Leaders who do good work are not recognized enough. Today, we point you in the direction of former Gov. David Beasley and the Historic Charleston Foundation’s Winslow Hastie.
Beasley, who served as head of the United Nations’ World Food Program when it won a Nobel Prize in 2021 for efforts to alleviate global hunger, is now back in South Carolina. But he’s not resting. He has launched a new initiative to bring people together to reduce the draining political toxicity that infects our quality of life.
It’s called “Breaking Bread Together” and focuses on showing our differences don’t have to divide us. In essence, Beasley is trying to re-inject civility and decency back into American social interactions. A great way to do that is to share a meal and conversation, said Beasley, who frequently entertains world leaders to help differing people understand each other better.
“We’ve forgotten how to disagree without losing sight of each other’s humanity,” Beasley said last week. “When people slow down, share a table and truly listen to one another, communities grow stronger and real progress becomes possible.”
Back in January when we profiled Beasley as the idea was percolating, he noted, “I’ve seen more starvation, more suffering than anybody. And I’ve seen what happens when people don’t work together.”
The solution, he concluded, wasn’t the Internet, more news or technology because today’s adults and children are connected more now than anytime in world history. But they’re in separate silos, not broadly relating as neighbors.
“The answer is going back to these fundamentals of people breaking bread together, sitting down together,” he said in January.
In Charleston, Hastie has been head of the Historic Charleston Foundation for the last nine years after being first hired as its director of preservation in 2006. At the end of this year, he’s going to step down to spend more time in the family business, historic Magnolia Plantation. As its relatively new board chair, he said it needs more of his time and energy.
Hastie, who worked as a preservationist and urban planner before returning to his native Charleston, is rightly proud of successes in co-sponsoring the city’s Dutch Dialogues. They crafted a new approach to deal with flooding and the management of rising waters that threaten the historic Holy City. Under his leadership, HCF also started a loan fund to help income-qualified legacy homeowners stay in their historic homes on the peninsula.
“Slowing down gentrification and displacement is a very important mission for HCF — you can’t stop it, but we felt we had to try and mitigate its most negative impacts,” Hastie told us this week.
He and the organization have been vital in the effort by the city and Beemok to remake Union Pier as a neighborhood, not just a chunk of boxy buildings with little relation to Charleston’s history. He also noted how he and the organization learned something during a public outcry over the Nathaniel Rutledge House a couple of years ago: “If we weren’t willing to listen to the community, then how could we ask people to support us and our mission?”
Beasley’s new effort and Hastie’s recent successes illustrate what happens when good leaders lead. We need more of them.
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