It's a funny thing. Any time, it seems, Jack McGowan heads to the podium to make a speech, some spirited soul yells out "McGowan for governor!"

Maybe it's his unabashed passion for Oregon, or maybe it's the politician hair. More likely, it's that in SOLV, the organization that deploys trash-gathering volunteers to spruce up our communities, Jack and wife Jan have found a powerful way to engage Oregonians in a dialogue about their state.

This is no mean feat, at a time when attempts to talk to one another tend to get tripped up by politics and differences.

We do have our differences. In fact, the Oregonian has been telling us lately we are no longer even one state. Having sorted through voting records and census and economic data that point up our regional diversity, the newspaper has determined that we are actually nine distinct mini-Oregons contained within a common border.

Then there's the Values and Beliefs survey recently conducted by opinion research firm Davis and Hibbitts Inc., which underscores our divergent beliefs. And here's where we get stuck. Across regions, we love our land but disagree on how to protect it. We believe in education but can't find consensus on a means of support. We're desperate to fix the tax system but are mixed on whether taxes should go up or down. While legislators nurse a monster hangover from a contentious session that finally put forward a new tax package, citizens have taken to the streets to make sure it doesn't come to pass.

Now, you might find it easy to dismiss SOLV's ability to cut through the confusion and get things done. Well, heck, trash -- who doesn't want clean beaches? Where's the argument?

Yeah? Well, heck, schools -- who doesn't want good schools? And affordable health care and effective law enforcement...

Why the dialogue around these issues fails is not because they are more complex but because it's not really dialogue at all but noise so clamorous no one can hear.

Trash could easily have become as politicized as any other issue. Instead, SOLV's kept it simple: Here's a bag, here are some friends. Let's go make our communities better. The McGowans have neatly skirted Salem gridlock and appealed directly to the people who see and feel and know the problem and want to be empowered to help.

Jack, not surprisingly, likes to talk about SOLV -- about beach cleanups and projects where the whole community turns out, CEOs working next to tatooed teens, gays next to straights, Buddhists next to Methodists, Hispanics next to Lithuanians. Politics aren't relevant here. If it doesn't help pick up plastic bottles and shreds of tires, car batteries and surgical tubing, fishing line and old shoes, there's no place for it.

SOLV's onto something big, bigger even than the mountain of trash collected each year, which is why the McGowans have struck such a chord. Fortunately for Oregon, others are onto it, too. As this issue hits the newsstands, hundreds of people are heading to the Oregon Convention Center for the sequel to last year's Oregon Leadership Summit, to define common goals and devise plans of attack. Like picking up trash, the summit, bringing together people from all over the state -- or nine states -- is an opportunity to say, yes we're different, now let's get some work done.

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Copyright 2003 Oregon Business magazine