Places like Pottstown and Boyertown have felt the pain of losing manufacturing. But creative thinking — backed by the power of Corporate Social Responsibility — is helping bring new hope.
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In many ways the Bentley family embodies the American Dream. Mrs. Bentley encouraged reading and good grades among her six children. Each earned a good education, and in the 1980s the five Bentley brothers came together to launch the engineering software company Bentley Systems. Today, the Chester County-based corporation has a market cap of $14 billion. It’s a true American success story.
In an equally American tradition, the Bentleys have been extraordinarily active when it comes to philanthropy. In fact, three of the foundations established by family members — the Justamere Foundation, the Foxwynd Foundation, and the Switchpoint Foundation — have become members of the Satell Institute.
An example of the family’s commitment can be found in Pottstown, the former manufacturing community in Southeastern Pennsylvania that’s struggled economically in recent decades. The Switchpoint Foundation is now working to create new opportunity in Pottstown, in part — this is pretty American, too — by partnering with a railroad.
A Train-Driven Turnaround
Nathaniel Guest (pictured below) is the man behind that rail line, the Colebrookdale Railroad, whose roots date to the Civil War era and which runs between stations in Boyertown and Pottstown, nine miles apart. The railroad, and the manufacturing companies it helped support, were an essential part of Guest’s childhood in the 1980s.
“I’m old enough to have witnessed the end of the legacy industries that Pottstown had, those industries that my grandparents worked for and that paid for the parades and sponsored the hospital and all of that,” Guest says. “I spent a great deal of my formative years with my grandparents and learned a lot about the history of my part of the world from them. They are where my love of trains came from, I’m pretty sure.”
By the dawn of the 21st century, though, the industries that Guest knew as a kid had mostly disappeared. Communities like Boyertown and Pottstown found themselves without much economic activity — or hope.
A dozen years ago Guest — an attorney, preservation advocate, and lifelong lover of trains — decided he could make a difference by reinventing the Colebrookdale Railroad as a tourist attraction. Working alongside local officials, volunteers, and funders, he’s made a big impact. Today the railroad runs multiple one-to-two-hour scenic excursions daily, drawing tens of thousands of passengers a year — and last year making an economic impact of more than $13 million. As Guest puts it, “If you can bring in 60,000 to 100,000 people a year from outside of the community, that’s a lot of money coming in.”
But the community and economic impact go beyond transactional tourism dollars. “There’s so much work necessary to run those trains, to restore the trains, to operate the stations, to operate the farmers’ market,” Guest says. “You’re taking a workforce that doesn’t have any of the skills necessary to do that work — you need to train them when you hire them. That training not only moves the railroad ahead, it gives them skills that are an on-ramp to family-sustaining wages.”
Thus far, much of the impact from the rail line has been felt in Boyertown, the line’s starting point; the area near the town’s rail station has been revitalized. Now, working with Scott Bentley’s Switchpoint Foundation, Guest is focused on the other end of the line, Pottstown.
Helping Pottstown Help Itself
Scott Bentley came to know Pottstown after locating VideoRay, an underwater drone company he launched after leaving Bentley Systems, in Pottstown. (VideoRay is a leading government defense contractor.) Spending time there gave Bentley an understanding of the challenges facing the community — and inspired him to try and make a difference.
Last year, Bentley and his wife, Susan, launched Switchpoint Foundation, whose mission is to work with existing nonprofit organizations in Pottstown to put the community on track to a better future.
“We call those organizations institutional anchors,” says Chris Tomlin, the veteran nonprofit executive the Bentleys brought in with Guest to launch Switchpoint. “We say to them, all right, we’re not just going to write you a check. We’re also going to get into the soup with you a little bit and help you build capacity.” That means guiding the organizations on everything from strategy, operations and fund raising to recruiting board members with experience and expertise. The goal is to permanently cement those organizations as major employers and providers of essential services in Pottstown. In a word: anchors.
Among the anchor institutions Switchpoint is working with is the Colebrookdale Railroad. Last year, the two organizations came together to deal with a huge encampment of homeless people that had developed in a wooded area adjacent to the railroad tracks.
“We were dealing with a humanitarian crisis for the past five years at the Pottstown end of our line,” Guest says. “We had hundreds of people living in the woods, and it was as bad as anything that you might imagine.”
Working together, Switchpoint and Colebrookdale landed on the idea of repurposing a hotel near the tracks, a Days Inn, into a homeless shelter, then brought in a services provider — Reading-based Opportunity House — to operate the venture. The project, initially funded by Switchpoint, has been a success. The encampment has now been cleared permanently, dozens of formerly homeless people are receiving transitional services, and county government has taken over the shelter.
Switchpoint and Colebrookdale are working together on other projects that will aid Pottstown, one of the poorest qualified census tracts in the nation. They include raising money to let Colebrookdale trains originate in Pottstown, which would generate $20 million in annual economic activity and 200 permanent jobs. The two organizations are also partnering on a vocational-training facility focused on the restoration and conservation of Colebrookdale’s fleet of historic locomotives and railcars; the facility would teach the skills needed for good-paying jobs in metal fabrication, plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, and other areas. It will create 148 permanent jobs.
Every Leader’s Business
Chris Tomlin has known SI’s Ed Satell and Regina Black-Lennox for years. Switchpoint joined the Satell Institute earlier this year, bringing in the Colebrookdale Railroad as a Nonprofit Affiliate. The more Nathaniel Guest has learned about SI, the more it’s become clear the work the railroad and Switchpoint are doing perfectly aligns with the Satell Institute’s motto: “Community is every leader’s business.”
Guest calls his efforts “a very special project that for me ties together lots of interests and goals that I’ve had for my whole life.”
Meanwhile, Scott Bentley is becoming active with other organizations in Pottstown, and Chris Tomlin is optimistic about the town’s future. The community may have gone through difficult times, he says, “but you cannot forget about Pottstown.” Committed people — and the power of CSR — are making sure of that.