Nashville; Boston (May 30, 2023) Ten government, business, academic, and nonprofit leaders from Middle Tennessee have been chosen by Global Action Platform for a Harvard Business School leadership program convening representatives from fourteen American cities who are working across sectors to help their communities prosper.

Dr. Scott T. Massey, Chairman and CEO, Global Action Platform, and Mitch Weiss, Co-Director of the Young American Leaders Program and Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurial Management, Harvard Business School announced the 2023 Class of Nashville Young American Leaders today at a Leadership Reunion and 2023 class induction held at the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.  

Global Action Platform is the local partner and coordinator of the Young American Leaders Program for Nashville and the regional affiliate of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard Business School.  The Owen School of Management at Vanderbilt University is Global Action Platform’s academic partner in the relationship with Harvard Business School.

The ten Nashville leaders were selected to be a task force to build a biomedicalcluster strategy for the region, using Michael Porter’s cluster models developed at HBS.  The leaders are

Joe Cook III                         Managing Director                                                            Mountain Group Partners

Alfred Dowell                      EVP and CFO                                                                     Ingram Industries

Rick Ewing                          Director of Customer Success-Health Sciences            Oracle

Michelle Gaskin-Brown     Senior Manager, Public Policy                                         Amazon

Lauren Ingram                   Senior Associate, Partnership Development                   Frist Cressey Ventures

Gabriel Perez                     VP, Software Development                                              HCA Healthcare

Chris Rowe                         ED, Industry Collaboration                                              Vanderbilt University

Carol Rothstein                  VP Academic Affairs and Workforce Development       Nashville State Community College

Fahad Tahir                        CEO                                                                                  Ascension Saint Thomas

Abby Trotter                      Executive Director                                                            Life Science Tennessee

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The Young American Leaders Program grows out of a deep concern and a great hope shared by Global Action Platform and the Harvard Business School’s ongoing project on U.S. competitiveness. The concern is that the local, shared resources which drive American prosperity are not keeping pace with global standards. U.S. workforce skills, schools, and infrastructure, for instance, are not improving fast enough or, in too many cases, are deteriorating.

As our research shows, these trends are causing an unsustainable divergence in the U.S. economy: working- and middle-class Americans are struggling, even as firms and individuals who can tap global opportunities are thriving. Prosperity is being generated but not shared as broadly as desired.  The COVID pandemic has underscored these challenges and reinforced the need for collaboration and inclusive prosperity,  The Young American Leaders Program is designed to prepare local leaders in Nashville and across the country to address and reverse these trends.

The hope of YALP springs from the local level. In cities and regions across the country, local policymakers, businesspeople, nonprofit leaders, educators, clergy, and others coming together across sectors to build skills, improve schools, restore infrastructure to build a foundation for economic growth and shared prosperity.

Ten leaders from fourteen cities across the U.S. are selected by senior community leaders in those cities to participate each June in an intensive case study workshop on urban and rural regional collaborations and strategies for economic resilience.  Other participating cities include Austin, Boston, Columbus, Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Salt Lake City, and Seattle, among others.  The program was launched to develop leaders who understand cross-sector collaborations for shared prosperity and canimplement them more effectively and spread them more rapidly than in the past.

“Global Action Platform iscommitted to supporting the creation of a globally competitive innovation hubfor shared prosperity in Nashville,” notes Dr. Massey.  “We are pleased to be the regional affiliateof Porter’s Institute at Harvard and to be collaborating with them on the YoungAmerican Leaders Program and other projects. Through this collaboration, we hope to help enable emerging andestablished local leaders to work together for the shared growth and prosperityof our region in today’s global economy.” Linda Peek Schacht, executive coach and Founding Director, Andrews Institutefor Civic Leadership, Lipscomb University, is an advisor for the Nashvilleprogram, which receives ongoing local program support from Global ActionPlatform and its 2023 sponsors, which include Gold Sponsors:  HCA Healthcare, Ingram, Vanderbilt University;Silver Sponsors:   JumpstartNova, and theScarlett Family Foundation, along with a number of individual donors.

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