JORDAN MARENO

What is one experience, relationship or lesson from the program that continues to influence your life or career today?

JORDAN MORENO: I work at a company called Education Strategy Group, which I think is the best example I have of the lasting effects of the Luther Hodges Scholars program on the shape of my career. In my work every single day, I interact with stakeholders from philanthropy, from institutions of higher education, from school districts, from state government officials, even business and workforce is becoming increasingly relevant to my field, which is now education policy. And the skills that the scholars program instills in students or emphasizes within students, of the importance of being able to communicate and generate a sense of urgency across stakeholders with really different interests and motivations, are something that’s top of mind for me every year.

In order to solve the biggest problems in education policy, which are increasingly interrelated with workforce development, labor, you can argue further and further down the road healthcare, mental health especially — there’s all these intersections between education policy and so many other areas of public life. It’s important to be able to frame the issues that you care most about in words and with stories and case studies and data points that are compelling to various audiences. So changing your own pitch, your own approach and philosophy to describing a problem day in and day out, even though you remain committed to maybe solving the same core problem. Different people come at it in different ways. Because even as an undergraduate student, I was joining lunch and learns or fireside chats with folks who were bringing really different perspectives, I began to understand how we can all get at the same problem through different on-ramps. And having the perspective to recognize those on-ramps really gets you started and goes a long way in terms of generating buy-in, coordination and collaboration across parties.

In what ways has the program shaped how you approach challenges, opportunities or decision-making in your professional life?

JORDAN MORENO: So I think now that I work in education policy, so often when you’re looking at any given policy challenge or challenge that students are facing, or even institutions are facing, it’s really easy to point to funding as the problem. There’s not enough money. There’s not enough resources. There’s not enough people.

I was just on a big brainstorming call earlier today. My teammates and I are discussing the importance not of always advocating for more. Humans have this bias to add things, that the solution to any given problem is to always add, add, add. When in fact that often just makes things more complicated or complex for the end user, particularly in the education space when our end users are young people in a lot of cases. And I think through the Luther Hodges Scholars Program, I’ve gained this instinct to instead ask, is the solution here not just not more money or more people getting involved on the ground, but is it actually just bringing different people to the table and being more collaborative? So in one sense that is adding, it’s adding perspective, but in another sense it’s blending resources rather than adding resources. If we can get, for example, our business leaders to get really bought into developing short-term training programs for adults in very specialized regional economic environments, then that reduces some of the burden that higher ed is carrying all on its own. So it’s not just constantly asking higher ed or whatever individual stakeholder to add more resources or to find more people, but to bring in support and start to crosswalk resources in ways that make all of those resources individually more valuable.

If you could share one message with current and future scholars, what would it be?

JORDAN MORENO: The solutions to these big problems that keep humans up at night, decades and decades over top of one another, often lie at unexpected cross sections of people who haven’t ever talked to one another, finally coming together and putting their resources, ideas, heads, experiences together.

In one sentence, complete this statement: “Because of this program, I …”

JORDAN MORENO: Because of this program I developed a deep commitment to leveraging my business skills in creative and impactful ways.

When you think about the impact of the program on your career journey — where you’re headed, how it’s supported you, how you stayed engaged with the program — what do you think of?

JORDAN MORENO: During the Class of 2019’s graduation speech, our speaker kept referring back to this term “co-conspirators for good” and encouraging us as a graduating class to be co-conspirators for good, and I think of the various communities that I engaged with as a UNC undergrad, the Luther Hodges Scholars program was the best example I have of that feeling being very visceral, of feeling like I was among a group of co-conspirators for good, and over the years that feeling has not gone away.

Interviewed by Phil Hardy. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.