Ronald Ron Fox

I first met Ron in 2006. We both returned to the Rogue Valley after extended stints away. He as the SOREDI Executive Director, and me as the Executive Director of the Rogue Workforce Partnership - the region's Local Workforce Development Board. We shared office space together, and we'd see, meet and run into each other all the time. Ron also served on the Workforce Board and our Corporate Directors/Executive Committee from 2006 to 2016. One of first memories I have of Ron is him coming up to me after one of our first meetings and saying: "I really need to have a white board session with you!" So that's we what did. We got together with Lee Lanphier, our Workforce Board Chair at the time and the CEO/Owner of Lanphier Associates, one of our region's top marketing communications firms. We white boarded for hours and then did even more white board sessions, and we eventually mapped out a plan for how we were going to revolutionize the public workforce and education system, through public-private sector partnership and leadership. Soon thereafter, Ron said we needed to make a "Road Trip" to Salem to the Governor's Office to advocate for key parts of our plan, and for pilot funding to launch it. And since he had all the personal contacts, he made it happen. It was an early morning departure time, so his memorable tag line the night before was "see you in the morning, wheels-up at 6:00 AM." After a great meeting with the Governor's staff, we got the money and the PowerUp Academy was born. The platform / business model we created was for skilling-up incumbent workers, and it worked wonderfully until the Great Recession hit. We're now just getting ready to relaunch it again as a valuable tool for employers to get the skills training they need for their current workers. Ron and I also regularly found ourselves meeting-up at the copy machine at 5:00 PM on Friday afternoon. One conversation would lead to another, and the next thing we knew it was 8:00 PM and we were both calling our wives to tell them we'd be home soon, and the we'd been held-up talking to each other until we had solved all of the region's and state's problems, at least for that week. During one of these Friday evening confabs, Ron shared a sensibility that we needed to find business leaders to run for Rogue Community College's Board of Education. And that this was the only way we would get RCC to dramatically improve their alignment to meet regional industry needs and more rigorously support the region's economic development and economic vitality. So when Ron retired from SOREDI in 2016, he ran and won a seat on the RCC Board. And he then recruited other business leaders to run as well. So that when it came time for RCC to hire a new President, Ron was able to ensure that the top candidate would be someone with the kind of skills, experience and deep commitment to business partnerships that Cathy Kemper-Pelle has so strongly brought to our region. Ron also helped the Rogue Valley forge strategic links with the leading statewide economic development, workforce and business organizations that remain strong today. This included the Oregon Economic Development Association in which he served as President for a term, and the Oregon Business Council, one of the state's top business associations that Ron also served as an advisory board member. Ron was a visionary strategist and systems thinker. And he was a critical player in the implementation of all our systems transformation and sector strategies work. He took me to places strategically that I would have never gone myself. It was his idea for us as a region to really embrace Oregon Institute of Technology as a key component in our region's economic and workforce development strategy. In one of our regular confers, he seeded the idea for us to "take the 0 out of the 70 miles" that was the distance between Medford and Klamath Falls. He had the vision and foresight to see that Oregon Tech's engineering graduates would be critical fuel for our region's innovation, business creation and business growth. And that the Rogue Valley needed to proactively go to the OIT Career Fair, and also connect with their key faculty to forge a stronger business-education partnership. So that's what we did. And today, our region still runs an annual Tech Tour that brings technology students from Oregon Tech, Klamath Community College, Rogue Community College and Southern Oregon University to visit the tech sector businesses in our region, resulting in recruits regularly being hired from OIT and all these schools. Ron's passion for politics, at its core, was a passion for good public policy, good government institutions, and a good return on our public investments. He brought a pragmatic business sensibility to the world and work of the public sector. Something so desperately needed as much then, as it is today. I'm reminded of Steven Covey's famous phrase- "To Live, To Love, To Learn and To Leave a Legacy. That's what we all want; what drives us as human beings. Ron leaves us a tremendous legacy. His legacy is embodied in his family - Lisa, Brian, Jessica, his grandchildren; and in all his dear friends and colleagues who he lived with, laughed with and loved. His legacy from his work is with us in our Rogue Valley public/private partnership institutions that are so much better today, than they were before Ron helped to mold them into his vision of what they could and should be, and are still becoming today. We will continue to stand upon his shoulders, and strive to further realize the vision he helped hold for us - to become "the better angels of our nature" and create a greater common good. Ron was a dear friend and amazing colleague, and I'll miss him greatly. With great love and affection, Jim Fong