Gov. Andy Beshear to speak at April 29 luncheon
More than two decades ago, five friends—community leaders all—began talking among themselves. And talking. And talking.
Who, they wondered, would step into the shoes of the people who had been the lions of Henderson’s late 20th-century civic life?
People like Dr. John Logan, an irresistible force when it came to community fundraising and demanding action.
Or Walt Dear, the infectiously excitable Gleaner newspaper owner whose passion for community betterment was boundless.
Or industrialist and banker Ray Preston, who amassed a fortune and created a foundation to give much of it away to worthy Henderson causes.
Or Dr. Bill Newman, the six-time mayor who helped recruit Fortune 500 industries that transformed the community economically in the 1970s.
And others.
Those five friends—Joel Hopper and Scott Davis (businessmen personally mentored by Preston), Gleaner Editor Ron Jenkins (who worked for Dear) and bankers Dale Sights and Herb McKee—looked into the pipeline of emerging talent and weren’t at all sure that Henderson’s future leadership was certain.
They decided to do something about that.
They created the Henderson Leadership Initiative—HLI, for short—training program taking place on one Friday a month for nearly a year (plus an overnight retreat at the beginning) to prepare promising young leaders in business, education, the nonprofit world and other arenas to not only aspire to leadership roles but—crucially—to learn how to collaborate with other leaders and make things happen.
Twenty years ago this year, they convened the first HLI class.
Today, the more than 300 graduates (which HLI calls Fellows) make up a virtual Who’s Who of Henderson leadership. They are corporate presidents and CEOs, business owners, holders of the community’s highest elected offices, school principals and other educators, executive directors and board members of key nonprofit organizations—Henderson’s movers and shakers. (Six of the nine HLI board members are also Fellows.)
“I always think, we constantly asked if it was working,” HLI Chairman Scott Davis, one of only two surviving HLI founders and the only one still serving on its board, said in a recent interview.
Famously, the irascible Ron Jenkins would lose patience as the founders debated the question years ago until he would burst out, “It’s working, damnit!”
On April 29, HLI will celebrate 20 years of leadership with a sold-out luncheon at The Vault venue on North Main Street. Gov. Andy Beshear will be the keynote speaker.
Twenty years after that first class convened, what amazes Davis is that the pipeline has kept refilling with eager aspiring leaders.
“I thought after four or five years, we’d run out of people,” he said. “The first couple of years, we would call people in organizations and say, ‘Who have you got who is ready for this?’”
As it turned out, the number of emerging leaders “was beyond my circle of vision”—young people who “want to make Henderson a better place. It’s satisfying.”
Davis said there were two populations of prospective HLI participants out there:
- What he called those with “the leadership quotient” who were “naturally ready to engage with people and (to whom) people were naturally attracted to them.”
“For them, it was about (learning they needed to be) building coalitions of people who were like-minded” because they couldn’t achieve community goals by themselves, he said.
He quotes what Sights uttered in one meeting of the founders that has become canon for HLI: “Loftier goals are often not achieved because a sustained coalition of leaders does not exist.”
- Others who needed “the training component” and to appreciate, as McKee would say, that “just because you have an idea doesn’t mean it’s worthy or worth pursuing” and that one should “look around and see if someone else is talking about it or already doing it with the right stakeholders.”
Many HLI Fellows say their class experience opened their eyes to possibilities, even changed their lives.
“HLI offered a lot of beneficial things to me,” Brianna Cessna, Davis’ executive assistant at Field & Main Bank who graduated in 2023, said.
“The first thing that comes to mind, it gave me the ability and the opportunity to engage with people outside my industry,” Cessna said. “It’s so easy to get stuck in your day-to-day work.”
Today, “I have peers in so many industries” with different skills, she said.
“Now I have those relationships, so now I have these people I can call on outside my banking network and who are readily available at the drop of the hat.”
During their class year, HLI participants are required to form groups with classmates to conceive and complete a community project, called a class practicum. Cessna’s group spearheaded the installation of the 13-foot-wide “I (Heart) Henderson” sign atop the riverfront, “a very exciting feature,” she said.
That project involved working with “so many groups of people and hoops to jump through” including “getting a chance to be in front of the city commission for approval, and working with the street department to pour concrete” and working with a sign company.
“I gained a lot of real-life experience outside of what I would normally get to do,” she said.
And for someone who self-describes herself as being “relatively introverted,” HLI helped move her out of her comfort zone to meet new people and engage in public speaking.
Cessna for years served as the liaison between Davis and various HLI executive directors; now she is the HLI executive director.
For Stacy Denton, a transplant from Wisconsin and owner of Blue Moon Stables here, HLI provided a broader introduction to Henderson.
“I was enlightened and excited about being part of this community,” Denton said.
The HLI experience prompted her in 2017 to found and serve as lead instructor for Healing Reins of Kentucky, a nonprofit that, according to its mission statement, exists to “assist community members of all abilities to reach their full potential through interaction with horses.”
“HLI gave me the confidence and the little edge to see that through,” Denton said.
“HLI changed my life,” Brad Schneider wrote in a message.
The former Gleaner sportswriter was working nights at The Evansville Courier & Press with younger kids at home when he went through the program in 2008.
“I was probably among the most gung-ho members of my class,” Schneider said. His enthusiasm caught the eyes of the HLI founders, and when the position of president of the Henderson Chamber of Commerce came open, they encouraged him to apply.
“I had no idea what a chamber of commerce did,” he said.
“Despite my ignorance, the leadership skills and better confidence I had gained from just a few months in the program gave me the courage to try,” Schneider said. He won the job easily and found that he “was perfectly suited to the work” of advocating for local businesses and his adopted hometown.
The chamber job led to him becoming CEO of Kyndle, the former regional economic development organization here then, in 2016, his appointment by Gov. Matt Bevin as Henderson County judge/executive, to which he was later elected three times.
“Without HLI, none of that would likely have happened,” Schneider said. “I’ll be forever grateful to the founders for their vision. Their efforts to formalize and make intentional the act of lifting up and supporting the next generation of potential leaders made a transformational difference in my life and the lives of many others.”
“HLI was a complete gamechanger for me,” Dr. Bob Lawson, a member of the 2014 class who became superintendent of Henderson County Schools in 2020.
“Prior to HLI, I was only thinking of school,” Lawson said.
The program “opened my eyes to all the critical parts of community leadership that make our town prosper,” he said.
HLI “really brought it all together as to how we could partner with the community and move our community.”
As Lawson said: “You have to have collaboration.”
“Our community is progressing because of the great leadership of a lot of people,” he said. “But I think if you look at all those factors, the one connecting factor is HLI.
“To me,” Lawson said, “it’s the egg in the cake.”
