MDC was established in 1967 by the North Carolina Fund, with the support of the state's civic and business leadership and the Ford Foundation, to help the state transition from a segregated, agricultural work force to an integrated, industrial work force. The North Carolina Fund was established in 1963 by then-Gov. Terry Sanford as a five-year program to address the root causes of poverty in the state through the creation of 11 community action agencies and other community initiatives. During the summers of 1964 and 1965, the North Carolina Volunteers Program created teams of African American and white college students to work together and show that communities could be stronger if their members reached across lines of race and class to solve problems of poverty.
Also by example, the North Carolina Fund served as a model and catalyst for such national programs a Head Start, VISTA, and the Community Action movement.
Both the North Carolina Fund and the federal Office of Economic Opportunity insisted that the people being served by the programs be involved in community program decisions.
Community coalitions developed in low-income neighborhoods. Protests and boycotts called attention to injustices by landlords, merchants, and service agencies. Hand in hand with the Civil Rights Movement, the war on poverty gave voice to long-ignored sectors of our communities.
The North Carolina Fund made final grants in 1969 and created MDC as one of three spinoff corporations.
The Fund's leadership had the foresight to document the Fund's work. A collection of films, radio pieces, and print materials is now archived at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill's Wilson Library.
MDC Timeline
Highlights from our History
- The Sixties: Addressing Poverty and Work in North Carolina
1964 - NC Governor Terry Sanford established the North Carolina Fund to address the systemic causes of poverty in the state. Supported by the Ford Foundation, Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, and Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, among others, the Fund directly addressed issues of economic inclusion, racial discrimination, and community engagement. One of the Fund's legacies was the creation of MDC.
1967 - MDC was founded in collaboration with the Office of Economic Opportunity and the National Association of Manufacturers. Its original mission was to design job training programs to help poor and displaced workers in the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy and from a segregated to an integrated workforce. George B. Autry was MDC's founding executive director, Luther Hodges, Jr. founding board chair.
1967-1973 - The Mobility Program was an experiment to change migration patterns that were crowding unskilled men and women in urban ghettos of the North and upper Midwest. MDC helped poor, displaced farm workers and farm families with annual cash incomes of less than $1,000 move to jobs closer to home in small Southern cities. read more >>
back to top >>
A Personal View of MDC's History
| by R.C. Smith |
What Does MDC stand for? All that is wise and noble in an otherwise sinful world. --George B. Autry, President, 1967-1999 |
Folks at MDC have been asked, immemorially, what the initials stand for. The answer is dull and, worse, requires a lengthy explanation.
I used to respond that the organization began as the North Carolina Manpower Development Corporation and that everything but the MDC withered away.
But rarely did anyone ask the more interesting question: What is an MDC, and how has it managed to hang onto the trapeze bar by its teeth for more than three decades? As one who was there when the doors first opened - and who put in his time lying awake nights worrying about whether they would be locked the next morning - I feel qualified to answer.
MDC is a child of Terry Sanford and George Esser's North Carolina Fund, with an assist from the National Association of Manufacturers and the federal Office of Economic Opportunity. Sanford and Esser sent their brain-child out into a cold, changing world with the mission of improving the lot of poor people and poor places in North Carolina, at a time when the state was shifting from farm to factory. Simply put, MDC's mission was to stick with what's practical, to develop pilot projects capable of being applied elsewhere, to shun the gobbledygook of academic think-tanks, to try to communicate with both precision and eloquence, and, above all, to stay flexible.
The inspired notion of its founders made MDC a team of generalists who, amazingly, managed to memorize the jargon of manpower well enough to insinuate themselves into professional meetings and then translate the proceedings into something very like English.
Before its doors first opened, MDC was committed to running demonstrations that would bring new workers to the South's burgeoning manufacturing economy. One of these, involving "manpower training centers" in three locations, proved a gateway project. MDC learned about people too often denied employment because of poverty and race. MDC fine-tuned its Human Resources Development curriculum to provide former sharecroppers and day laborers with the information and orientation they needed to be successful in manufacturing jobs. The program is now institutionalized throughout North Carolina's community college system.
In its initial job-training projects, MDC focused its attention on the problems of youth by revealing the costs of our schools' failure to reach children considered unprepared and unsuitable for education. In the 1970s, MDC monitored federal youth programs and produced a school-to-work demonstration project in Edgecombe County that was later expanded to 90 schools in North Carolina and Florida. That project, in turn, led to more in-school efforts culminating, in the 1990s, in a remarkably fruitful project in Indiana public schools, a project that assisted administrators and guidance counselors in promoting excellence, raising students' horizons, and impelling them toward postsecondary education.
Esser had observed that social institutions can be changed by confrontation or by persuasion, but not by a single change agent plying both approaches at once. MDC traveled the persuasion route, and as it traveled down the labor-market street, it worked on both the demand side and the supply side. Consequently, MDC has had a continuing role as both a convener and broker for collaboration between and among manpower training specialists, educators, and business leaders, as well as employees, customers, and the public at large. In the 1980s, MDC focused on community economic development as its influence spread beyond North Carolina and into the Mississippi Delta and elsewhere in the South.
MDC has not simply applied itself to workforce and economic development in the South, but also has expressed, with the force of rhetoric and fact, the glaring need for such work (principally in
Shadows in the Sunbelt). It has not just thrown itself into public school reform but has studied the national crisis in public education (
America's Shame, America's Hope). It has repeatedly joined with business and public leaders in state capitals to figure out how to address the problems of the unemployed, the working poor, and the under-trained.
In doing all of this, MDC did not invent the practice of working beyond the constraints of budget, but it may have elevated the practice to an art. Through the difficult years of fiscal retrenchment, when national nonprofits disappeared like chaff in the wind, MDC broadened itself from a workforce development organization into an effective force for overall economic progress in the South, gaining the strong support of North Carolina and national foundations. Former board members such as Juanita Kreps, Luther Hodges, Jr., the original board chair, and William Winter provided the personal attention and magnetism to keep MDC going. George Autry, MDC's first and only president until 1999, worked tirelessly to spread MDC's message and expand its influence.
There's a younger staff at MDC now, but the organization has kept its focus and passion. If anyone asked me whether to accept a job at MDC, I'd respond: "If you have enthusiasm, can handle the clash of strong opinions, and want to make a difference in the lives of people and their communities, there is no better place to work."
What do the initials MDC stand for? Hard work, hanging in there, beating the odds.
R.C. Smith, a writer and editor who lives in Jamestown, N.C., spent 25 years on the staff of MDC and remains a great friend to the organization.