“Whatever we have been collectively doing for the past 20 or 30 years hasn’t worked,” said Chris Krehmeyer, president and CEO of Beyond Housing. “We want to have a different conversation and operate in different ways.”
The St. Louis American spoke in depth with Krehmeyer about how Beyond Housing is operating in its 24:1 initiative to organize and develop the 24 communities in the Normandy School District – now, the Normandy Schools Collaborative – from within.
The St. Louis American: What’s new at Beyond Housing?
Chris Krehmeyer: A continued push to help create a place within the boundaries of the Normandy School District that everyone can be proud of. We believe in the notion that home matters. For us, that starts with housing and housing preservation, but home is so much more than that. It’s the life in and around where we live that fuels and draws the best out of the people who live there. We’re looking at housing, education, health, economic development and jobs in the boundaries of the Normandy School District in a comprehensive way that is driven by the voices of the people who live there.
Whatever we have been collectively doing for the past 20 or 30 years hasn’t worked. We want to have a different conversation and operate in different ways. We want to push people to do things differently, because what we’ve been doing didn’t work. That doesn’t mean good people didn’t try, but there just hasn’t been much success. I’m not willing to spend the next 10 or 15 years in this work only to wake up and find that the schools are not better and the neighborhoods aren’t any better.
The American: Why that boundary?
Chris Krehmeyer: We spent 10 years in Pagedale, building homes, running a family support center and building trust in the community. Our sense was we had learned things in 10 years about what our role could be and how we could have the beginnings of success.
In 2008, we started to see the convergence of the foreclosure crisis and the continuing struggles of the Normandy School District. We had credibility with the folks in Pagedale, who were telling others that Beyond Housing is someone you can trust. That allowed us to convene people around the foreclosure crisis and the school district, and from that came the birth of 24:1.
We believe the core of a strong community is a strong educational system. We also thought the conversation about public education was very thin – people only seemed to care who was steering the ship and what was happening inside the four walls. People seemed to be silent about all of the other important things: what was happening in the lives of the families, what was happening in the neighborhoods. It doesn’t make sense to keep ignoring these things. We have to have a bigger, broader conversations, and we pushed for this.
The American: How does this conversation change with the state now running the Normandy Schools Collaborative through an appointed board?
Chris Krehmeyer: Unless there is a true partnership between the state – the administrative body governing the district – and the community, we’re going to fail again. We can have a new structure, but if the partnership with the community isn’t real and meaningful, then we will have this conversation again in another year or two.
The American: With your experience with 24:1, you must know what we’re talking about when we talk about regional cooperation. What are some best – and worst – practices?
Chris Krehmeyer: You need to begin with the premise that just because an entity is small does not mean categorically that it’s inefficient or ineffective. It just means it has lots of opportunities to be inefficient or ineffective.
One early thing we did was facilitate a constructive conversation between municipal governments about where they buy rock salt. Most didn’t know there was a Chesterfield Cooperative that bought rock salt. We got the information and called the City of Chesterfield about joining the cooperative – and governments saved 40 percent on their rock salt. That created an environment where people were comfortable talking to each other.
You have to be non-threatening. Don’t ask people to give up control, but ask them to share information and then move onto some things we can do together.
The biggest thing we have tackled to date is trash, which is the second biggest expense for every municipality, after personnel costs. At first, people said, “Don’t mess with trash, it’s too political, it’s too hard – leave it alone.” But we started with rock salt, then where you buy gas, then where you have vehicles repaired. This allowed people to talk and feel good about sharing information.
When we got to trash, every municipality was bidding out its own trash collection, whether they had 3,000 homes or 150. Clearly, if you’re bidding out 150 homes, the economy of scale is not there. So we had every municipality give us their trash contracts, and we created a de facto spread sheet with who the vendors are and the services you get. We found a wide range of services delivered and how much people were paying.
We talked to trash vendors and told them we wanted to create a model contract that covers the basics and allows for a la carte menu add-ons to the base price, and when a community bids out they could allow any other partner in 24:1 to piggyback on their contract
Pine Lawn was the first to go. They got three bids for the exact same services and picked the same vendor they had been using – but received a 40 percent reduction in cost. That example showed people that if they are willing to work together and share information, it will allow them to serve their constituents in a more efficient and effective way.
Now our mayors meet monthly – 12 to 18 of them meet every month – and talk about big and small things. By building rapport and building relationships, there is a greater willingness now to work together to tackle things that are important to us in the aggregate.
Does that mean a merger down road is in the offing? That’s up to the municipalities to decide. It’s not for us to say. We can be supportive, but it can’t and won’t come from us.
The American: How do we go from piggybacking trash contracts to greater regional collaboration?
Chris Krehmeyer: What the trash contract story says is that when you build relationships with a level of trust, then you can begin to talk about things collectively because people see that when we work together, good stuff happens.
There’s a phrase we use that we got from this guy at the Aspen Institute. He said, “Community-building happens at the speed of trust.” Quite frankly, that is true. Getting trust is hard, maintaining trust is even harder, and regaining trust after you lose it is almost impossible.
The American: Do you have any advice for Better Together, which is studying regional fragmentation and collaboration?
Chris Krehmeyer: Talk to folks directly. Take the time to understand what people actually are doing and what they actually want, then solve the problems that evolve. Ask, align and act – in a continual cycle.
It’s a never-ending process of asking the community what’s important, what’s needed; then aligning the resources, human and financial, it will take to get it done; then acting. Then keep doing that, over and over and over again.
You need to have community meetings, but also host smaller focus groups and reach out to different subsets who are not always part of the conversation. Ask kids what they think, ask seniors – don’t rely on the eight people who come to every public meeting. Then people know you asked, they responded, their voice was heard. They know it was a legitimate process they were part of that ended up producing some action in their community.
We just did this thing with the community along Natural Bridge. We had a community conversation about what things people would like to see. A subset of people didn’t believe we didn’t already have a master plan. They are so used to people giving them a solution which they have to respond to – which they hated, so they were ready to hate us as well.
The American: How do you square a data-driven approach with your populist way of doing things?
Chris Krehmeyer: It’s not either/or, it’s and/both. Data help you ask questions and make decisions, but you can’t lead public policy change with data. You change the community by changing people’s minds, and you can only change someone’s mind if you are having a conversation with them.
