Cooper: Bill Kilbride's Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce legacy

Bill Kilbride, president and chief executive officer of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, discusses the community-wide Chattanooga 2.0 movement in a 2016 meeting at Woodland Park Baptist Church.
Bill Kilbride, president and chief executive officer of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, discusses the community-wide Chattanooga 2.0 movement in a 2016 meeting at Woodland Park Baptist Church.

Talk about going out on top.

A week after the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce was announced as Chamber of the Year by the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, President and Chief Executive Officer Bill Kilbride has announced his retirement, effective at the end of the year.

The chamber executive, according to board Chairman Larry Buie, deserves praise for regional economic development, workforce development and increasing membership value.

We salute Kilbride, 66, for those things, but, perhaps more importantly, for his spearheading of the Chattanooga 2.0 movement, an effort that has an ultimate goal of putting more Chattanoogans into the living wage jobs that continue coming into the area.

At the launch of the movement, in an editorial board meeting at the Times Free Press in December 2015, he talked about hearing, fairly early in his tenure at the Chattanooga Chamber, business executives talk about how difficult it was to find local people who had the skills and/or credentials to fill the good jobs they had to offer.

Tracing that need backward, Kilbride got a better idea not only what was missing at the job entry level but also how poor preparation from the years before school and throughout a kindergarten to 12th-grade education contributed to that lack.

That need spurred the start of the movement, which was kicked off with the sobering statistic that "in the coming years, over 80 percent of jobs paying a living wage ($35,000) in our area will require a postsecondary certificate or degree, but currently, just 35 percent of students in Hamilton County are likely to obtain this required level of education."

It just so happened that the drive corresponded with a low point in the Hamilton County School district, which had been dinged with low test scores, a poor report from the state on the plan for its low-performing schools, turmoil from an out-of-town rape of an Ooltewah basketball player and the subsequent resignation of its superintendent.

In the ensuing year and a half, with the school district's troubles fresh in their minds, thousands of Chattanooga area residents weighed in on all or part of the movement in the strategic areas of early childhood education, K-12 education, and postsecondary education and workforce development. Now work has begun across the region in all three areas to make improvements, with better jobs (and, thus, better lives) as the ultimate goal.

If the movement continues its momentum and helps turn the corner in any or all of the strategic areas, Kilbride's legacy may be far more than three-plus years at the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce.

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