Mark Barbash teaches public budgeting and nonprofit financial leadership at Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs.
This week the Columbus Partnership — the organization that, more than any other, stands for what we call “the Columbus Way” — announced it is searching for a new chief executive.
It is the second such search in less than two years, and the third leader the organization will have had since 2024.
The stated reason is personal, and I take it at face value. But set any single exit aside and the pattern is hard to miss: the institution built to embody this region’s talent for sticking together is struggling to keep steady leadership of its own.
I raise it not to pile on, but because it is the clearest sign yet that the civic glue central Ohio took for granted no longer holds by itself.
We still need a bigger, wider table
None of this is an argument against the Partnership — just the opposite. A region this size needs a place where leaders can quietly do the crucial work of building consensus: testing ideas and narrowing differences out of the spotlight.
That consensus-building is what lets a community act as one.
The Partnership has been broadening it the right way — from a handful of CEOs to more than 70 leaders, with entrepreneurs and newer firms alongside the legacy names. I was working with then-Mayor Michael Coleman when the Partnership was founded.
The reasons it is needed are as valid today as they were at its inception. A bigger — and wider — table is harder to align, but it is the only kind worth building.
A wider table, though, only works if the people at it share the commitment the old one took for granted — and that is the part we have stopped passing on. For most of our history, that commitment was not taught. It was implicit.
A broken transmission
A young executive arrived, watched the people above her write the checks and show up when something needed doing, and inherited the assignment with the office. Nobody wrote the rules because nobody had to.
That transmission belt has broken. When the top job changes hands twice in two years — and the region hires from other cities rather than growing leaders here — you can no longer assume the culture passes on by itself.
This is not a complaint about the people arriving. The executives coming with the chip plants, the headquarters relocations and the young entrepreneurial startups are no less generous than those who built the old compact.
They are simply less connected — to the history, the nonprofits, the unspoken expectation that leadership here carries civic obligations. No one handed them the assignment: those who once did have retired, and the institutions that did it informally are now too thin to do it on purpose.
So let’s do it on purpose.
A new approach is needed
Central Ohio needs an intentional civic onboarding for its newest senior leaders — and it should treat that work as seriously as it treats a site-selection pitch. Not a welcome reception. A real apprenticeship in the place.
I’d build it as a joint effort of the Columbus Partnership, the Columbus Foundation, the Columbus Chamber and Leadership Columbus — broad by design, not another backroom — built around a few core commitments.
Our progress must continue
I can hear the objection: this sounds soft next to billion-dollar investments and jobs announcements.
In fact, it is exactly the opposite: this is the difficult, foundational work necessary to maintain the community’s progress. A culture that is never taught does not survive its founders. Of everything the region could do, it may be the most concrete — it rebuilds the broken belt.
There is reason for optimism right now.
The Partnership’s interim leader — Corrine Burger — has spent more than three decades in Columbus, at Bank One and its successor.
She is exactly the kind of rooted, home-grown leadership the region needs more of — proof the model still exists, and that we should be producing it intentionally, not just hoping it appears.
The search underway is a chance to act on that.
Whoever takes the permanent role should be measured not only on rankings and capital investment, but on their grasp of the Columbus culture — and whether they can pass along the civic compact that made those wins possible. That is a harder assignment than chasing the next plant, and the more important one.
Commitment to place is learned. Right now, no one is teaching it — and we are about to ask a new leader to model the very thing we have stopped passing on. Let’s start teaching it before we do.
Mark Barbash is a former director of development for the city of Columbus. He teaches public budgeting and nonprofit financial leadership at Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs and chairs the board of the nonprofit Short North Stage.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Instability at Columbus Partnership sign of broken Columbus Way | Opinion
Reporting by Mark Barbash, Guest columnist / The Columbus Dispatch
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By Mark Barbash, Guest columnist | USA TODAY Network
