Jason Hall, CEO of Greater St. Louis Inc., sits down with Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew to share the work he and his organization is doing to bring together the business community to help drive economic growth and create opportunities for all with a focus on inclusive growth.
This is home. I grew up on the Illinois side and then came back. I’m a lawyer. I was practicing downtown. I had just come out of the closet and had been in St. Louis for less than 12 months when Missouri was the first state to have a ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage. Our civil rights were on the line, so I started to get more politically active. I was in my 20s and had all the energy in the world.
I was volunteering for Jay Nixon’s campaign when he ran for governor and he said he wanted to get young people involved in his administration. The Great Recession had hit and my mentors at the law firm I was at were like, “You’re not gonna miss much. If you want to do public service for a while, have fun and go help the State.” So I did. And I loved public service. I was part of a team that committed to creating more jobs and opportunities in communities across the State. In the end, I wasn’t yet ready to return to practice law because I saw the need to improve economic development in St. Louis, particularly, around the emergence of the entrepreneurship movement. So I joined the St. Louis Regional Chamber. I was there for several years focused on expanding support for entrepreneurs, but it became clear a new platform was needed to carry the work forward.
I quit my job, helped organize civic seed capital from a few institutions and foundations, sold my house, and got an apartment to have some financial flexibility in case things didn’t pan out. I just put all my eggs into a basket around January 1, 2017. I’m a first-gen high school graduate. I don’t come from money and I didn’t have a lot of personal resources at the time. It was a real risk and I felt alive. Like many entrepreneurs I’d worked with in my economic development career, you have to believe in something so much that you’re willing to make it work and create value. My team and I didn’t know what this group was going to take on precisely, but the focus of Arch to Park was to connect emerging development we were seeing in the heart of the City closely tied to the rise in entrepreneurship.
At the time, the major civic catalyst was John Dubinsky — the founder of Cortex, a co-founder of BJC HealthCare, and a former trustee of Washington University. He was a young wiz banker and looking to do something else civically that expanded on the core principles of Cortex. John and I visited other cities to see what they were working on, how they organized, and how they were getting stuff done. And we started taking on more work and partnerships when COVID hit. Well, we ended up supporting our healthcare and public partners in standing up with the Pandemic Task Force and with weekly press briefings. And it was eye-opening to say, ‘When it really matters, the business community needs to function as one in partnership with the public sector to get things done.
One of the early projects Arch to Park got involved with, alongside 20 or so community groups, was economic development. And the metro narrative was, how do we tell a better story about our people and the economy? How could we get the energy starting to build in the urban core to be a national story? No single organization had the budget to do it. There was no unified messaging or movement around those issues at the time. So we all agreed to work together. STLMade didn’t exist yet, but Andy Taylor liked that all these groups were working together. So he put some seed capital in to say, let’s try to discover a people-centered narrative to show the economy of St. Louis without being technical or jargony or just showing pictures of buildings. It became about people telling their stories.
Everybody assumed St. Louis was viewed negatively nationally. But, in doing focus groups, a national perception analysis showed people didn’t even know they were supposed to have an opinion of St. Louis. It was pretty humbling. So, doing all this community engagement work, it was clear people wanted a way to talk about St. Louis and bring some of that growth and vitality forward in a unified way. Then on one March 14th, for #314Day, we launched STLMade at Cortex with Venture Cafe to bring people and small businesses together and over 1,000 people showed up! It was just awesome and so important at the time because it was this grassroots and grasstops get-together. St. Louis can get pretty segmented that just getting so many different people in a common space was special.
This was one of those moments of hope that our generation of leaders is doing differently. In our minds, we needed a day in March, 3-14 happened to fall on a Thursday that year when Venture Cafe would have meetups, so we wanted to have that day on the calendar. We ended up discovering Young Dip and Tatum Polk, whose early work as the founders of #314Day had not yet been widely covered in the press. So, we stopped, paused, listened, and weren’t afraid to say, “We didn’t start it, but we’re trying to accomplish the same thing. Let’s work together and support each other towards this goal we all believe in together.”
That’s how their story became part of the #STLMade narrative. We projected the 3-14 Day logo on the Science Center planetarium during the first year of the collaboration and when Young Dip saw it, tears came to his eyes. 3-14 Day became an even more powerful movement and it’s been on display.
What does 314 Day mean to you?
To have a day in this region intentionally set aside to focus on what unites us rather than divides us — that is powerful and critically important. The unexpected element was that it’s become a week on the calendar focused on small businesses in the region, too. People have come up with unique recipes and special discounts. It’s become this day to remind people that entrepreneurs, small businesses, restaurants, and all these St. Louis local businesses — they make us who we are. Our story is best told through people and it’s effective to tell it through the lens of story. Over the past 100 years, there have been about five pushes, #STLMade being the most recent, and the only one we can find that really does center on the people here in St. Louis. The others were building or project-defined, but this one is about telling a story through a broader fabric that might not otherwise be told. And people could relate to it. People understood at that time they were seeing pockets of economic energy in the region but they didn’t know how to connect it, struggled to talk about it, and most often felt connected to it when it was their neighborhood, church, and small businesses that they give their business to. We leaned into that and stay true to it today.
If you want to transform economically and have inclusive economic development, you braid DEI work into it. So many groups try to represent businesses, but how do they all collaborate? Those two things you see in how the community is moving today. There are several manifestations of that and it’s a testament that sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. For example, the partnership between this City and Arch to Park convened a table to plot out the future of the opportunity around geospatial in a community-centered way. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) was embarking on its new headquarters, which we saw as a catalyst for a much larger economic development effort in St. Louis. It made its decision to build its headquarters in North St. Louis — the largest headquarters in the history of the City — and it was an opportunity. We had inspiration from the work in the biotech sector, but the neighborhood into which the NGA was moving is very different. The Danforth Plant Sciences Center was on fresh dirt in Creve Coeur. The social and historical context of North City in St. Louis required us to say, “Let’s not just be leaders in the industry, let’s use the growth in that industry and link it to racial equity and community development.”
The GeoFutures Coalition was formed to map a regional agenda to become the leaders of the geospatial industry. When you look at the plan we put together, we were told it was the first metro, industry sector growth plan to center racial equity from the start. And we did that in several ways. First, anybody who had a role in shaping the steering committee’s plan had to go through a two-and-a-half-day intensive anti-bias and anti-racism training. Second, we challenged ourselves to put community development and other perspectives around the table with traditional economic developers which created new tension points that led to a stronger plan overall. And, third, we worked with Harris-Stowe State University, which historically had not been included at the beginning of key civic decisions.
We’re not waiting for the NGA to open in 2025 to seize this moment and implement the GeoFutures Roadmap plan. You can’t drop almost $2 billion into a neighborhood and not change. It’s going to change. The question is, will residents get to participate and do it in an organized way? And with respect to the racial equity component, fast forward to today, Harris-Stowe is now the only Historically Black College or University in the country to have a national education partnership with the NGA. With a shortage of Black talent across tech, we’re working on addressing the systems that created that and expanding opportunities. And working with City and business leaders, St. Louis is now host to a national program for HBCU students across the country to come here and immerse themselves in a discovery process over the summer about what opportunities exist and what they can do to prepare to be a part and even get certified for geospatial careers. We challenged ourselves to say it is too late if we start addressing race and social dynamics after the ribbon is cut on the new NGA.
The thought exercise we often repeated is, “What do we want to say is true when the facility opens rather than after the fact?” We didn't want kids growing up in North City either to say, “I see construction, but that has no relevance to my life.” Community non-profit partners have now organized a full K-12 pipeline going into schools to start exposing young students about what geospatial is and foster inspiration in this exciting new tech sector.
“It’s important to drive people to take action. We want to create enough oomph so people run in that direction and not in the other. Geospatial is an example and we can do it in other industries, too.”
Being a first-generation high school graduate, I realize access to opportunity is everything. I always said, “if I ever have a shot to make a difference, I wouldn’t forget where I come from and I’d stay deeply dedicated to that work.” We live in a country where opportunity is not equally distributed yet. We may not get it perfect in our lifetime, but that’s not the test. The test is, are we affecting the arc of that and are we leading by example? I really believe that leadership has consequences. And I’d like to think our staff, volunteers, and community partners are creating a groundswell where that will put St. Louis on a new trajectory, particularly coming out of COVID. History will prove that there’s a unique opportunity to drive change during those big disruptions. We’re doing something nationally significant here in St. Louis. Oftentimes, in this region, when it comes time to compete for catalytic federal investments we end up beating each other up and competing with ourselves at the expense of winning. I was really proud of this region when we got it around one proposal, it came directly from the jobs plan, we already baked the DEI piece into it, and at the centerpiece of that proposal was North City.
Of all the things you do in the community, what comes easy to you and what is really difficult?
My difficulty is patience, just because this region is staring down a very dangerous decade. If we don’t grow, we’re going to fall from the 21st to closer to the 30th largest metro by 2030. So I feel this sense of urgency and burden every day that the time is now. But I have to balance that intensity. I’m a scrappy kid from Granite City. Finesse is not always my strongest suit. I’ve tried to balance how to use my intensity in a way that is more balanced while not losing sight of the ambition St. Louis needs to embrace now. What comes naturally is taking risks. There have been several — the fight for Medicaid expansion, that was one when I was just frustrated. We denied Medicaid expansion to the people of this community even after voters statewide approved it. We have to take some risks and be uncomfortable from time to time. We have to fight for what’s right. It’s okay. I’m willing to stick my neck out there a little bit. That’s what we have to do.
- Jason Hall, CEO, Greater St. Louis Inc.
