Workshops Help Groom Civic Leaders of the Future

Nancy Schmidt can remember when San Fernando Valley communities such as Northridge and Van Nuys were still small towns surrounded by orange groves and cornfields.

The Valley isn’t like that anymore, which is why the 40-year-old vice president of a Sherman Oaks bank has joined Leadership San Fernando Valley, an eight-month program to help form the Valley’s civic leaders of the future.

“We are no longer 20 little towns separated by orchards and farmland. It’s all one big urban area,” she said. “I think the Valley needs to see itself as a unit to address things like development and transportation, graffiti and gangs. We need to make all of these communities work together.”

Each month Schmidt joins about 20 other like-minded people--most of them corporate executives--to discuss the many social and political problems facing the Valley. The hospital administrators, plant managers and other executives hope to become what one member called the Valley’s very own “senior-level think tank.”

“We’ve got a lot of people who are leaders in their own right,” said J. R. Ballard of Leadership Inc., a national nonprofit group that organizes the training. “They’ve all accomplished things, and this is a chance for them to share ideas with other people. . . . This is a very high-powered group.”

Monthly Meetings

The training consists of monthly meetings with government officials, board presidents and other “movers and shakers,” Ballard said. Since the first meeting in February, the group has discussed topics such as gang violence, population growth and immigration.

The idea, said Leadership Inc. President Floyd Decker, is to prepare the executives and administrators to do battle in the arena of government and civic decision-making.

“We encourage them to become informed on a broad range of issues in the area so that if they become active in the community, their decisions will be based on facts and not rumors,” Decker said.

During their first five classes, the trainees have visited the Los Angeles Police Department’s Van Nuys station, where police officers outlined the Valley’s problems with drug abuse and gang violence. To study immigration issues, they traveled to San Ysidro near the Mexican border and met with U. S. Border Patrol officers and an immigrants’ rights attorney.

Last week, the group met in Van Nuys with representatives of the Southern California Rapid Transit District, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission and the Los Angeles City Planning Department to discuss an issue dear to the heart of every Valley resident--traffic.

Most of what the “movers and shakers” said at the leadership training was not a matter of public record, however. Ballard said the sessions are closed to outsiders “to create the maximum amount of candor between the participants.”

Some of the invited public officials might be reluctant to express their real views if a newspaper reporter were present, Ballard said. “The trouble is that you’re never quite sure what people are going to say.”

Own Opinions

After the session had ended and the officials had left, most of the group members offered their own opinions about the Valley’s traffic and transportation problems.

“If you look at other cities in the U. S., they have mass transit,” said Bob Freeman, West Coast manager of corporate services for Texaco. “Our concern for the Valley is that it’s going to be left out if it doesn’t have the right leadership. We’re concerned that the Valley gets its share.”

Freeman, whose office is in Universal City, said he was especially concerned about transportation because most of his employees live in the Valley or commute through the area.

For other members of the leadership group, solving the Valley’s traffic and crime problems means changing the Valley’s political relationship with the city of Los Angeles.

“The Valley is controlled by Los Angeles,” said Rich Adkisson, 42, plant manager at Continental Can Co. in Van Nuys. “How big can L. A. get and what kind of control can L. A. have over such a large area? The Valley needs more local control.”

Jim Breeden, administrator of the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Woodland Hills, said the leadership training has helped him gain insight into the “layers of bureaucracy” responsible for governing the Valley.

“We need to know where the authority of a government agency begins and ends,” he said. “A lot of what we’re learning is . . . how to deal with the system.”

Alumni Group

When the training ends in October, the graduates will form an alumni group, Ballard said. That group will “network” with other community leaders, creating in effect a Valleywide “think tank.”

Eventually, Leadership Inc. hopes that the alumni group will grow to about 200 people, Ballard said. One class graduated last year and another class is scheduled to begin in August.

Tuition is paid by grants from foundations to Leadership Inc. Class members are selected by a Leadership San Fernando Valley board, which includes members of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. and the United Chambers of Commerce of the San Fernando Valley.

Although graduates of leadership training in other California cities such as San Rafael, Santa Ana and Livermore have received political appointments, Decker said, the alumni group is not intended to become a partisan political organization.

“The purpose of the alumni association is to maintain itself as a pool of talent for community service,” Decker said. “We’re not training people to run for public office.”