
Tammy: Sure.
Julia: Where they can go to learn more about it, websites, information. Let’s get into that a little bit. So, that way we can ask just a few more questions.
Tammy: Absolutely.
Julia: How can people find you and find more information?
Tammy: Absolutely. They can call our office or they can email me. My email address is twhite, T-W-H-I-T-E—at leadknox.com. And our website address is www.leadershipknoxville.com. And then our main office number—and you know, I never call it—oh, it’s right here. It’s [laugh] 865 I knew you were going to laugh—523-9137.
And I do have to tell you, we are launching another program next June and it is going to be called Encore, and we are targeting people who are either close to retirement or in retirement and looking for ways that we can really plug in for their talents of these sages and get them better engaged in community.
Julia: You’re going to have to make that a year-long event that can’t be just six weeks. There are so many retirees here. I get asked that all the time. “What can I do? What can I do?”
Tammy: Yeah.
Julia: I’ve got a whole book of people to send to you.
Tammy: Okay, awesome.
Julia: You already got—I’ve got a built-in volunteer base for you for your very first time.
Tammy: That’s awesome.
Julia: Seriously.
Tammy: And then hopefully we can toss you some business Julia because we’re going to be hosting our national conference, people who do what I do and our team does. I have an amazing team at Leadership Knoxville that our colleagues from across the country are coming to Knoxville next July for our national conference. So, we’ll be hosting them here. So, maybe there’ll be some of them might be wanting to stay.
Julia: Yes. And some people to interview.
Tammy: Yeah, absolutely.
Julia: Yeah. We got the podcast, so we thought—yeah, and at that point, they will be connected to Knoxville. So, a lot of their conversations can get out. We’ve got about 175,000 followers on TikTok channel—
Tammy: Awesome.
Julia: So, we kind of we tend to, like, push out our local content very hard. It’s very relative.
Tammy: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen it. It’s awesome.
Julia: All right, four minutes left. This is my favorite round of every podcast. It’s my absolute favorite—
Tammy: Oh, this has to be the favorites stuff.
Julia: Okay. It is my favorite. So, this is the most difficult question I always ask.
Tammy: Okay.
Julia: When people visit you that have never been here before, what place do you take them that if any—like, no one else really knows about? Or maybe you think no one else knows about? What’s your secret spot to entertain out-of-area people?
Tammy: Oh, my secret spot. Oh, gosh. Okay, I love the Botanical Gardens. I think that is an amazing place. And I love Ijams, as well. And then always go to the KMA, the Knoxville Museum of Art, and then the East Tennessee History Center.
Those are probably my four favorite things, favorite places to visit and take people. And in fact, we’re always taking our classes from Intro Knox to all of these venues because it’s they’re so important. And they’re little hidden gems to a lot of people.
Julia: Our mutual good friend, Glory Johnson said the same. The Botanical Gardens was her very first one. I was like, “Man, that’s a good one. That is such a good one to add to the list.”
Tammy: Yes.
Julia: Favorite restaurant?
Tammy: Any Randy Burleson concept. I love Randy, I love everything from Aubrey’s to the—
Julia: I need this man on my podcast.
Tammy: Yes. It’s a—
Julia: Oh, my gosh. Every single person—not a joke. Even people that aren’t from here. I interviewed a guy from Johnson City. Not from here. I said, “What’s your favorite restaurant?” He said, “Aubrey’s.”
Tammy: Yeah, I love Aubrey’s, I love Bistro, Sunspot, Fieldhouse Social. Like if you want if you don’t want to watch a game at home, go to Fieldhouse Social. It’s amazing. Yeah. Any anything he does is awesome. And he was an LK alum, too, so I got to talk good about him [laugh].
Julia: Oh, that’s fantastic to know. I’m telling you, though, every single person has said Aubrey’s. Hands down, Aubrey’s. So, I think that man has definitely got a talent for pleasing people. All right.
Tammy: I love it.
Julia: Favorite grocery store?
Tammy: Butler & Bailey, hands down. Rocky Hill, that’s my hood. I love it. And it’s so small but it’s got everything you need. In and out. You’re in and out. It’s awesome. But because it’s so small and it’s so popular, you don’t want to go looking haggard because you’re going to run into somebody you know, always [laugh].
Julia: [laugh]. I learned that the hard way. I learned that the hard way. I would go out and I would just be normal, you know, ponytail, hat, and I would always run into somebody. And then I would dress up and no one would ever be around. I’m like, “Listen.”
Tammy: [laugh]. Love it. Love it.
Julia: Favorite bar. It can also be a restaurant, but favorite bar.
Tammy: Okay. I do love, if you want to drink with a view, the Five Thirty Lounge rooftop at the Hyatt Place downtown. It is spectacular.
Julia: Oh, my gosh, yeah. I totally forgot about that.
Tammy: Yeah. You’re looking at the amazing mountain view of East Tennessee. And then if you want a little privacy and you don’t want to be seen, the speakeasy bar which is called the Library at the Oliver Hotel downtown. Love it that it’s limited capacity, like, 40 people.
Julia: It is. All right. One minute or less, so I’m going to sign off here. This is Connect the Knox. I’m your hostess with the mostest, Julia Hurley, connecting the nation with Knoxville, Tennessee. And today’s guest—and we are having her back to talk about every single one of these leadership programs—Leadership Knox CEO, Tammy White, one of the most important people in Knoxville, and she claims that she’s not, which tells you servant and humble leadership is at the forefront of Knoxville. Tammy, thank you. Hug Courtney for me. I’m very excited for her future. Very big congratulations. Thank you for Connecting the Knox.
Tammy: Appreciate you, Julia. Thank you.
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