Forty-five-year-old Aaron Tobias Polkey is unlike some members of his generation who grew up in Charleston but left to seek their fortunes.
Polkey returned home last year after a nine-year stint as an attorney with a gender-based anti-violence organization in Washington, D.C., to give back to a city that launched him into careers in law and advocacy.
Polkey said in an interview that knew ties to his family and supporters in Charleston would bring him home again.
“I am a proud Gullah Geechee Charlestonian,” he boasted. “The core of what it means to have a home and a connection and a sense of responsibility to this place is the foundation of everything.”
The return for Polkey, who formally announced July 24 that he was running for the peninsular 4th district seat on Charleston City Council, was made possible when Steve Skardon retired as the second person to serve as president and CEO of the Palmetto Project.
The Palmetto Project’s board of directors last year placed Polkey at the helm of the Charleston-based nonprofit that for four decades has met some of South Carolina’s greatest needs with big solutions.
Listening to South Carolina
Since settling in the agency’s office on Rivers Avenue in North Charleston, Polkey has traveled to more than half of the state to get first-hand responses to the problems and concerns of South Carolinians.
The listening tour is guiding a recently launched We Are South Carolina initiative to identify the next big issues for the organization to tackle.
Dozens of individuals have offered future goals ranging from affordable childcare, sustainable land use to resiliency and expanding opportunities for juvenile offenders.
Some South Carolinians, Polkey added, also are calling for ways to break through the social media bubbles that block community cohesion in a rapidly expanding state.
We Are South Carolina, a name that evokes inclusion, seeks ideas from other nonprofits and “everyday people,” he said.
A decade from now, if We Are South Carolina is successful, “I hope that openness to try new ideas will culminate with us [doing] something that began at the grassroots and found its way to a sustainable solution,” Polkey said. More listening sessions are planned over the next year, he added.
Toot your horn
The Palmetto Project boasts that it has sparked more than 330 successful public-private partnerships throughout the state and some of them have been copied elsewhere.
Since its founding in 1984, the Palmetto Project has helped to expand electronic voting in South Carolina, held conversations around racial conciliation and distributed free books to children under 5. It is also the state’s only nonprofit insurance agency, specializing in subsidized plans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Many of those achievements, however, are not widely known, Polkey admitted to the Charleston City Paper in his first in-depth interview since joining the statewide nonprofit.
“I have a hard-working and very humble staff that oftentimes is reluctant to toot their own horn,” he said. “We’ve got to do a better job of getting the word out about what we do.”
With a staff of 18 employees in Charleston, Columbia, Greenville, Georgetown and Marion, the Palmetto Project offers programs that are as broad as the state’s economic and social needs, he said.
With so many lanes to travel in, it is “challenging to communicate which lanes we occupy when we are open to any new idea that addresses any need,” he said.
Health care threat
In South Carolinians, more than 500,000 people receive health insurance through the federal ACA Insurance Marketplace. The Palmetto Project serves about 3,000 of them.
Skardon, who has counseled Polkey while retired, said the challenge for Polkey and the Palmetto Project is restructuring their work to help South Carolinians who are likely to lose health coverage as result of expected cuts in federal spending.
The agency is bracing for those reductions by identifying consumers “we suspect may be impacted and contacting them well in advance to begin to figure out solutions together,” Polkey explained.
“The second part is reaching out to have a mass marketing campaign to inform concerned residents that we are available to answer their questions and allay their concerns,” he added.
A family of achievers
The Palmetto Project multi-faceted portfolio is as diverse as Polkey’s upbringing in one of Charleston’s classic middle-class Black families of educators, entrepreneurs and civil rights activists whose address books read like a who’s who of Black Charleston.
Polkey’s maternal grandfather, Sumter-born Sylvester Jackson, set the foundation for the family’s generational wealth. As a skilled carpenter, he built homes for his family and others in the upper Meeting Street and Wagener Terrace neighborhoods decades before gentrification began to change peninsula Charleston.
Ernestine Tobias Felder, Polkey’s maternal grand aunt, was the secretary of Charleston’s branch of the NAACP. She often reminisced about the time she hosted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at her Alexander Street home.
Polkey’s mother, Charleston educator Sylvia Polkey Smalls, was among the 300 students who graduated in 1960 from Burke High School. That mega-class included Harvey Gantt, the first Black student at Clemson University and former Charlotte mayor, and noted Charleston educator Cecilia Gordon Rogers.
Polkey’s stepfather, Robert Smalls, a retired bus driver for the South Carolina Electric and Gas Co. (SCE&G), was also in that famous Burke class.
But it is perhaps Polkey’s maternal grandmother, Ida Tobias Jackson, who had the most lasting influence on him.
“She cultivated in me a specific set of interests focused on community, public speaking and advocacy,” Polkey recalled.
Jackson lived on Addison Street next door to former Charleston City Council member Hilda Jefferson. Through that friendship, Polkey, an 8-year-old student at Buist Academy, was chosen to ride on a horse-drawn carriage during a Christmas parade with then-Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr.
Now with degrees from the University of South Carolina School of Law and Georgetown University, Polkey said, “My story is a story of education, housing and access to mentorships.
“A lot of people who grew up in similar circumstances weren’t afforded those same opportunities,” he lamented. “That’s why I feel a responsibility to break down the barriers that deny those opportunities to other children.”
Editor’s Note: This story on Polkey was assigned and written before his announcement this week that he will be a candidate in the Nov. 4 nonpartisan election for Charleston City Council.
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