Paul Robert Edwards

When I was in the third grade, a favorite aunt gave me a copy of a book entitled 32 Roads to the White House, in which I read about an almost next-door neighbor, Harry Truman. When Truman was seeking election in his own right in 1948, I asked my mother to take me to his headquarters where I got two posters. The next morning I put these on in the way I had seen picketers wear sandwich boards and marched off to school. My next memory was being face-down on the playground pavement. I suspect that convinced me there was something special about being an underdog.

I started managing political campaigns, especially for underdogs. The first campaign I managed was for a state senator, the brother of one my grade school teachers.  Years later that state senator proved the swing vote in enabling the financially struggling hometown university become part of the University of Missouri. 

When I was growing up, many politicians were lawyers and that influenced my decision to go to law school. Though I graduated with distinction and as president of the Student Bar Association, I found I did not relish the practice of law. After law school, I consulted for the then new Legal Services Program of the Office of Economic Opportunity and served as an assistant county counselor. While in that job, I accepted a new role as the first Coordinator of Intergovernmental Relations for Jackson County, Missouri.   

 Because of that position, Reader’s Digest interviewed me when realigning the boundaries of the federal regions became a popular target for government reform. Shortly thereafter, the new Nixon administration announced it was creating eight federal regions with headquarters cities. Some cities won but most lost. In Kansas City 25,000 jobs were on the line. I proposed a plan for persuading the Administration to increase the number of regions and then was given responsibility for selling the plan.  I made presentations at the White House and to Congress and with the muscle of both Kansas’s and Missouri’s senators Nixon reversed his decision and Kansas City remained a regional headquarters city.

 In 1968 my wife Sarah and I went to Chicago for the Democratic Convention. We participated in a short-lived “Draft Ted Kennedy” effort and were at the corner of Michigan and Balboa the night that lingers in history. We concluded that the term “police riot” understated what we witnessed from the second floor of the Blackstone Hotel. After the melee we left the hotel and while walking to where our car was parked, a policeman threw a leather “hippie” arm band at us.  When we later spoke about what we observed, we learned a lesson. Most people blamed the people on the street.

In 1969, I attended the second Program for Urban Executives at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I then entered the urban affairs field, becoming President and Chief Executive Officer of the Environmental Research and Development Foundation, an organization developed from a grant to the Menninger Foundation that pioneered in the field of environmental psychology. During my tenure, ERDF had approximately twenty professional and support personnel.  I was recognized as “Outstanding Young Man of Kansas City” and "Outstanding Young Man of Missouri" in 1972.

Also during these years, I managed multiple campaigns and did community organizing in Westport, the community in which we lived. This included organizing the community to stop a planned freeway and the condemnation of a neighborhood. This was chronicled in a book entitled Westport by Patricia Cleary Miller.

 

 In 1974, I set up shop as Public Affairs Assistance to consult on public issue communication, ballot initiatives, and candidate campaigns.  Clients included city, county, and legislative district campaigns as well as assignments from government agencies, civic and professional associations.  I believe my strengths are with strategy, organization, messaging, forming candidate slates, and relished employing them working with underdog candidates and campaigns. I have a winning record. At the same time, I find negotiating is frequently the path to the greatest advantage and enjoy both doing it and assisting others to move from conflict to agreement.

 

 After several years Sarah and I decided to pursue another dream and move to California. We have always been interested in trends and decided to write a book about working from home.  We were both doing that. So in 1980 we began writing Working From Home. It was the first commercially published book of its kind. After it was “successful” we went to Jeremy Tarcher, our publisher, with a list of other trend topics. Jeremy Tarcher, always gracious, told us we were not specialists in tracking trends but were established as home business experts. Tarcher went on to publish thirteen of our seventeen non-fiction books. 

Even though we might be described  as accidental business writers, we enjoyed helping to popularize the acceptance of working from home, including being columnists for the LA Times syndicate, Entrepreneur magazine, Home Office Computing magazine, having a TV show that ran on HGTV for four years and twenty years of network radio shows focused on home business. We also served as weekly commentators on CNBC's "How To Succeed in Business" show.  In 1991 we advised the White House Office of Policy Management and in 1995 I was a delegate to the White House Conference on Small Business.  In 2006 the U.S. Small Business Administration named Sarah and I as (SBA) Region IX "Small Business Journalists of the Year."

 

Beginning in 1996, we began expanding our focus to address problems people encounter in pursuing their yearnings to create more balanced and rewarding lives. We wrote Changing Directions Without Losing Your Way and the Practical Dreamers Handbook, These books were self-help books rather than business books, but were shelved in the home business section of bookstores with our other books. In this same vein, Sarah also wrote a novel, Sitting With the Enemy and last year completed a PhD in the emerging field of ecological psychology.  Today she maintains a blog that continues the story.

                                                                                                      

Our interests converged again in writing our seventeenth non-fiction book, Middle Class Lifeboat: Careers and Lifestyles for Navigating a Changing Economy. Sarah and I are extending the relocalization and personal and community resiliency themes we featured in the book through through the work described on our Pathways to Transition website and Let's Live Local. We are providing training and public affairs consulting to communities as they adapt to legal and political changes needed for sustainability and resiliency. Issues include reforming building codes to allow for sustainable materials, reforming restrictions on growing food and raising non-offensive food animals, allowing the use of gray water, zoning codes, bond issues to fund new community infrastructure, and electing candidates with the vision to lead their community into a sustainable future. I have been accredited to consult and speak about Transition Initiative material to government and businesspeople by Transition United States and am a member of the American Association of Political Consultants.