Trustee Profile: Jim Truby

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Trustee Profile: Jim Truby (Marla Shaivitz) -- Jim Truby knew there was a bigger world than the small town in western Pennsylvania where he grew up learning to be a good neighbor and helping others in need. When President Kennedy announced the formation of the Peace Corps in 1961, Jim thought this would be an opportunity to serve and touch other’s lives and to experience a larger world.

What he didn’t know, is just how life altering it would be.

A Rethinking of Cultural Values

On his Peace Corps application, Truby expressed his interest in serving as an architect (he was just about to graduate from Carnegie Mellon with a degree in the field). While waiting for his application to be processed, he went to the headquarters in DC, to check on its status. “I stopped in unannounced on a Friday; after an hour they ‘found’ my application, we talked for a while, and then I left.” No one mentioned the architecture program in North Africa. On Monday, an offer to serve as an architect in Tunisia arrived at his parent’s house in western Pennsylvania.

“I told my parents I needed to be at Brown (University) that Sunday to start the training program,” he laughs, “I didn’t even have a passport.”

Truby reflects that it’s widely known that Peace Corps volunteers experience culture shock. “For me, it felt like going to a different planet. I spent a lot of energy determining how the world worked there . . . Ultimately, the experience caused me to rethink nearly everything about the world and America’s and my place in it.”

Framework for Understanding

After his Peace Corps service, Truby began a social anthropology program at American University. “I thought that pursuing this course of study would provide a theoretical framework for not only understanding countries and cultures, but understanding the situations I was exposed to while serving in the Peace Corps, and situations I was involved in back in the United States.”

Social anthropology encompasses the values and beliefs of human beings and how they are organized in social groups. Coupled with his Peace Corps experience, the insights gained pointed Truby into a remarkable series of leadership and management positions.

As an architect and founding principal of Synthesis USA, a firm that represents clients in managing the building development process, Truby puts into practice his knowledge of social anthropology. In addition to identifying their space needs, he assesses his clients’ values and priorities and how their organizations are structured as valuable input to guiding the development of their building projects.

Personal and Professional Commitment

Nonprofit organizations make up the bulk of Synthesis’ client list. And beyond this, he is deeply committed to related organizations on his own personal time.

In addition to his work as a Horizon Foundation Trustee and Secretary to the Board, he is the Vice Chair of Howard Community College’s Board of Trustees. Truby says this volunteer involvement is congruent with two key elements of our society. “A healthy, educated population is the key to the success of any society. The Foundation contributes significantly to the health of the County; the College provides access to higher education. Their missions are parallel.”

Truby has been involved from the very beginning, both professionally and personally, in the expansion of the Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center. Planning for the expansion started 10 years ago, beginning with site identification. This led to a decision to build a new, larger facility on the site of the organization’s current building. The new facility will be completed in February 2008.

A Culturally Rich County

Truby moved to Howard County for “a year” in 1970 in order to conduct field work for his graduate studies. He’s still here.

The primary reasons why he stayed on was that Columbia attracted residents who embraced open housing, diversity and new ways of doing things such as the interfaith centers. He also likes the lingering rural traditions and culture of the larger county, the many nonprofit human service and arts organizations, and the fact that a creative working relationship has developed between the ‘new town’ and the rest of the County.”

He laments the resistance that currently exists not only in Howard County, but nationally, to locating housing for different income groups adjacent to each other. “While affordable housing is partly an issue of land cost, it is more fundamentally an issue of how open and willing residents are to living next to someone who doesn’t occupy same place in the socio-economic structure.”

He notes that “I live in an area of the County where there is acceptance of socio-economic diversity. I feel richer for the experience.”

Spoken like a true social anthropologist.