St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura Jones is going to Aspen, Colorado in the dead of winter, but not to ski.
She is going to the mountains to talk about the roots of democracy with the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, the Agriculture commissioner of Florida, the mayor of Minneapolis, a Nevada state senator, the president of the Dallas School Board, a councilwoman from Providence, Rhode Island and the majority leader of the Alaska House of Representatives.
She is a member of the 2014 Rodel Fellows at the Aspen Institute, a nominee of a former fellow, Robin Carnahan.
“It’s an opportunity to really dive deeper into the reason why we’re in this industry that we like to call ‘politics,’” Jones said.
The Aspen Institute’s Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership seek “to enhance our democracy by identifying and bringing together the nation’s most promising young political leaders to explore, through study and conversation, the underlying values and principles of western democracy, the relationship between individuals and their community, and the responsibilities of public leadership,” according to its website.
The institute also wants the fellowships “to support and inspire political leaders committed to sustaining the vision of a political system based on thoughtful and civil bipartisan dialogue, and to help America’s brightest young leaders achieve their fullest potential in public service.”
Jones’ fellow “brightest young leaders” in her fellowship class also include the state treasurer of Colorado, a Public Service commissioner for North Dakota, the president pro tem of the Michigan State Senate, the speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, the mayors of Cincinnati and Denver, and enough state legislators (from South Carolina to Oregon) to field a baseball team.
These fellows have their reading cut out for them this weekend. Aristotle, Thucydides, George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. are all assigned reading. “You really get in touch with historical figures and their ideologies,” Jones said.
Closer to home and closer to now, Jones also found wisdom in a 13-year-old youth from Chicago named Malik Bryant. He told Ronan Farrow of MSNBC that the underlying problem in this country is that “people need jobs.”
“A 13-year-old knows that safety and security are paired with economic security and puts it out there so simple,” Jones said. “Why can’t the rest of us get it?”
She was warming up for the MLK segment of the discussion in Aspen.
“Right before Martin Luther King Jr. died, his focus changed from civil rights to what some termed ‘silver rights’ – his Poor People’s Campaign focused on bringing people out of poverty,” Jones said.
Dr. King marched on the powerful, famously, but he is less well known for preaching financial literacy to the poor. Jones is calling people to rejoin that march.
“In his later speeches, he talks about economics,” Jones said of Dr. King. “He says things like, ‘Your mortgage should be no more than one-third of your income.’ Then he was assassinated – and no one was talking about it.”
Forty-five years after King’s assassination in Memphis, when Jones was sworn in as St. Louis treasurer, she said, “at the city level, no one was talking about it.”
As treasurer, she is in a powerful position to talk about it – and walk the talk. She preaches financial literacy and has been active on a task force that encourages people to leave predatory lenders and do business with banks. She also is in a position to invest the city’s money remaining mindful of equity in more than one sense of that word.
In mid-2013, she hired PFM Asset Management and Comer Capital Group (a minority-owned firm) to manage the city’s reserve funds. This increased the city’s vendor diversity portfolio – and its return on investment through a different kind of diversity.
“We found if we diversify by duration, holding out investments a little longer, we were able to get a higher yield,” she said.
Jones is also moving to invest in the future of the city’s children. She is finalizing plans to launch a Children’s Savings Program for all St. Louis city public school kindergarten students in fall 2015. The deposit-only account will be in the student’s name and will be opened with a $50 deposit. Funds can only be withdrawn for college/vocational school expenses.
She said 1st Financial Federal Credit Union was leading a partnership with lending institutions that includes Wells Fargo, Vista Share and CFED’s 1:1 Fund, as well as St. Louis Public Schools and Missouri Charter Public School Association.
The program was praised by Michael Sherraden, the director of Washington University’s Center for Social Development. Washington University has been studying a similar project, SEED for Oklahoma Kids, which gave 1,346 children a much larger $1,000 college savings account at birth.
“We find that if the children have an account, their parents have higher expectations for their educational achievement,” Sherraden said. “We know that’s very much associated with educational achievement later on. We have more positive measures of child development, especially social and emotional development, with children and their mothers.”
Jones understands all about mothers, children and expectations for educational achievement. She is a single parent of a son, Aden. He is a student at Glen Ridge Elementary School in the Clayton School District, where she pays tuition as an out-of-district parent. Math is Aden’s favorite subject, and basketball is his game.
Her reading for the roots of democracy discussion in Aspen is a sharp departure from her usual reading, which is books she can read with her son, who no doubt will get around to Aristotle and Dr. King, but not yet.
Now also is not the time for Jones – among the city’s most eligible bachelorettes – to change her single status.
“I hope this doesn’t sound conceited, but a man has to be very secure to date someone who is a public figure,” Jones said. “And I really don’t have the bandwidth to concentrate on another person right now.”
