No one would accuse Kankakee of booming. Unemployment in the metro area peaked at 15.8 percent at the beginning of 2010 and still stands at 11.4 percent, more than three percentage points above the national average. But it is certainly staging a comeback with some of the strongest job growth in the nation. The central Illinois metro economy saw a 5.8 percent bump in employment in trade, transportation, and utilities sector last year. Education and health services also performed well, with a 5.7 percent rise. Major employers include an Armstrong World Industries flooring plant, a BASF chemical plant, a CSL Behring biotherapeutics R&D and manufacturing facility, a Cigna health-insurance call center, and distribution centers for Sears and Kmart. Although the city of Kanakee has seen almost no growth, the village of Bradley has grown 24 percent in the past decade. A regional health center is slated to begin construction on a new wing in June.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
