Doug Hooker: A Profile in Regional Agency

ATLANTA — Doug Hooker does not see himself as a meme, but he’d be a solid one. He’s certainly a good sport and, for the Atlanta region, he epitomizes the saying, “When you want something done, ask a busy person,” like no one else.

Senior Fellow Doug Hooker

During the last three decades, when Atlanta has wanted something done, it asked Doug Hooker. This includes the Urban Studies Institute, which named him a Senior Fellow and Professor of Practice and hired him to teach the course URB 8097: Practices in Urban and Regional Governance for a second fall semester in 2023.

Hooker headed the Atlanta Regional Commission for 11 years until he retired in March 2022. He now leads the Midtown Connector Park Project in Atlanta and chairs the board of directors for the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta. He sits on the boards of the Atlanta Housing Authority and several other nonprofit and private organizations. And as hobbies, he composes symphonic, choral and instrumental music, sings with The Trey Clegg Singers, plays the oboe and travels with his family.

During his more than 30-year career, Hooker has contributed mightily to metro Atlanta’s nonprofit, public and business sectors. His wide range of commitments helps him meet and bring together people and organizations with a variety of purposes and skills to find solutions to the region’s challenges — an ability some call his “superpower.”

Hooker talks more about regionalism and his experiences in the following Q&A.

What sets your course apart from others, and who benefits?

Many of the problems and challenges we now encounter in large and even smaller urban areas are often regional in scale. They frequently require the participation, cooperation and collaboration of more than one local government, or collaboration among the public and nonprofit sectors along with governments, to address those challenges.

For example, transportation can rarely be solved by a single local government. Water resources are another example. Many issues we encounter require working on a regional scale to address them. Increasingly, homelessness and affordable housing are emerging as regional issues, as is public education. Most people don’t understand the importance of regionalism, then they get frustrated when they realize an issue is a lot bigger than just their government’s piece of it.

So, for a student wondering, “what’s in this for me,” if you anticipate a career in urban planning, public administration or public planning, this course in regionalism gives you a more informed framework from which to take your questions. If you’re going to be a professional in an urban region, whether a doctor, lawyer, dentist, nurse or some other, having a deeper understanding of how regions work — or don’t — can help you be a better-informed professional and/or an active civic and community leader.

How did regionalism become a focus in your career?

My eyes were opened to a regional scale when I served as the commissioner of Public Works for the City of Atlanta. Our work leading up to Atlanta’s hosting of the 1996 Olympics required regional cooperation on a scale we hadn’t seen before. Our local, regional, public, private and nonprofit sectors all had to come together to successfully bring and host the Olympics. This experience stretched my horizons in relationships and my understanding that we need to address issues with regional cooperation.

Shortly after, I participated in the Regional Leadership Institute hosted by the Atlanta Regional Commission. My participation in that program accelerated my understanding of the kinds of and scale of issues we were facing, and why they required more collective participation by the public, private and government sectors to be addressed more effectively.

Even with your retirement, you’re still very busy. Why teach?

Often, I’ve given speeches, made presentations or offered one-on-one consultations to help younger professionals understand the broader nature of questions that have perplexed them. Teaching gives me the opportunity to encapsulate some of that informal information into a more structured program and presentation.

I also enjoy how students stretch me. They give me the opportunity to share what I believe and know, as well as what I don’t know.

The invitation to teach at Georgia State was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. The first semester I taught the course (fall 2022) was such a joy that I hope to continue teaching in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies for the foreseeable future.

How does your civic engagement tie into your life, and your career?

I’m a systems thinker. I look at the systems in the world and community and how they’re integrated.  From whatever perch I sit on, whether public, private or nonprofit, I try to understand how the task and group I’m working in can best be used in improving the larger system.

My relationships are important in my nonprofit work. Because I know so many different people in a variety of institutions, public and private, I often get to be the integrator for a lot of community organizations. I tend to bring together a combination of people with my understanding of different sectors of the community that I’ve built over the years, with relationships that others don’t have. I get to bring them into cooperation, collaboration or alignment by bringing to bear a more holistic systems way of thinking about the work.

For example, the opportunity to chair the Community Foundation board — while also serving on the Atlanta Housing Authority board — allows me a wonderful way to bring these organizations together. These groups don’t have a history of working together — they haven’t really known each other — but both institutions recently completed their strategic plans with a similar focus: to serve and lift marginalized people.

I invited these organizations to come together, and they’ve realized they have opportunities to do this work together. I often offer this possibility in my work, whether I’m working in the public, private or nonprofit sectors: bringing more people and organizations together in collaboration and cooperation to address larger problems in our community.

What does your passion for music add to your vocation?

The systems work that interests me and things that drive me are very much because of my interest in music and the complexity of bringing voice and various instruments together to make sense of a moment, the emotion of an event, artistically. One is personal, the other professional. Both come from the same place in me.

If you could tell your students one important thing about your course, what would it be?

My teaching is not so much in telling my story. It’s in sharing with others what is possible.

The emerging issues that young people are going to face coming into their adulthoods and careers — issues like climate change, grappling with artificial intelligence and automation, and building community in everyday life — those are going to be regional in scale. It’s worth their while to develop a mental model of how to begin to think about issues like this in a collaborative fashion.