Civil Rights in the NRCS Workforce
and Program Delivery

Remarks by Bruce I. Knight, Chief
Natural Resources Conservation Service
at the NRCS All Special Emphasis Program
Manager Training Conference
St. Louis, MO

August 27, 2002

Good afternoon, everyone. It is a pleasure to be here with you as you begin this important training conference. Our special emphasis program managers in NRCS have an important job to do, and I want to thank Andrew Johnson for deciding to hold this conference.

I understand this is the first conference of its type in NRCS. It won’t be the last. We need more opportunities for you to get together with your colleagues and share ideas and inspiration.

I also want to thank all the people who helped plan the conference and run it. It is not easy to plan an event when you have to invent it from scratch. I also want to thank the State Conservationists for supporting this conference by sending you all here to St. Louis.

By now, you all have received the NRCS Civil Rights Policy Statement. In working with Andrew to formulate that statement – and in signing it – I came to a whole new appreciation of my role in the civil rights and equal employment opportunity programs here at NRCS.

Many of you may know that being Chief of NRCS is my first job with a government agency. My life’s work has consisted of being a farmer and rancher, working on Congressional Staffs, and working for Commodity groups. Each of these stages in my life has had strong conservation aspects, but none of them involved signing policy statements.

Let me quote you two sentences from the Civil Rights Policy Statement: “I expect everyone associated with NRCS too comply with every aspect of our Nation’s civil rights laws and policies. Those who do not will be held accountable through appropriate disciplinary action.” I stand behind every one of those words – not because they are laws and policies, but because they are the right thing to do.

I’m glad to have all of you working to make sure NRCS lives up to the commitment represented by this policy. Your education and outreach efforts are an important part of making our Civil Rights Policy a reality within NRCS, and in our delivery of programs across the nation.

I understand that most of our special emphasis programs have existed for about 20 years. That gives you a long history of helping NRCS recruit a diversity of employees. You are the eyes and ears – and the brains – that help our managers fulfill their responsibilities. I salute you for that.

I want to mention the good work being done by our national special emphasis program managers: Barbara Compton of the Federal Women’s Program, Xavier Montoya of the Hispanic Emphasis Program, Thaddeus Hamilton of the Black Emphasis Program, Cliff Denshire of the Disability and Veterans Emphasis Programs, Marcy Arrowchis of the American Indian / Alaskan Native Emphasis program, and Virginia Lewis of the Asian American / Pacific Islander Emphasis program.

You’ve been providing excellent leadership for our efforts in these programs. I also want to thank all of you who are managing one or more programs at the State level. Your jobs are important. You keep local management informed of issues in the community. You perform local outreach to disseminate information and gather data. You assist in cultural awareness activities. You identify and help remove barriers. And you serve as mentors. You only have to look at the example of Andrew Johnson to see the importance of mentorship.

The amazing thing is that for most of you this is a collateral duty. We owe you special thanks for your hard work and dedication.

With all the good work you have been doing, I am hesitant to add more to your workload. However, we do have significant challenges to meet.

First is to continue building a diverse workforce within NRCS. Our workforce still severely under represents females, both African American and white. Hispanic and Asian American / Pacific Islander employees of both sexes are in short supply. So, we need to keep up our efforts to recruit a diverse workforce.

Second is to prepare for the upcoming loss of many of our older employees. You have all heard about the so-called retirement bulge, when thousands of our employees become eligible to retire. Your sessions at this conference on workforce planning, recruitment, and retention will help you explore ways of dealing with this problem.

The retirement bulge presents both a challenge and an opportunity with regard to workforce diversity. It is an opportunity because there will be vacancies to fill, and vacancies mean opportunities to increase diversity. It is a challenge because many of the employees who will become eligible to retire will be the ones you and your predecessors worked so hard to recruit.

We need to do everything we can to make the NRCS a hospitable and rewarding workplace, so significant numbers of these older workers stay on and continue giving us the benefit of their knowledge and experience. Retirement is a natural phenomenon. All of us will eventually retire. But as long as we enjoy our work and feel valued, we won’t rush into retirement.

We also need to work on retention. We need to have good opportunities for advancement, good training, and a good work environment if we are to keep our younger employees from moving on. What a waste it is to go to all the effort of recruiting promising new employees, only to have them move on to some other agency, or to the private sector simply because we didn’t make this a good, enjoyable place to work.

In the retail business, they say it costs five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to retain an old one. I know from my own experience that it is even more expensive to lose an old employee and have to recruit, train, and develop a replacement. So we must do more to make NRCS a good place to work, so we retain and reward the employees we have.

Some of the topics you will be covering in this conference are related to making NRCS a better place to work – reducing workplace violence, eliminating sexual harassment, using alternative dispute resolution, and reasonable accommodation.

Finally, you can expect to be called on to do more in terms of promoting program delivery to traditionally underserved populations. You all know that the Department of Agriculture has historically had problems with delivering programs equally to all farmers and ranchers. Our job is to change that. All of the agencies within the Department have been working hard to correct this situation, and NRCS is no exception. But there is much that needs to be done.

We recently let our managers know the priorities for NRCS for the coming fiscal year. They are

* Implementing the farm bill,
* Implementing the President’s management initiatives,
* Increasing outreach activities and workforce Diversity, and
* Strengthening our Technical Delivery system.

You can easily see that one of the four priorities is directly related to your work: Increasing outreach activities and workforce diversity. But all of the other priorities are related to your work as well.

Implementing the Farm Bill fully means implementing it for all farmers and ranchers, not just for some. We must deliver our programs equally to everyone.

Implementing the President’s management initiatives has implications for you as well. One initiative is strategic management of human capital. This relates to recruiting, managing the retirement bulge, and promoting retention of employees.

Another initiative is competitive sourcing. Our use of technical service providers to help us implement the farm bill will be the largest effort in our history to rely on the expertise of others. We must be sure we have a diversity of technical service providers, and we must be sure our technical service providers do a good job of serving all farmers and ranchers. We can’t -- and won’t -- let conservation languish in underserved.

Another initiative is to expand e-Government. We must make sure the benefits of e-Government are available to all farmers and ranchers – and that traditional modes of service remain available for underserved communities and those who do not choose to interact with us electronically. Promoting e-Government and its alternatives will take additional outreach.

Finally, we will be working to increase accountability with regard to our financial performance and to integrate our budget with our program objectives. Through a better accountability system, we will be able to tell how good a job we are doing in delivering our services to all of America’s farmers, ranchers, and landowners.

Strengthening our Technical Delivery System is our last objective. As you know, it is also related to your work. We must have a strong technical delivery system for farmers and ranches in every community. Underserved populations must have equal access to our technical delivery system.

That is quite a list of challenges for you. I know you have already been working in some of these areas. We have done a good job of identifying underserved communities, and we have been introducing these communities to our services and programs. Now we need to get them involved -- to deliver more of our goods and services to them.

So, there are challenging times ahead for all of you who are involved in our special emphasis programs. I know you have the dedication and the energy to meet these challenges. This week’s conference should give you more of the knowledge you will need.

I wish you good luck and continued success. Now, I would be happy to hear your comments or answer your questions.