Imagine you are in Cuba. It’s 1985. You just took a shower. Your face looks like a red connect-the-dots game thanks to pieces of toilet paper to stanch bleeding from a rough shave.
You walk out of the bathroom in a robe. There’s a man sitting on the bed, chuckling a bit.
“I see you shaved. That’s why we have beards here,” says Fidel Castro.
Yes, it was that Fidel Castro, Cuba’s late Marxist leader. At the time, Steve Skardon was a staffer for an official U.S. House visiting delegation authorized by the Reagan administration. The others were staying in a big house on a secluded island off the Cuban coast. Skardon was in a two-bedroom guest house, thinking he would take a less posh space because he was staffing the trip. Unbeknownst to him, Castro mostly slept in the guest house. And because he liked to be a good host, he waited to welcome Skardon.
“It was a little unnerving,” Skardon recalled. “How do you make conversation — like, ‘Kill anybody today?’ ”
Over the next couple of days, Skardon drank a lot of coffee so he could stay up to interact with Castro, an insomniac. Castro didn’t speak much English because he thought he sounded like a bumpkin, but he understood more than he let on.
“We didn’t have totally substantive conversations until the interpreter showed up.”
So goes another episode in the incredibly interesting life of Skardon, often at intersections of policy and politics in Washington and South Carolina in ways that continually enriched others’ lives. Now after 32 years as head of the Palmetto Project, he’s retiring, ready to ease back on the gas a bit and enjoy his twin grandsons.
From bus driver to nonprofit leader
As a teen, Skardon lived in Summerville, but he attended Porter Gaud School in Charleston. For his junior and senior years, he drove the school bus, taking 14 students from Summerville and Hanahan to the private school.
After graduating from George Washington University in the early 1970s, he spent three years as a reporter at the Florence Morning News. Among other things, he covered the investigation and trial of serial killer Donald Henry “Pee Wee” Gaskins who confessed to at least 15 murders and is thought to have committed more.
By the late 1970s, Skardon worked on some campaigns and then as a lobbyist for the National Association of Retired Federal Employees. Soon he landed in the House as a staffer, working a few years for top leaders before going to a public affairs firm. In 1993, he wanted to be back home in South Carolina, taking over the helm at the 9-year-old Palmetto Project.
He thought he’d be around for a couple of years, not 32. But interesting, compelling and helpful work kept coming, particularly in a poor state like South Carolina with its ongoing shortcomings in education, health care, poverty and more.
“If there was anything that speaks to the 32 years, it was the possibility for us to solve problems,” Skardon said. “We’re good at being entrepreneurial and good at being innovative in South Carolina, but we’re not so good at applying that entrepreneurial spirit for building community. That’s what these things [done at the Palmetto Project] represent.”
Four projects to know about
Through the years, the Palmetto Project has made a difference in people’s lives through more than 30 different projects. Here are four that Skardon believes were hugely important:
Insure South Carolina. Today if you need health insurance and don’t want to use a big company to connect to what’s available in South Carolina, you can use the Palmetto Project’s nationally known model. It has the first nonprofit health insurance agency in the state and second in the country that helps people get what they need. It’s a one-stop shop for information and provides free services, offering options on everything from Obamacare and private insurance to Medicaid and Medicare.
Welvista. Now a standalone nonprofit that offers $50 million of free medications to South Carolinians a year, the program started more than 20 years ago at the Palmetto Project to help uninsured residents get access to life-saving drugs. It has provided free pharmaceutical drugs to hundreds of thousands of people across the state.
Imagine South Carolina. This six-year effort, which started in 1996 in response to a growing number of hate crimes in the state, convened “citizen summits” to increase public dialogue. Through the years, more than 600 people participated yielding an array of ideas that were incorporated into a comprehensive plan that emphasized building community leadership skills, better communication and networking to solve problems.
Palmetto Voter Project. An advocate for election reform and better voting since its 1984 founding, the Palmetto Project has been building awareness about the importance of voting for years with its “I Voted” stickers. Skardon led statewide commissions on voting reform that spurred action for the state’s first unified voting system, which boosted participation significantly.
It’s clear to any student of what works in policy that the Palmetto Project’s continuing impact — in advocating for better health care, engaged families and communities, better schools and improved civic participation — is due, in large part, to Skardon’s longtime enthusiasm and commitment to make life better for people across the state.
Looking back on a successful immunization campaign is revealing. In the mid-1990s, it boosted the state from having among the worst childhood immunization rates to the best and it highlights how working together in smart ways can make a huge difference.
“It proves we don’t have to be the last in the country in these things — if we can come up with imaginative and innovative ways of approaching problems,” Skardon reflected.
Skardon has already given up the daily reins of the Palmetto Project’s leadership to incoming President and CEO Aaron Polkey, a Charleston native of Gullah Geechee heritage who served as a leader and lawyer at a Washington social justice nonprofit before returning home.
Skardon says he’ll be around until July 1 to help the organization shift. But after then? Who knows? But it is sure to be filled with friends, family, service to his church and service to the community. He’s not going to just sit still.
Native Polkey to take over at Palmetto Project
Charleston native Aaron Polkey left town in 2008 to take a job as an nonprofit election attorney in Washington, D.C., where he had gone to Georgetown University, served as senior class president and graduated in 2002.
Now he’s back, fueled by a continuing passion — and a boatload of national experience — to give back to his native state as the incoming president and CEO of the Palmetto Project, the statewide nonprofit that has been fighting for social and economic improvement in South Carolina for four decades.
Polkey, who is of Gullah Geechee descent, has a law degree from the University of South Carolina. Most recently, he’s been senior program attorney and associate director for learning and leadership at Futures Without Violence, a nonprofit that works to end gender-based and hate-fueled violence and harassment. He’s also worked in jobs to boost affordable, safe housing and equal voting. Before moving to the nation’s capital, he was a staff attorney with what is now Derfner Altman, a Charleston civil rights practice.
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