2023 Chamber Chair Challenges Members To Make “Faithful Investments”

More than 500 Wichita area business leaders gathered at INTRUST Bank Arena Wednesday for the Wichita Regional Chamber of Commerce’s 2023 Chair’s Lunch presented by Grant Thornton.

The event focused on “Faithful Investments” and featured a panel of Wichitans who are living out a calling to faithfully invest in the community moderated by 2023 Chamber Board Chair Joy Eakins, president of Cornerstone Data.

“We at Grant Thornton are pleased to continue our relationship with the Chamber and sponsor Chair’s Lunch. We appreciate and support all the Chamber does for the business community,” said Syndney Been, audit senior manager at Grant Thornton.

“The Chamber’s leadership is essential for the business community.  We’re excited to learn from the panel where and who we can invest in next. At Grant Thornton, we invest in our people and our clients to help Wichita succeed,” Been said.

Grant Thornton’s commitment to investing in their people and clients demonstrate the heart of Eakins’ message for the business community.

“I’m excited to unpack this idea of faithful investments in people with all of you today,” she said. “When you ask the question, What makes Wichita special? You’ll get a variety of answers. But I think one thing that’s different about the people of Wichita is that they are willing to invest in helping other people level up. There was a person who believed in you and your possibilities and gave you the courage to believe it, too. And that’s Wichita.”

But for Eakins, it’s not just that we invest in each other, it’s that we’re faithful to making those investments.

Faithful means loyal – we show up and we work through our differences. Faithful means conscientious – we show up even when we don’t feel like it and do the work to the best of our ability. Faithful means binding – we make a decision and we live decided.

“These three adjectives – loyal, conscientious and binding – describe the kind of investments that I have observed us making in the lives of people in this city, and this is the kind of work that has the potential to change a community,” she said. “All those dreams don’t work if we don’t invest in others.”

Eakins assembled a panel of Wichitans who are making a difference because someone cast a vision for them and invested in them.

• Vicki Bond, chief executive officer for Medical Provider Resources and founder of the Raise My Head Foundation
• Robert Garner, president and CEO at Youth Horizons
• Joe Jabara, Colonel (R) and director of the Hub for Cybersecurity Education and Awareness

“I remember when Dr. Gil Kendrick, director of medical staff services at Wesley, came to me and encouraged me to apply for a job in his department,” said Bond, who was working in medical records at the time. “I didn’t know anything about the job, and I wasn’t trained in it. But he encouraged me to apply for it. He said, ‘I think we can teach you how to do it.’ If not for him, I would probably still be working in medical records at Wesley.”

That position, verifying physicians’ credentials, turned into a career where she started her own business, which she continues to run even after selling it to the Medical Society of Sedgwick County.  MPR processes more credential checks than the Mayo Clinic.

After selling MPR, she wanted to do something for Wichita with the proceeds.

“I was volunteering, but I really wasn’t making a difference,” she said. That’s when she started looking for opportunities and founded the Raise My Head Foundation.

Jabara was a lawyer in the Air National Guard when he was approached by members of the command with an opportunity to move into the command structure. The move was nearly unheard of in military circles, and he asked why they thought he’d be a good fit.

“They said, ‘because you see things we don’t and you think differently,’” Jabara said. The move led him to eventually being named Vice Wing Commander over 1,200 air men.

Jabara says the decision to start talking about the need for cybersecurity training and jobs in Wichita was less altruistic.

“The Air National Guard is responsible for recruiting their own people, but an even bigger deal is retention,” Jabara said.

The Air National Guard was having trouble recruiting because when air men retired from full-time service, they were leaving Wichita for high-paying jobs on the coasts rather than staying in Wichita and joining the Air National Guard. That prompted him to start talking to area schools about the need for cybersecurity and led to programs at Butler Community College, Wichita State and Friends.

Garner’s high school accounting teacher changed the trajectory of his life just before he was set to graduate from college with an accounting degree.

“The people who had the greatest impact on me were teachers,” Garner said, as he recalled going to visit Joan Seaton before he was set to graduate from Wichita State University. She asked him what he was going to do, and he told her he was going to be an accountant.

“She said, ‘I just don’t see you in an office, Robert. You need to be around kids.’ The next week, I changed my major, and I became a high school business teacher,” he said.

It was a career that took Garner from the classroom into school administration, where he was director of secondary education for USD 259. His last child was getting ready to graduate from high school, and Garner started looking for that next career move into a superintendent’s seat.

He had applications out all over the place, but a conversation with his pastor on his pastor’s back porch set him in another direction. Within one month, he’d resigned his position with the school district and had taken on the role of president and CEO at Youth Horizons.

Now he’s working with an organization that provides mentoring to boys and girls who are facing difficult circumstances, residential services for boys and girls in the foster care system and advocacy for children.

“If we do not continue to make faithful investments in our people today, how will Wichita fare in the future?” Eakins asked.

Eakins shared the Chamber’s early history. The Chamber started on May 7, 1917, in the midst of World War I, the “Great War.” A year later, the Spanish Flu raged through communities, and many people died. And after that, the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. In the midst of those unprecedented times, the Chamber led an initiative to start the Wichita Community Chest to support 25 social service agencies. They raised more than $180,000, and started an organization that is still changing lives today – The United Way of the Plains.

“Instead of quitting, they leaned in. If they measured too soon, they would have given up. But they didn’t, and we can’t either,” Eakins said.

Eakins challenged the business community to make a decision and to get involved and live decided to make a difference.

“Measure your success by asking the question, ‘Was I faithful? Did I keep showing up? Did I do my part today?’ And those yesses over time will add up to a big impact for Wichitans who haven’t even been born yet. Let’s go out there and make some faithful investments.”