Rick Cavey – September 21st
Rick Cavey, former US Navy Diver, who owns and operates an organic vegetable farm with his wife Jen, in Southwest Virginia, spoke Wednesday, September 21 for the Community Voices program. He spoke on lessons learned in a career leading agricultural initiatives, exploring the Blue Ridge with children, negotiating peaceful partnerships with foreign nations, playing conductor to cross-sectoral underwater archeology, and executing military missions.
In his talk, entitled “Adventures in Community Engagement – Building Consensus by Tapping Individual Motivation,” Rick spoke about learning from his rich experiences that leveraging individuals’ motivations is often the key to successful team engagement.
Rick Cavey’s motto, “Let folks own it like they made it”, sums up how he approaches community engagement and promotes social enterprises. Rick shared adventurous stories of leading engagements over a broad and diverse range of projects including regional agricultural renewal, raising the USS Monitor from it’s watery grave off the coast of Cape Hatteras, alternative outdoor education in the Blue Ridge, and building foreign relations in both war and peace – highlighting insightful and often humorous situations that display the human spirit in its most cooperative mode.
Rick got his start by enlisting in the Navy and graduating from Navy Diving School. Retiring as an Officer (Mustang) after 24 years of service, some of his proudest achievements include: leading Partnership for Peace exercises with former Soviet Bloc nations; the recovery of the cannons, turret and heroic human remains from the Civil Warship, USS Monitor; Katrina recovery and rescue operations; and returning with all his men from his tour in Iraq. Following his service, he joined a leading consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton and continued serving the Navy as a business consultant guiding formation and submission of congressional budgets.
Rick Cavey was the featured Community Voices speaker on Wednesday, September 21, 2016. The community was invited to the event sponsored by the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance; [other sponsors]. Cavey’s talk were Adventures in Community Engagement – Building Consensus by Tapping Individual Motivation