Episode 5 Graham Walker - ”Shreveport-Bossier: My City, My Community, My Home”

Graham Walker, President and CEO of Fibrebond Corporation, sits down with Jeffrey Goodman, Director of Marketing and Development with the YMCA of Northwest Louisiana, to answer the following questions: 0:42 1. Graham, in 2018 you wrote an op-ed piece for The Shreveport Times in response to WalletHub ranking Shreveport 182 out of 182 places to find a job. I consider the piece you wrote as strong a state of the union on our community as I have ever read.

 

Here are the final lines for those who may not have read it yet,

 

“As a community, we must find a vision for Shreveport. The talented people of this city and region deserve it, but they will not wait forever. If we don’t start demanding more of our leaders and of ourselves, we’ll deserve to stay at the bottom of the list.”

 

I asked if you would be willing to come today and verbally update the piece you wrote in 2018 to what you now see four years later and you generously agreed to do it. So Graham, if you were writing an op-ed on Shreveport-Bossier in 2022, what would you say?

 

2:51 2. With this next question I'm looking to you for some guidance. Every resident of this area has been in this situation at one time and will inevitably encounter it again. You are at a dinner party or around friends and someone starts putting down or bad mouthing Shreveport-Bossier. What's the right way to react if we hope to correct that type of behavior moving forward?

 

9:35 3. Now I’d lie you to comment on some other quotes I have read from you through the years:

 

“If your expectations are not high, you’ll become what that expectation is.”

 

11:00 4. “We don’t make a great impression.”

 

14:51 5. “What this area needs and what’s currently lacking is a sense of hope.”

 

19:40 6. “It feels like, in a lot of ways, a very authentic, real place.”

 

21:56 7. “How do we create what’s happening in other cities? How do we do that here?”

 

24:40 8. “If we’re all too busy to do it. If we don’t see it as important to give back into the community and to try to do something. If we’re not going to do it. Who is going to do it?”