After serving Lexington in a variety of arts and community development leadership roles for the past decade, the CivicLex director explains why his focus has shifted to the civic engagement landscape.
At the age of 31, Richard Young has served the Lexington community in an impressive array of arts administration roles: executive director of the Chamber Music Festival for about five years, starting at age 21; interim general manager of Central Kentucky Youth Orchestras, where he founded the impactful CKYO MusicWorks program; and co-founder of the Origins Jazz Series, which has brought a wide range of national and international talent to Lexington stages since 2018. In recent years, he has largely shifted the thrust of his career to the civic and community development landscape, putting in several years as director of North Limestone Community Development Corporation (NoLi CDC) before settling into his current role as executive director of CivicLex, a nonprofit that he founded three years ago with the mission of improving civic engagement on a local level.
While Young’s resume might seem dizzying at an initial glance – especially considering his age – a closer examination of his career path reveals several common threads of passions he has nurtured since childhood: culture, community and creativity.
Growing up in Lexington, Young spent significant time stoking his love for reading at the children’s bookstore The Owl & The Pussycat, a beloved community business in Chevy Chase co-owned by his father and aunt. At home, he exercised his imagination by watching classic Japanese Godzilla movies or spending time outside. And when his interest in music led to him pick up the double bass in middle school, it also led him down an important path that continues to help define him.
“I’m deeply grateful to Fayette County Public School’s music and arts programs for making me into who I am today,” Young said.
It was as a young musician where Young first learned the value of self-expression and the importance of having a voice. Performing with ensembles throughout the years – from the middle school band to the Lexington Philharmonic – reinforced the importance of collaboration, showcasing the beauty that can result from a successful group effort. It also taught him that each component contributes to the whole and that leaving out any single voice or part can change everything – often detrimentally.
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Richard Young’s experience as a musician has equipped him with a number of skills and lessons that he has applied to his varied professional roles. He started playing double bass in middle school and continues to play to this day, occassionally performing with the Lexignton Philharmonic. Photo by Mick Jeffries
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Richard Young’s experience as a musician has equipped him with a number of skills and lessons that he has applied to his varied professional roles. He started playing double bass in middle school and continues to play to this day, occassionally performing with the Lexignton Philharmonic. Photo by Mick Jeffries
While he was afforded a valuable music education at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, Ohio, Young decided soon after college that he didn’t want to pursue a career as a performing musician, describing the audition process as incredibly competitive, expensive and even “demoralizing.” Experiences gleaned as an orchestral musician did, however, unlock doors to professional opportunities in arts administration, where much of his early work focused on breaking down barriers to the arts – particularly when it comes to orchestral music, an art form that has often suffered from a reputation of being inaccessible.
Breaking down barriers remains a strong focus in Young’s work today. He transitioned from arts administration to civic and community development work via a path he describes as “sideways”: He started collaborating with the community development organization NoLiCDC in its infancy, helping create arts programming and eventually transitioning to the role of executive director. Soon after he left that organization, he founded CivicLex – largely in response to frustrations he encountered while trying to navigate local policy and to lessons he learned from missteps along the way.
“While I was at the [NoLi]CDC, we did some great work around affordable housing development, neighborhood programs and long-range community planning,” he explained. “I’m proud of much of the excellent work we did. … But, honestly, some of our work took an already changing neighborhood and advanced that change at a harmful pace. Knowing that I contributed to harm for some of my neighbors, despite some good work, is a really complex emotion to hold.”
Learning how to grow from his mistakes and carry forward lessons learned has become an integral part of Young’s development, and the emphases on expression, collaboration, creativity and culture – virtues that he first gleaned as an orchestral musician – continue to inform his work.
Ultimately, these are qualities Young would like to see expressed more freely when it comes to the relationship between citizens and their government.
“When you listen to people talk about government or power systems, you start to notice one glaring theme: mistrust,” he said. “While some of it is undoubtedly deserved, that mistrust is undermining our system of self-governance.”
CivicLex is a civic education nonprofit designed to help citizens more easily understand and participate in the government processes that help shape lives. Photo by Mick Jeffriews
Read this Q&A session between Smiley Pete reporter Celeste Lewis and Richard Young to learn more about the work CivicLex is doing in Lexington.
What was the inspiration for Civic Lex? When I was at the North Limestone Community Development Corporation (CDC), I was in city hall regularly. I grew frustrated with the lack of resident voices present in really impactful decisions that shaped our city’s fabric. At first, I think I interpreted this as a sort of intentional obfuscation on the city’s part, in the same way that people can often jump to conspiratorial thinking about government. But, over time, the [now obvious] fact dawned on me that city government is just an institution, and institutions are complex, clunky and hard to engage with.
So, after I left the CDC, I reached out to Dan Rowland, the board president of ProgressLex, a nonprofit organization that had been dormant for several years. They were considering whether or not to keep the organization intact. I told him that I was interested in working on Lexington’s civic engagement issues, and the match was obvious. I often describe what happened next as ‘hermit crabbing.’ Practically, the ideas and people that would build CivicLex just sort of crawled into ProgressLex and started living there within that foundation, which supported its infancy. CivicLex is now just over 3 years old.
Tell me about the CivicLex team. How do you do your work? We’re a small team! On staff, it’s just myself and my colleague, Megan Gulla. We then have two AmeriCorps VISTA placements, Kit Anderson and Hayley Alfaro, and a rotating cast of UK students that work with us through different practicum placements. We’re a pretty light-hearted, self-directed bunch. We have lots of inside jokes. Though I am the executive director, I try and keep a mostly horizontal structure to stay collaborative and call each other out on mistakes.
What do you see as the most important mission of CivicLex? At CivicLex, we envision a Lexington in which all residents are able to meaningfully participate in the decisions that shape where they live. We’re working toward that in three ways:
The first way is that we help people understand the complex issues that are impacting Fayette County and how to get involved and voice their perspective.
The second way that we’re working toward that vision is by working with government to reform the processes that govern how it interacts with residents. This could be in small ways, like helping advise on how meetings should be organized and facilitated, or in big ways, like our new Civic Artist Residency Program, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
The third way we work toward this vision is the most important, in my book: We are democratizing who has relationships with the people who have political power.
Given the nature of government, there are many experiences and perspectives left out of the conversation, by nature of who has relationships with people in government. So, we work to change who has those relationships through our workshops, trainings, etc., by bringing together residents and public officials — in physical space, at a ratio of 7-to-1 — and by using specific facilitation methods. This has obviously been hard during COVID, but we’re trying to adapt however we can.
What are some of the highlights of your data that may surprise people? Lexington has some striking racial disparities that a lot of people seem to be unaware of.
• Since 1970, the number of Census tracts labeled as “Racially/Ethnically Concentrated Areas of Poverty” has more than doubled in Lexington. Since the same time, the number of Census tracts that are “Racially/Ethnically Concentrated Areas of Affluence” has increased by 800%.
• In Lexington, Black households own their own home at less than half the rate of White households.
• The median household income in Lexington for Black households is almost half that of White households.
• Lexington’s poverty rate is higher than the U.S. average. The poverty rate for Black individuals is more than double both Lexington’s overall rate and the White rate.
• About 7% of businesses in Fayette County are owned by people of color. This is an estimated 511 businesses, of which 246 have Asian ownership.
• The number of businesses owned by Black individuals is too small to be statistically determined by the Census’ annual business survey.
Numbers like those don’t occur out of happenstance. It is a result of policy decisions.
What do you see as the most important priorities for Lexington going forward? I think the most important priority in Lexington is to address our complacency. Like the rest of the country, we’re struggling to pull out our city’s roots in racism. We’re approaching a no-turning-back moment for our affordable housing crisis. Our city government’s revenue structure is dragging down our ability to keep up essential services. Who knows what sort of toll COVID will end up having on our city’s workers, businesses and social services.
Most of these challenges have been around for decades and decades. We have always had the opportunity to address the racism in our city, invest in permanently affordable housing, give our shared government the resources it needs or build a more resilient economy. This is an oversimplification, but I feel like we have chosen not to because, for so many, what they have here is good enough for them. We can’t think that way any longer.
To learn more about the work of CivicLex, visit www.civiclex.org.
Photo by Mick Jeffries