Oran Smith:
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of Beyond Policy, the official podcast of Palmetto Promise Institute. We have a very special guest today, and that is the new CEO of Palmetto Promise, Wendy Damron, who’s joining us, and look forward to having a conversation with her. So welcome everyone, and welcome Wendy. Glad to have you with us.
Wendy Damron:
Well, hello everyone. Hello Oran, I am beyond excited to be on Beyond Policy with Dr. Oran Smith. I have been a fan of the podcast and I’m just excited to be a guest, so thanks for having me.
Oran Smith:
Yes, yes, you’re welcome. Well, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to introduce folks all over the state, from the 864 and the 803 and the 843 to you, for folks that don’t know you already. And to do that, I thought maybe we might do a… I don’t know, there’s a show from many, many years ago, many decades ago called This Is Your Life, and they would have someone come out on stage. Then secretly they would have all of their family and friends who would be backstage, and somebody would… “Uncle Johnny from…” They would come out and talk about the person who was being honored that day.
So yes, welcome. This is your life, Wendy Damron. Tell us, I guess start about your life in the Northeast, in the Midwest. It sounds like, just from the conversations that we’ve had, that you were not born into the manor, you were not to the manor born. You were not born into the lap of luxury and you didn’t have an upstairs maid, and a downstairs maid, and a chauffeur there. So tell us about your life from the early years.
Wendy Damron:
Sure. Well, like most people, I would just say that I’ve been able to live the American Dream, and that is, I grew up right there in Detroit, in a tiny, little 1,000 square foot brick ranch with my brothers and my parents. And it wasn’t a great place to be, but I was motivated, very motivated to get out. So the one great thing that we had always in our home was, we always had books, so even though the schools that I had an opportunity to attend, were not wonderful, there was always an emphasis in my parents’ home about getting an education and the importance of it. And we always had a lot of books around, so I spent a lot of time reading books growing up, and thinking about what it is that I needed to do so that my children did not have to grow up where I grew up. So I got my first job when I was nine years old, delivering the Redford Observer newspaper.
Oran Smith:
The daily or a weekly?
Wendy Damron:
No, no, twice a week. Twice a week and then the collect… Of course, no one’s ever home when you go to collect. Anyways, from there I actually had my first business cards at 11 because I wanted to be a babysitter. So I had my babysitter business cards that I put in all my neighbor’s mailboxes, and there you go, that’s me. I just had my whole goal in my life, was how to get out of there. And with a lot of hard work, a lot of studying, I was able to do that. I ended up at the University of Michigan and met my husband there. I graduated with a degree in business and got, as 20 year old, started as an intern at Ernst & Young in Detroit. That was terrifying.
I had never done anything other than my own 1040EZ, and the first day in the tax department, they gave me a corporate tax return and they said, “Here you go, do it.” So I slowly started doing it and to this day, I remember one of the senior people came by and they said, “Are you making a career out of that return?” And I went, “Oh my gosh, I need to do better,” so I did. But anyway, they ended up liking me there and they kept me on, and so I worked there while completing my degree. Then eventually-
Oran Smith:
I wanted to rewind you a bit.
Wendy Damron:
… married my husband after graduation.
Oran Smith:
I wanted to rewind a little bit if I could. Are there any existing business cards? Do you have any of your original babysitter business cards?
Wendy Damron:
You know what? I don’t think so. Maybe, I’ll have to dig for that.
Oran Smith:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was just wondering, just for posterity, if any of those were preserved. But I’m already thinking, you really were driven from a pretty early age. You were driven to be a babysitting entrepreneur. And I assume when you went to the University of Michigan, you probably had some scholarships, but probably, I’m guessing, involved some work as well. Attempting to work your way through, is that how you got through college?
Wendy Damron:
Yes. Yeah, so I worked… You name it, I did it, retail, food and bev, I did all that stuff. Then when I got my internship in my junior year, I thought I had struck gold because I think I was making 4.25 an hour, and then I jumped up to 12.50 an hour, and then time and a half overtime, and I was working a hundred hours a week, so I was really raking in the dough. So from that, I was able to pay my tuition and graduate actually debt free. And of course, back then it wasn’t as expensive as it is now, so it’s gone up exponentially.
Oran Smith:
Yeah. Unfortunately, you can’t… Well, at least in South Carolina, unless you have lots of grants, either for academic excellence or need-based grants, it’s just very difficult to work your way through college anymore. It’s just almost impossible. That’s why we have an enormous percentage of South Carolinians… You know, on the job application or any application you fill out, there’s always that little box that says some college. I always thought, for the longest time, there’re probably not a whole lot of people that check that because either they started college and they said, “I’ve got to get this degree, otherwise, what value is college to me?” But we have an enormous number, percentage of South Carolinians who check that box, some college. And I think one of the goals of higher education in South Carolina probably is going to be to figure out a way to get more of those folks to… And some of them really close, a semester away, a class away from getting a baccalaureate degree.
This is a little bit of a rabbit trail, but that’s something that we’re probably need to work on, and clearly need to work on in South Carolina. And maybe the source of a future research project for Palmetto Promise Institute. But anyway, back to “This Is Your Life.” So you worked your way through college, which just makes that college degree and walking across that stage even more meaningful, I’m sure. For you, when you walked across and knowing you did it academically, but you did it financially and personally, that must’ve been a great sense of accomplishment.
Wendy Damron:
Yes, yes. I just say that I noticed that when I was growing up, amongst my peers there were two attitudes. To me, anyone who had a second floor on their house was rich, in my mind. So when I would drive by and I would see a big house, I would say to myself, “What do I need to do to get there?” Whereas other people that I knew would say, “Well, it’s their fault that I’m in my position,” and they had a feeling of they were stuck and there was nothing that they could do, and it was somebody else’s fault. I think the people who had that attitude were people that truly were stuck. And the people who looked inward and thought, “Let me make a plan. What can I do to change my circumstance?” Those are the people that really were able to get out and move on.
So I just tried to always maintain that attitude of what can I do? No, I’m not starting in the same place as some other people, but I can end up wherever I choose to end up if I put my mind to it, if I work hard. I had to forego a lot of things. I didn’t join a sorority, I didn’t party, I didn’t drink, I didn’t use… I had to forego a lot of things that a lot of my peers were doing, and I missed out probably on a lot of things like that. But I was okay with it.
But I have a funny story that I like to tell. It’s a little bit embarrassing, but everyone that I worked with was from the fancy areas, Grosse Pointe and West Bloomfield and everything. So anyway, I go out to my first formal lunch, business lunch in a very fancy restaurant in downtown Detroit, and it’s the classic story with all the forks and all that. Well, we never went out to eat, we literally just never went out to eat in our family so I did not know-
Oran Smith:
Yeah, we didn’t either.
Wendy Damron:
Yeah, I thought the only lettuce was iceberg lettuce. I didn’t know there was other kinds of lettuce. So when they brought the salad and it was… I was horrified. I thought they had picked leaves off trees and put them on my plate, and I didn’t want to eat it. But I looked around and everybody else was fine with it and they were eating it, so I ate it. And then actually I was like, “Actually, this tastes pretty good.” But that was my first thought, was, “Oh my gosh, what did they do? Go out and pick some leaves off trees?” Because I didn’t know there was anything other than iceberg lettuce in the world. So things have changed, my horizons have…
Oran Smith:
Have been broadened, yeah.
Wendy Damron:
Expanded since then.
Oran Smith:
Yeah. Well, as you know after working with me for two months now, everything reminds me of a South Carolina historical story. But one of the greatest baseball players ever was from South Carolina, Shoeless Joe Jackson. And Shoeless Joe Jackson was a native of Greenville and he played in the mill leagues. But he was dirt poor, I mean, just came from extreme poverty, but he was a great baseball player. And immediately, well Shoeless, because he thought he could run around the bases faster and better without his shoes. But because of that, he was made fun of everywhere he went, when he played for Chicago. And again, very similar to your experience, there was this fancy dinner in Chicago, and all of his buddies on the baseball team, you say buddies, but they loved to pull tricks on him, particularly things that involved his not being very sophisticated.
At one point they convinced him that the little bowl that was at each place setting to moisten your fingers, to make sure your fingers were clean, that that was an extra drink and that he was supposed to drink out of it. So of course he fell for it, everybody laughs at him. So he was constantly being teased for not knowing even the most basic things about life in middle class or upper class society. But he came out of that and became a great baseball player, and had the last laugh, I think, in most ways. But yeah, so you are working your way through the University of Michigan, you get that degree, you really understand the value of it. And then Ernst & Young, and it sounded like you climbed the ladder pretty quickly at Ernst & Young. Tell us about your Ernst & Young experiences, in addition to the longest ever tax return.
Wendy Damron:
Well, they kept me on as an intern, like I said. I did the last two years of college while being employed there, and then of course it was great because they just offered me a job. So while a lot of my friends were still wondering where they were going to be working after graduation, I already knew that I had a job waiting for me. Then my husband and I got married shortly after graduation and he actually got a job offer to work for… I guess I can say it now because it’s been so long, for the NSA. Back then we couldn’t tell anybody, he worked for the Department of Defense, that’s all we could say. So we made a decision to move to the Baltimore area, so thankfully I was able to transfer from Detroit to Baltimore office of Ernst & Young.
We lived there for eight years while he spent four years with the NSA and then left to go to a tech startup, and I actually left Ernst & Young after my children. My children were born in Maryland and I no longer wanted to go months at a time without seeing them during tax season, it just got to be a little bit hard. I missed them terribly and so I decided to just step out and just start my own practice so that I could limit the number of clients and have my busy season, and just still be able to see my children while they’re awake. That worked out really well. That worked out really well and so I did that for many years, actually still up until this point. Had many of those clients for many, many years.
Then we, at some point just decided, “You know what? We want to be back in Michigan. That’s where our families are.” That’s where my brothers were having their children and we wanted the cousins to all be together, so in order to be able to move back there… In that time, especially in the Detroit area, if you were not working for the auto company or for a supplier to an auto company, there really wasn’t a lot for you in my husband’s field, which is tech. So we decided that if we were going to do that, we were going to start our own company. So he and some other partners started basically an internet security company, and so we did that. We sold that back in 2013 and at that time we decided, “Why do we live in Michigan?”
My brothers had moved out, so when the economy tanked in 2010, it tanked really bad in Detroit. I mean when the auto industry goes down, everything goes down. Both of my brothers moved out of the state with their families, for jobs, and so we said to ourselves, “We really don’t like it here and we can live anywhere because we both have been working from home since 2005.” So we said to ourselves, “Where do we want to live? We can live anywhere we want,” and we landed in Charleston, thankfully, and loved it.
Oran Smith:
This is an issue, those of us who trace our ancestry back to the battle of Cowpens and Kings Mountain, we always have a, “Yeah, we don’t understand why anybody would want to live in Michigan either.” But South Carolina, as we just reported in our new publication, Fiscal Facts, South Carolina’s number four in the country for places that people are moving into. And wow, the metropolitan area. I was speaking to a group of concerned citizens and conservatives just last evening in the Dorchester County area, near Summerville, and it had been a while since I had… Because a lot of times, unfortunately, if you’re going to the low country, you’re going to only Charleston, you’re not stopping along the way at some of the places that are adjacent to Charleston. That happens in the upstate, in Columbia as well, so you miss out on some of those areas.
But I was really amazed and impressed with Summerville, how much Dorchester County has grown, and just new construction like mad. Of course I don’t know that there’s much space left anywhere in Greenville County, in Spartanburg County. When Boiling Springs is booming, you know you’ve reached the extreme areas there of the county, thank goodness. So I’m really, really interested because we haven’t really talked about this a lot, but there are 49 other states besides Michigan, and somehow South Carolina was the one you settled on. I mean, how did you narrow it down and what were some of your top 10 or top five, you remember during that period, what you were looking for, and that type of thing?
Wendy Damron:
Absolutely. When you are in a blue state… And I know that some people listening to this will be able to relate to this, there’s a hopeless feeling that you don’t even realize you have it until you hear some other people from another state talking. It’s like you know that there’s really nothing you can really do in your own state, so you look to Washington. And every now and then you think, “Okay, well something good is happening in Washington, so that gives me a little hope.” But when there’s nothing good happening in Washington and there’s nothing good happening in your state, it’s a depressing feeling. So I’ll go all the way back to that internship I had at Ernst & Young. There was a young lady there from Charleston, and I don’t want to give away my age, but we’re talking about, this was, let’s just say the mid nineties. And she, poor girl, had come from Charleston to Detroit in January. Okay? So she-
Oran Smith:
From Charleston to Detroit, okay. Wow, yeah.
Wendy Damron:
Yes. And I can’t remember the circumstances why she would ever do that, but I remember she would just not shut up about South Carolina and Charleston, and how much she loved it. And I’ll listen, and I was just thinking to myself-
Oran Smith:
Guilty of that too.
Wendy Damron:
I was just thinking, “Oh, come on. Oh, please. It just can’t be that great.” Well, here I am, I’m 20 years old and I never left Detroit, so what do I know? This is the only thing I know, and I don’t understand that there’s this land of the free elsewhere in the country. So I remember being annoyed by that, but when I look back on that now, I think, “Oh my gosh, this poor girl,” I just want to give her a hug and say, “I understand. Go back, go back.” But I lost touch with her. I can’t even remember her day anymore. I don’t know whatever happened to her. I hope she came back to South Carolina. If you’re her and you’re listening to this, call me.
Oran Smith:
Yes, yes. Well, she served her purpose, and that was to expose you to the glories of South Carolina.
Wendy Damron:
Yes, and so then I’ll go back a little bit in time, and I’m listening to Barack Obama give the State of the Union. I think you know where I’m going with this.
Oran Smith:
Yeah.
Wendy Damron:
I hear someone from the crowd say, “You lie.” And I went, “Who is that? Where is he from? These are my people.” And [someone said] “Oh, well that’s Joe Wilson, he’s from South Carolina.” “South Carolina? Okay, I like this. I like this.” Then my husband and I had gotten involved. We had been donors to Heritage Foundation, and we had been at a Heritage Foundation event, and we heard Nikki Haley talking, just talking in ways that I’d never heard a governor in Michigan or Maryland talk. Just talk about freedom, just talk about lowering taxes and talking about being pro-life, and just all these things that were just… The skies were opening and rainbows are coming in, and I couldn’t even wrap my brain around it.
And I know that not everybody in South Carolina loves Nikki Haley, and I know that rhetoric doesn’t always match action and all that, but just to hear a politician talk that way was just a revelation, honestly. So when we were coming to look, it’s like, “Okay, we’re putting, South Carolina has got to be on our list of places to go.” And a lot of it was, I’m a Michigan girl, so every Michigan girl longs to be at the beach, and every-
Oran Smith:
I think I’ve sensed that, every Ohio girl too.
Wendy Damron:
Yes. Yes, absolutely. I wanted to be near a city I could love, because having worked in Detroit and Baltimore, you can imagine, it’s not that great. So wanted be near a city I could love and we came down, visit Charleston and just fell in love with Charleston. So I said, “I never want to shovel snow again. I’ve had enough of that in my life,” and it has snowed one time since we’ve been down here, enough that we could’ve shoveled, but we didn’t own a shovel, so everybody just stayed in for five days, and that was fine. Hopefully that never happens again.
Oran Smith:
Wow. Wow, yes. Well, and you started with your experience hearing about Charleston, hearing about South Carolina, and then you went to the weather next. I hope that people understand when they have the warm feelings about South Carolina, the fact that we have lots of marvelous beaches of all types of interests, depending on what type of a beach you’re looking for, that it’s not just sunshine and mountains, and the beach, and good barbecue. I mean South Carolina is deeper than that, and it really is an embracing of freedom and independence, and not really looking to government for a lot of solutions. That’s been in our DNA for a long time, I think. So those of us who, well a few years ago thought, “Oh dear, were being overrun with moving vans from people from Ohio and the Midwest and places like that, who think that they have good football.” So we’re worried about that a little bit, or is it going to change South Carolina?
But this is not very sophisticated as far as the sample size or the sampling method, but judging from that event I attended last night where most of the people in the room were born somewhere else, I just really got a sense that people were coming here because they were attracted to our values. Not that they were trying to bring alien or very blue state type of values about government and the role of government, they weren’t trying to bring that with them. Now, a lot of them complain that we don’t know how to drive. I know I’ve never heard that before, but most people are adopting the independence and freedom, and conservative, free market values that we value here in South Carolina. You’re a perfect example of that. You came here, you were not born here, but you got here as quickly as you could.
Wendy Damron:
A hundred percent, and I would never, never dream of leaving. We just love it so much. I am sort of a history nerd, and there’s so much history in South Carolina and Charleston, just Charleston alone and just all over the state. Which is why I love talking to you, Oran, because you’re a fellow history nerd, and you know everything about South Carolina. You can go to California and get good weather but no, that’s a non-starter. It’s not just the weather, it’s not just the beach, it’s the people, it’s the culture. And it’s just this…
In Michigan, it’s like Republicans, at least in my area, the other side of the state, the western side is more conservative, but Detroit, Ann Arbor area, it’s like you’re almost like a secret society. You almost have to whisper… You almost have to have a secret hand signal or something. And whenever I would say something conservative, sometimes people would say, “I didn’t know you’re a Republican. I’m not sure I can be friends with you anymore.” And I’m just like, “Well, okay.” So when I came down here and it was like, there’s a Republicans women lunch, and there’s this, and there’s that group and that group and that group to go to, and it was just like, “Wow, this is amazing.”
It’s just the greatest thing, and so I think I went through that little naive period of this is South Carolina, so we should just be able to get everything conservative done like this. Because I didn’t really understand fully how state government worked, because there was no point in really being engaged in Michigan, or Maryland for that case, in state government. It took me a little while to really understand the process and understand that it is frustrating. Yes, we should be able to get things done, but there’s a process that has to be gone through, and there’s potential here. There’s so much potential here that there isn’t in so many other places, and I never take that for granted. I have so much hope for all the great things that Palmetto Promise is trying to get done, and I have so hope for the progress we’ve seen. And so my-
Oran Smith:
This is where we bring in your relationship with Palmetto Promise, because after you’d lived here for a while, you were involved in various conservative efforts. And you’d heard about this organization called Palmetto Promise, and you were invited to join the board, I mean, pretty quickly.
Wendy Damron:
Yes, yes, that was very exciting because of course, absolutely love Ellen, and I loved everything you guys were doing. I love that you’re taking… I say you, I should say us now, right?
Oran Smith:
Yes.
Wendy Damron:
We are taking the potential that we have in South Carolina and really trying to harness that and just make it happen. There’s so much about policy, there’s intention, but sometimes you can have the best of intention, but if you don’t do it right, it’s not going to work. Because you’ll have unintended consequences or you’ll have it killed in the court, or it just won’t be as effective as you want. Or someone will try to find a loophole around it, like they do. So you have to have the good intention, but you have to have the right facts, you have to have the right research, you have to have the right policy to make it actually work.
So I love that Palmetto Promise is there to harness that potential and get it moving in the right direction. And I had the privilege of getting to know so many of our state legislators, and so many of them want to do the right thing. They just really want to serve their constituents, they share our values, but they don’t have staff. They have have full-time jobs, most of them, this is a three days a week, four, five months out of the year. And they have families, they don’t have time to do the type of research that we are doing. They don’t have the time to dive deep into each and every issue. And we all know that their desks are stacked high with issues, and there’s a limited amount of time to do all that. So if we can come along and provide them with the information that they need, that is just a crucial function to getting the right things done in a timely manner.
Oran Smith:
Yeah. Well, when we were forming Palmetto Promise Institute 10 years ago, that was probably our number one selling point. We said, “People may not realize this, but legislators don’t have a lot of staff.” And well, sometimes organizational inertia can settle in with any government, and any staff in any government. Sometimes ideas that are a little bit different, something we haven’t tried before, sometimes they’re not as popular amongst those who are the administrators of government and those that are staffing the legislature. So sometimes it involves looking at other states, see what’s working in other states. See what may be working in other states, but really wouldn’t be a good fit for South Carolina, and then thinking through what the priorities should be because they have different levels of priority, depending on what we used to call in political science, the policy stream.
There’s a stream of policy that is flowing and some things are able to make it into the stream and continue through the process, and other things are not, that get diverted off somewhere. So making a list, having full confidence in each of the items on the list. Some of it’s very elementary, but it’s also extremely complicated, particularly when you’re trying to do a lot of issues at once. You remember those early days because you were on the board relatively early in our existence, so you remember some of those battles that we fought early on. We’ve chosen to do a remembrance of what we think are our top 10 successes, our top 10 accomplishments for the first 10 years, and we’ve been going through those on our social media, but also have posted a list of our top 10. And that was your idea to do, so we thank you for that, so that we’re able to get the word out about what we’ve done and then what we want to do.
But as you have now settled in to the leadership, the CEO position of Palmetto Promise Institute here, guess it’s been about two months, we’re probably at the 60 or 70 day level, I think with your leadership at Palmetto Promise. Anything that strikes you during these first 60 or 70 days, right off, that you’ve been surprised about? Or that you have had maybe reconfirmed from what you thought as a board member? Just curious what your thoughts are on your first 70 days, as far as how you’ve experienced it and how you view it?
Wendy Damron:
It has been amazing. What has been so fun for me, Oran, is getting to work with you. Getting to go to the State House with you and watch you work, because I love to say this, I’ve said it a million times now Oran, but Oran knows everybody in Columbia, and he’s known everybody in Columbia since 1985. So we’ll just be driving down the street together and he’ll say, “Oh, there’s so-and-so walking across the street. He and I went to high school together,” or, “This guy was my college roommate’s best friend,” or, “I know this person’s parents.” He knows everybody and everybody in Columbia respects Oran. I love to watch him work because Oran knows everything about everything. Any time there’s an issue, if he doesn’t know the answer, he knows how to find it pretty fast. So anytime there’s an issue that’s coming up, and usually it’s something that we’ve been working on… And by the way, I’m really excited about some of the issues that we’ve been working on for a few years now.
I’m talking about things not necessarily happening as quickly as we like, but we’ve stuck with it. And repeal of certificate of need is so important, especially for those areas that you’re talking about, like Summerville, where it’s growing so fast and the medical facilities are not growing fast enough to meet the need. That’s happening down here in my area as well. Things like that, and education savings accounts and things that I know we’ve been talking about for years, and dreaming of for years, are coming to fruition now. As those legislators are in there, making their arguments, they’re reaching out to you, Oran, and saying, “What’s the best way to answer this question?” Or, “Can you give me the numbers on this?” Or I’ve watched you testify in these hearings and they’re going to you for those expert opinions and delving into your research. And you have a book, a binder this big, full of just-
Oran Smith:
Where is the binder? It’s here somewhere.
Wendy Damron:
Just facts. Facts just on ESAs, I think. It’s just ESA facts, and it’s like a binder this thick with anything you ever need to know about ESAs. I just love watching you work. And something else that really struck me… Well, first of all, I said to myself, “Everybody in the whole state needs to know what we do,” because what I’ve noticed as I’ve been around and been down in Charleston, and I’m talking about PPI and people are like, “What is PPI? What does PPI do?” And I was like, “Everybody needs to know what we do because it’s so important.” So one thing that I have been telling people is that when I’ve been up at the State House, I see a lot of lobbyists around. And they are there to advocate for their industry, their special interests, whatever that is. And sometimes we sync up with them on the issues that we’re advocating for, and sometimes we don’t.
So what I think about is that we’re not lobbyists, but we’re really the people there that are there just to represent all of the citizens of South Carolina, and what’s best for all of the citizens of South Carolina. We’re not paid by any special interest or anything like that, we’re just there saying, “What policy can we help support that will be best for everybody here in South Carolina?” Our voice is needed there because we’re not beholden to any special interest group who’s there, advocating.
Oran Smith:
Right. Yeah, it is a funny feeling because if… And basically what we do because we’re not registered lobbyists, is if an issue is before a committee or a subcommittee, or sometimes a full senate or full house, legislators have questions. So often what we’ve tried to do is to put ourselves in the position that, if we find literally a place to stand in the lobby, and just sometimes, as you said, it requires a binder about that thick of all the facts about a particular issue. If we’re just available for their requests and questions, we’re literally educating them on what is going on. There are lobbyists that are allied with us, and in that they have an interest in something that we may have an interest in, but our interest is never going to be financial. So when you look out over that vast crowd in the lobby, if you take out, as you just said, everyone who represents an association or represents some financial interest…
And many times it’s just the nature of government and the nature of the economy, you’ll have interests in the lobby where, well, the people that want to turn this policy in favor of this interest, which may be a competitor, they have a lobbyist, so we have to have a lobbyist. So you have just really, really weird controversies. Maybe a good example was at one point there was a controversy over how sales tax was going to be collected. You had online sellers that were not collecting or paying sales tax, and they argued, “Well, we’re worldwide, we’re not based in South Carolina. We don’t need to collect sales tax.” But then you had had brick and mortar stores that were selling the same stuff and they were located physically, and they were charging sales tax, and they’re required to do so. So you had an army of lobbyists for the brick and mortars, and you had an army of lobbyists for the virtuals, and they were going at it.
And we’re watching this, saying, “We’re really not in this fight. We’re generally free market.” But if you remove all the folks that are lobbying for some special interest or financial interest, and then you remove those who are principle oriented or somewhat ideological, or have a view of the world that’s based on a system of beliefs, you remove all those that are based somewhere else, but have a South Carolina affiliate, now the circle’s getting even smaller. Then you’re down to very few groups that just were founded in South Carolina, based in South Carolina. The way that they exist is to get other South Carolinians to make contributions to support those free market efforts. I always thought, wouldn’t it be marvelous if there were a foundation that supported Palmetto Promise Institute, and that foundation had this large corpus of millions of dollars? And then the interest from that corpus were to be generated and then sent to the organization, and then that would be the operating budget, the interest on some large pool of money by some foundation?
But then I thought, you’re so much more accountable when you have to go out and earn your wings every day. When you have to make payrolls, and you have to have enough people in the state that believe in what you’re doing, to invest in your work. So this has become your prime position and work, and job at Palmetto Promise, and that is to spread the word about our work so that individual South Carolinians can put us in their family budget. It’s one thing to be in a foundation budget or the State House budget, but being in a family or a business’s budget so that there’s a line item for Palmetto Promise Institute so that they can support our work. That’s really powerful to know that real, honest to goodness, South Carolina people and businesses are the ones that are making your work and your influence that you’re projecting into the electoral and governmental system, possible.
How has your work in that area gone? What do you think about the future prospects for Palmetto Promise Institute? Do you think that we should grow to a larger staff? Or do you think we’re where we need to be? We’ve talked about this internally of course, but here for everyone, maybe your thoughts on the future of Palmetto Promise Institute.
Wendy Damron:
Oh, absolutely, I want to see us grow. I mean there’s so many more issues. I know you have a wishlist, Oran, of issues that you would like to cover. And every year new things come up. I mean, we never predicted Covid and the types of issues that were going to come out of Covid, with vaccine passports and all these things. You just never know what’s going to come up. So yes, absolutely, I would love to grow. And we are strategically located right across from the campus of the University of South Carolina, and just five or six blocks from the Capitol. So what I would really love to do is have a really vibrant intern program, because I just love the idea of giving those conservative college students an outlet to learn and grow, and network in the capital.
I mean for someone to be able to shadow you… Like I said, you’ve known everybody since 1985. To have someone be able to shadow you and have you introducing them to all the players there in Columbia, and walking them through the process of how things really work there, I think just such a valuable experience. And we really need to be training up and encouraging the next generation of conservatives in South Carolina and of course, across the country. I think we are perfectly positioned to do that, and so that is something that is a big goal of mine. I would love to have a really vibrant internship program going. And then of course as well, just add more just general staff, more researchers and policy people to help you, Oran, so that we could just do even more. I mean, there’s so much more we could be doing at this point.
Oran Smith:
Right, right, yes. Yeah, you really reawakened the idea of a robust internship program at Palmetto Promise. We’ve had really good success with interns that were just… And different from one another. Every intern we’ve had has not been exactly the same. Just to speak very generally, we have one of our former interns who is completing his master of public policy degree in Malibu, California. Guess somebody has to do it, at Pepperdine University. Very renowned public policy school there at Pepperdine. Then we have another former intern who went on to get his law degree, had a stellar career as a student, and now is an associate in a prominent law firm. And is doing, with that law firm, the work that’s very consistent with what Palmetto Promise is all about.
But there’s a lot of negativity I think, about these young people today. But wow, maybe we’re just in some kind of rarefied air where we’re able to work with just some amazing young 20 and 21 year olds, maybe even a 19 year old thrown in there, that have just great ideas and just think outside the box and think to the next step. Sometimes even they’re playing chess and I’m playing checkers, it just amazes me. But it’s so wonderful to know that this is a legacy that we can pass on to these younger folks who will be here much longer after we’re passed on, that will be fighting this fight, and with such brilliance and winsomeness.
That’s something else. We’ve been blessed with interns who are really just cool people, great people to be around that you enjoy working with, and have gone on to do great things. We’re looking for the next great future leader and leaders in South Carolina, who are poised to do that. I do think that the on the job training that we provide, both in research and the informing and interaction with the public and with legislators, it’s a strange set of competencies that I think we have. Normally an organization is not able to do good research but also have the ability to communicate it in an interesting way, to the average person who has a life that’s not connected to politics. Or at another level, to a legislator who may be very knowledgeable and has a high standard for why they may be concerned, or they want to know more about some policy that we have introduced into the stream that’s never been there before.
So on a regular basis, and these interns are able to do it, we are switching from talking to a member of the general public, running down some specific fact or answering a call from a legislator who may be considering introducing a bill. It’s a lot of different kinds of talents that have to be in one organization. So yes, here’s another advertisement, and a description of what we’re looking for and of the program is on our website. If there are folks within the sounds of our voices that might have a student that would be interested in that. And we think, looking across the street literally here, at the University of South Carolina, we are very close to USC, but that other university…
See, I have the benefit of having graduated from both, but there may be a student at Clemson, in any of the state or private institutions in South Carolina, that may not be physically in Columbia, but they may be able to intern with us virtually. Or may be able to spend a summer with us, or something of that nature. Just a long commercial, I’m sorry for my long commercial, but adding on to Wendy there for this commercial for our internship program.
Wendy Damron:
Well, I was just going to say, Oran…
Oran Smith:
Well, yes?
Wendy Damron:
I was just going to say I have so much respect for an outed conservative college student. I mean, I was conservative in college, but it wasn’t dangerous. I mean, it’s almost dangerous now. It’s dangerous to your reputation. It’s dangerous to your ability to maybe get work with a professor. You may feel afraid that you may not get a job, and so the young people who are outwardly conservative on campus these days, I mean, you just have to admire their courage. So I think that’s the caliber of people that we can get, is someone who is just not afraid to be conservative in this atmosphere. You just got to admire that.
Oran Smith:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, are able to do that, but also to have some intellectual basis for their conservatism, which is a unusual combination but we’ve found gold mines here, on that. But yes, yes, it is a tough time to be a young conservative, I think, because there are all these motives that are ascribed to you for being conservative. And it’s an old term now that we use frequently, political correctness, but it really is a thing, and it’s like you can’t hold a political position that is not acceptable. But that’s fortunately not what we’re about in South Carolina. And I’ve noticed we’ve had several colleges adopt the Chicago statement, to protect the rights of students to express their views on campus, and well, in academic areas as well. Well, any other parting shots that you have, Wendy, for those listening to us, who may be considering recommending an intern or being a part of Palmetto Promise’s work, or are just engaging with us as a donor or a supporter?
Wendy Damron:
Well, I just would say, first of all, thank you for listening to the podcast. If I haven’t met you yet, I really want to. I know that a lot of people, they know Ellen, they associate Ellen with Palmetto Promise, and sometimes I have to say, “I’m the new Ellen”. So I’m really making a concerted effort to get out there and meet as many people as I can, and I would love to meet you if I haven’t met you yet. And yeah, please spend some time on our website. There are so many issues that we, Oran, has spent so much time researching. There’s so much good research, so many good policies out there that really would make South Carolina a better place. Although it’s already great, it can be even better, so please just take some time. And if you think that the work that we’re doing is worthwhile, please consider donating to help us not only keep doing what we’re doing, but help us to do even more.
Oran Smith:
Fantastic. What a great close, thank you very much. That is it for this episode of Beyond Policy. We look forward to future episodes. We’ve got some great guests already in the can that we’re going to be rolling out to you, so we look forward to having you tuning in again soon. Until then, thank you for listening to Beyond Policy from Palmetto Promise Institute.
