Courage under fire: Celebrating Gayle A. Hobbs
LINC’s founding President and CEO Gayle A. Hobbs retired after 32 years with a celebration event at the Kauffman Foundation Conference Center March 25, 2024. Here is her story — and LINC’s story.
In the beginning,
the directions led to a sparse state office unit in a strip shopping center off of Kansas City’s Prospect Avenue.
Visitors opened the door to nothing but a card table and striped-vinyl lawn chairs for furniture.
This was the early 1990s, and this was the scene awaiting many reform-minded public officials and community leaders when they joined the procession of people who were told –
“You need to go see Gayle.”
A social services revolution was brewing, and this simple office was where Gayle A. Hobbs cooked the plans.
“She had a whiteboard,” remembers Robin Gierer, then a senior executive in the Missouri Department of Social Services. It was scribbled with “words in circles and bubbles connected by lines, going everywhere.”
All Gierer knew was that he’d been sent by then-Missouri Department of Social Services Director Gary Stangler to find Hobbs so he could learn about this nascent “Local Investment Commission” concept bubbling in Kansas City.
“LINC,” they were calling it.
Hobbs, in her whiteboard work, was shaping the LINC idea about building localized, citizen-driven government resources, Gierer said.
“And honestly, I didn’t know if this stuff was going to work or not.”
When Marge Randle, then a supervisor in the state’s Family Support Division, made her first visit to see Hobbs, Randle remembers asking: Just what is LINC, anyway? “And Gayle started laughing,” Randle said. “I don’t think Gayle even knew where this was going.”
Hobbs was running with the brainchild of Kansas City businessman and civic giant Bert Berkley, LINC’s founder.
Berkley’s idea – born from his work on a Stangler-created business leader roundtable – proposed that citizen leadership at the grassroots should drive the allocation of state social service resources to meet the unique needs of their communities.
It’s stunning now, Berkley said, to know the diverse and challenging course that LINC would travel over the next 30 years, and all the lives that would be changed, even saved.
People would come from across the nation and foreign countries to “see Gayle” and witness the Caring Communities movement that LINC and many community partners put into motion – with visitors as prominent as President Bill Clinton.
A culture, forged in neighborhoods and marked by creativity and grit, within a decade would see LINC deploying a workforce in the hundreds, radiating from a vibrant network of community schools.
“Not in my wildest dreams,” Berkley said, did he see all that coming.
But what Berkley knew at the beginning, before he met Hobbs, was that the revolutionary road he imagined for LINC would require leadership with courage and a warm heart.
He had to find that first staff member, the right executive director.
‘Trust me’
Young Gayle Hobbs hadn’t even finished the second grade when her mother saw the future.
A boy named Roy Lee, one of Hobbs’ classmates, apparently needed shoes. And young Gayle – the family story goes – delivered the news of Roy’s plight to her parents in their Northwest Missouri home with such earnestness and urgency that the mother knew her daughter would make a life of helping people.
“I kept, literally, harassing my parents to buy Roy Lee shoes,” Hobbs said.
Soon, adventure in service was defining her life.
She was the high school student who, when competing in a United Nations program, wrote up a plan to end world hunger.
She was the graduating senior who, for her gift, asked her parents to loan her the car so she and a friend could take a road trip retracing the steps of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders through Selma, Birmingham and Montgomery.
She was the trailblazer who began her career on behalf of youth, working in a government services system – the Missouri Division of Youth Services – that was in need of an overhaul.
Phyllis Becker, who would later rise to director of DYS, saw it coming.
Becker was a disillusioned frontline DYS worker in the early 1980s when Hobbs – rising into the role of a regional supervisor – came sweeping in for a regular staff meeting at a Kansas City group home.
Becker was on the brink of quitting that day, frustrated and disillusioned with a system too focused on managing and punishing youth.
“She must have seen something in my eyes,” Becker said.
Because Hobbs, when she was done speaking to the group, paused on her way out to catch a meaningful moment face-to-face with Becker.
“It will get better,” Hobbs said. “Trust me.”
It turned out that Hobbs was pushing the department in new directions, “shaking everything up,” Becker said. She saw Hobbs in a relentless mission to help remake DYS, “changing the narrative about how we see these kids and families.”
This was what the new DYS believed:
The children in their care were kids caught in circumstances. They were not “thugs” and “delinquents,” Becker said. Going forward, their group homes would be furnished with actual couches and chairs, not hard plastic bolted to the floor. The youths’ parents would be treated as partners – experts in the lives of their children. DYS would tap the resources of their community.
Stangler saw what was happening too.
As the director of the Department of Social Services, Stangler seized on the rapid changes happening in DYS as a model for the rest of the state’s services.
“I called them my Marines,” Stangler said. “They were small and innovative and doing new things.”
Could Hobbs be just what Berkley was looking for to run with LINC?
Stangler told Berkley she looked like a reformer – with state experience, politically savvy.
Berkley had a litmus test ready when he met Hobbs.
LINC’s mission would require a skilled and bold staff. Reshaping public services and getting quick results would demand agility and toughness and it had to start at the top.
How would you fire someone? Berkley asked.
Others who he’d considered for the job, when asked that question, hemmed and hawed, Berkley said. They cautioned that it was difficult to fire people in public service.
But not Hobbs. Berkley recalls that she said, “You build a case and get rid of ‘em.”
“If you want the job,” Berkley said, “it’s yours.”
Holding the heat
6 a.m. Saturday morning – generally not a time people choose to be working.
This was the early 1990s and Jim Nunnelly, a public health administrator by trade and a community organizer in Kansas City’s mostly Black east side, was rising early to join the regular sounding-board sessions that Hobbs was holding in the lobby of the PennTower building.
The early weekend hour provided a time when everyone involved could be available, Nunnelly recalled.
It felt a bit like safe cover, too.
That’s because leaders in the mostly minority communities that LINC aimed to serve didn’t know yet what to make of what many suspected was just another non-profit coming with another prescription for perceived neighborhood ills, Nunnelly said.
But Nunnelly could see that Hobbs and the LINC Commissioners that Berkley was putting together wanted LINC’s work to rise with, and from, the community. They wanted Nunnelly’s voice, and he was willing to share it.
“I was criticized at first,” Nunnelly said. “Or at least I was talked about.”
These were tricky times, said SuEllen Fried, one of the original LINC Commissioners, recounting those days.
Fried remembers being at a community gathering in a Kansas City school as Hobbs was presenting some of the early ideas for anchoring services in the neighborhood schools, and it was a rough gathering.
“The idea was genius,” Fried said. But the audience was rejecting it. However, it was in those honest public meetings that LINC sharpened its mission to be in the community and listening.
“Gayle said we need to give voice to the voiceless,” Fried said. And Hobbs was capable of standing in the breach, absorbing the wants and needs coming at LINC, and taking action.
“Most executive directors just want to take on things they can handle,” Fried said. “They don’t want so many pieces. But Gayle wasn’t like that.”
Nunnelly saw it too, in those early Saturday morning meetings and in the community.
“LINC was doing the work others didn’t want to do or couldn’t do,” he said. “Gayle was the kind of person who could hold the heat.”
Hello Mr. President
It was one of those eye-rubbing, head-shaking, hard-to-believe moments.
But it was true, Clyde McQueen said. The president of the United States was sitting right there at the work table in McQueen’s Full Employment Council office in Kansas City. Bill Clinton – asking questions, drilling into details.
“The President, in your place, for two hours, not scripted at all.”
In 1994, LINC, in one of its early ventures, had teamed up with McQueen’s FEC and Marge Randle’s DSS division to revolutionize the way Kansas City was helping individuals on welfare successfully attain education and employment.
This Kansas City approach, adapting rapidly through trial and error, was changing the landscape for welfare – incentivizing employers to hire men and women from welfare who were being trained for work – not just with basic skills, but soft skills too, with case management support to help new workers start careers that stick.
By 1996, President Clinton had made welfare reform a major platform and he was looking for models of success. He came to Kansas City to see it for himself.
“These people in Kansas City know what they are doing,” the president said. “It’s miraculous what they are doing.”
LINC and the FEC were a good match, McQueen said. Both were doing work in the community that formerly had been confined to divisions of government, learning from each other.
“To be flexible, we could challenge things that don’t work much quicker,” he said.
But that didn’t mean it was any easier.
He said it to himself and he said it to Hobbs whenever meetings got tough: “You’ve got to stay at the table. When it gets the toughest, that’s when you don’t run.”
“That’s why we’ve been able to move the needle,” McQueen said.
The needles that LINC would move in the years that followed, by their variety, showed its timely ability to take on new, rising issues.
LINC worked to reform the foster care system, brought Medicaid services into schools, built its Caring Communities network, rallied the community in a legal struggle around HCA’s purchase of Health Midwest that brought a settlement in the hundreds of millions of dollars that launched today’s Health Forward Foundation.
The strength of LINC in its growing staff was propelling these missions and more, Fried said.
“Gayle collected an incredible staff of like-minded people, enormous in scope,” she said. “I’d never seen such a hard-working staff. They lived it, breathed it, believed it.”
The results were rewarding “the big leap of faith” that DSS and other state entities took in committing to the LINC idea, said Steve Renne, the deputy director of DSS under Stangler.
Renne was handling DSS’s budget, overseeing this unheard-of shift of historically rigid state funds into flexible streams with community control, through community schools and site councils.
Gayle gave the movement “traction,” Renne said. “Gayle was the missing ingredient, the secret sauce we needed.”
Keeper of the flame
As the 1999-2000 school year was approaching, the Kansas City School District and its community were staring into an abyss of missing services for its children and families.
A long-standing federal desegregation lawsuit had ended and with it so departed the court’s control of public funding.
The district believed it could no longer support before- and after-school programming. And when local leaders and the Mid-America Regional Council surveyed the landscape for someone with the capacity to take on the giant role, they looked to LINC.
LINC had firmly established its place in modeling community schools in Kansas City and Independence, but this would require amassing a staff of hundreds to serve thousands of children, their families and neighborhoods.
LINC’s work in the 90s of bringing health and social services into neighborhood schools had already attracted the attention and collaboration of Marty Blank and the Institute for Education Leadership.
LINC was showing the way, Blank said, modeling for the nation the power of community schools. Kansas City hosted the first national conference of community schools in the mid-1990s, Blank said, because he and others knew Hobbs and her team could pull it off.
“Gayle was a very savvy person,” Blank said “She had credibility from the grass roots to the grass tops.”
Now, with the entire Kansas City district’s before- and after-school programming under its responsibility, the full breadth of community schools was possible.
And Hobbs and LINC’s leadership made sure, Gierer said, that size didn’t compromise values.
“What Gayle brought LINC over and over was to create the culture of the program in a way that always focused on who we were serving,” he said.
The program locked in “the Big Six” core expectations of the program. The values permeated through the staff. Everyone’s mission was anchored, Gierer said, like all of LINC’s work, in being “very respectful of the people we served.”
LINC’s reach was inspiring others engaged in the work, said Bill Dent, the executive director of FACT, the Family and Community Trust in Missouri.
FACT’s league of 20 community partnerships across the state – including LINC – has grown in a similar mission of blending public and private resources, always trying to cut through the bureaucratic “red tape” to empower neighborhoods, he said.
“Gayle was the exemplar of servant leadership and a mentor to myself and others,” Dent said. “She was the keeper of the original flame of caring communities.”
Aaron Deacon, now a LINC Commissioner, was a foot soldier in the work of digital communities when he fell in with others in 2012 to overcome Google Fiber’s inequitable plan to offer free broadband access to schools and libraries.
He saw at close hand how LINC leapt in with other community forces to get, and even fund, the prerequisite percentage of home-by-home Google registrations to get the free services so Kansas City’s neediest schools and neighborhoods weren’t left behind.
Now Deacon is the founder and director of KC Digital Drive, a non-profit working to elevate the opportunities and eliminate digital barriers for everyone in Kansas City.
“I saw in LINC how people can respond to challenges and make things happen,” Deacon said. “That LINC’s leadership – Gayle, Landon (Rowland), Brent (Schondelmeyer) – could build an organization that could do that was inspiring to me.”
“I said, ‘We can do this.’”
Flesh and bone
Nunnelly asks the question:
What does it really mean to be kind?
He saw the question taking shape all those years ago during those early Saturday morning sessions. And he saw LINC’s powerful answer day after day, year after year.
Kind words are hollow, he said, unless you can say, “I’m going to be here for you and you can count on it.”
“Gayle” believed all along that “the capacity was in the community” to meet a crisis. “She had the can-do people.”
The “beauty of LINC” shone, he said. The kindness of LINC was its dedication to action.
Stangler, in retirement, can look back at a long legacy of ideas he championed and programs he launched in his years of directing state departments.
But in government, the shifting whims and tides of politics wash over it all, year after year.
“Most creations,” he said, “are like castles in the sand.”
He loved Berkley’s idea for LINC and was determined to back it from his high post.
“I had the rhetoric,” he said, “but it was Gayle who was the spirit. She put flesh and bones to it.”
This is one of those castles that stands, he said. And it is because of more than the ideas.
“It’s because of the people.”
By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer
Video by Bryan Shepard