What are you doing at 7:30 on Saturday morning to make your city better? Probably not a helluva lot. I know that, right about that time, I’m usually dreaming of showing up for a high school algebra test — naked. (Fodder, still, for me and my shrink.)
Well, unlike you and me, a couple of Philly guys are that committed. And they’re not just focused on making Philadelphia, as they say, “the most inclusive and equitable big city in America” — they’re intent on disrupting the traditionally siloed way that our city has always done its public business.
They are White business macher Michael Forman, CEO of FS Investments and the driving force behind the hip Union League alternative Fitler Club, and African American labor leader Ryan Boyer — a seeming odd couple. But they’re not as different as they appear. Both are natural challengers of conventional wisdom, in a city often driven by it. And both have widened the aperture of their respective lenses to make their mission Philadelphia — all of it — rather than just their self-interested pieces. That’s what makes them our Citizen Disruptors of the Year.
The Citizen will honor Forman and Boyer at our inaugural Citizen of the Year Awards celebration on January 30, at the Fitler Club Ballroom, featuring a conversation between MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi and actor/activist George Takei. Tickets and tables available here.
Together, Forman and Ryan formed the Philadelphia Equity Alliance, a diverse group of business, nonprofit and policy leaders that, by coming together around the problem-solving table, provides an antidote to the old ways of doing things. It started with those calls at that ungodly hour every Saturday morning after the murder of George Floyd, ultimately featuring a veritable who’s who of Philly influence: Enterprise Center CEO Della Clark; FS Investments Sr. VP and former state representative Mike Gerber; Drexel University President John Fry; Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia CEO Madeline Bell; Philadelphia Foundation CEO Pedro Ramos; Comcast Vice President of External and Government Affairs (and Citizen Board member) Bret Perkins; Urban Affairs Coalition CEO Sharmain Matlock-Turner; and the Rev. Dr. Alyn Waller, among others.
The overarching issue on the table: Historically, the business and nonprofit sectors here have outsourced leadership to an ever-insular political class. We’ve long relied on a succession of mayors and City Council apparatchiks to steward us towards greater opportunity, prosperity and safety. How’s that worked out for the poorest, violent, slowest growth city in the nation?
In a city traditionally long on diagnosis and short on prescription, Forman and Boyer asked: What can we do?
An unusual alliance for unusual times
What started as a group of friends sharing, and commiserating, quickly grew. Today, the Saturday Morning Group, while no longer necessarily convening every Saturday at dawn, consists of more than 70 diverse and actively-engaged leaders and would-be leaders of Philadelphia, a first-of-its kind gathering of next-generation and established leaders, all diving in, becoming experts on the most intractable problems facing Philadelphia, and fueling solutions addressing them.
Today, the Board of the Equity Alliance is one of Philadelphia’s most diverse. It is a non-profit affiliate of the Philadelphia Foundation, and is funded by significant contributions from Forman, FS Investments, Boyer’s Laborer’s Council, Drexel University, and CHOP. The Civic Coalition to Save Lives that has been so instrumental in lowering the gun violence rate? In its infancy, the Alliance helped Philadelphia Foundation Executive Director Pedro Ramos and William Penn Foundation Executive Director Shawn McCaney stand it up.
“What we’re trying to do, Michael and I, is have a story where there’s finally one Philadelphia. So if Philadelphia rises, everyone rises and we don’t have a city of haves and have-nots like we do now. The only way you do that is by being intentional — that doesn’t just happen. Political leaders were never supposed to be the only leaders.” — Ryan Boyer
It has helped fund the supplier diversity and workforce training work undertaken by Michael O’Bryan, a next gen leader (a member of The Citizen’s Generation Change Philly cohort) held in wide esteem. It has worked with Deborah Gordon Klehr’s Education Law Center on fully funding all of Pennsylvania’s schools, and with Dr. Stacy Holland, executive director of Elevate 215, on reimagining the next decade of education in Philadelphia, and on rebuilding the infrastructure of the city’s crumbling schools.
Perhaps most importantly, Forman, Boyer and the others who have joined the Alliance have spent the last year on a type of best practices tour of other cities, exploring what moves the needle on long intractable problems in places like Charlotte, Pittsburgh, New York, Cincinnati, Minnesota and Atlanta.
“This is all a prelude to coming together and doing something big here in Philadelphia, something transformational that addresses being the poorest big city in America,” Forman says. Forman and Boyer both concede they haven’t done the big thing yet, though the object lesson of the Alliance’s emphasis on cross-sector collaboration does indeed qualify as revolutionary. “A diverse group of people coming together, building an atmosphere of trust and respect?” Forman says. “That is how change begins.”
Other cities have shown this. In Pittsburgh, for example, business, labor, clergy, nonprofit and other community leaders decided to no longer wait for permission to lead and formed the Allegheny Conference, which released a 10-year vision for the region. In St. Louis, as Bruce Katz has chronicled, the innovative STL 2030 Jobs Plan led to the formation of Greater STL, Inc., a new business and civic leadership organization created through the fusion of five existing, and siloed, groups to meet the city’s agreed-upon north star: Broad-based and inclusive economic growth. In Chicago, the Civic Consulting Alliance loans the city’s best and brightest private sector minds to local government, to help its innovation and implementation.
A political and civic odd couple
Let’s not forget the other way that Forman and Boyer have broken through the status quo. For a couple of dudes who barely knew each other a few years ago, they’ve become besties. They are, at first blush, a political and civic odd couple in a town of deep divides.
Forman is a one time hard-charging corporate lawyer turned indefatigable entrepreneur and finance guy. He left a successful law practice in his forties to found an asset management startup dedicated to, in effect, democratizing investing, and has built FS Investments into an avenue of wealth-building for middle class investors.
Then there’s Boyer, whose compelling personal story has legs in a town that revels in its rags-to-riches working class roots. Born in North Philly and reared in union organizing, his life trajectory is a testament to the prospects of union mobility. “When my dad got into union organizing, my family’s ascension was very quick,” Boyer once noted. “We moved from the projects to Germantown to Overbrook. I saw what a good union career could do.”
In a town long dominated by labor leadership that hasn’t always been inclusive and has veered into thuggishness, Boyer’s tenure as Laborers’ District Council Business Manager earned the moniker bestowed upon him by one big wig civic leader: “The conscience of the labor movement.”
“We’ve just kept asking, How do we get the political class and business class to think about gun violence? To think about Black and Brown jobs? To think about building businesses, and the right vendor/vendee relationships? How do we hold folks accountable?” — Michael Forman
He is bipartisan at a time when across-the-aisle outreach has become dangerously passé, and he’s not afraid to offend his base, as when he calls left wing fever dreams like defund the police “silly and dangerous” and when he turned heads by penning for The Citizen his support for school vouchers. Maybe, in their no-nonsense, get-it-done practicality, the businessman and the labor leader are not that different, after all.
“It was a raw time when we first started talking,” Forman told me in the early days of their partnership. “I didn’t know Ryan and I’ve never had to walk in his shoes, never had to experience what it’s like to be a Black man in Philadelphia and understand what they go through with the police, for instance.
From that perspective, it has been a great learning experience for me. We’re all developing a level of trust with one another and we’ve just kept asking, How do we get the political class and business class to think about gun violence? To think about Black and Brown jobs? To think about building businesses, and the right vendor/vendee relationships? How do we hold folks accountable? Our goal is to get those who can have impact thinking about all those things collaboratively.”
“What we’re trying to do, Michael and I, is have a story where there’s finally one Philadelphia,” Boyer chimed in back then. “So if Philadelphia rises, everyone rises, and we don’t have a city of haves and have-nots like we do now. The only way you do that is by being intentional — that doesn’t just happen. Political leaders were never supposed to be the only leaders.”
It’s rare for a Philadelphia labor leader to find such common ground with a denizen of the C-Suite, but Boyer says it’s all about relationships. “I trust this man,” he says. “He doesn’t have to be doing this. He could be off to the Hamptons every damn weekend like everyone else. But he’s on these Saturday calls at 7:30 in the morning and sending all kinds of reading material our way all the time — I’ve read all about that Allegheny Conference. Usually I read about four books a year, but that’s been replaced by Alliance homework.”
Boyer says they want the Alliance to be collaborative and disruptive at the same time. “You have to be disruptive to the status quo to change it but we don’t want to do it in a way that we embarrass people,” he says. Forman pledges that “we don’t want to blow things up. We’re just looking to see if we can get people to work together and solve problems with a laser focus on equity.”
We haven’t seen a business guy and a labor leader arrive at common ground like this in quite some time. If they can keep hearing one another and trusting one another, maybe it’s not inconceivable that each will bring their bases along. That would represent real change to a status-quo town.
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