The Community Development Foundation's 60th anniversary meeting and banquet last week offered a strong reminder that the globally recognized jobs-building organization thrives because its methods and principles have withstood 11 recessions since 1948, including the current downturn.

CDF - formed by progressive-minded community leaders who understood the necessity of innovation and adaptation to changing times and opportunities after World War II - learned early never to consider its mission accomplished.

Goals may be met and projects completed, but the mission remains more and better jobs, as immediate past chairman Mitch Waycaster repeatedly stressed on Thursday night.

Some of the companies that CDF helped bring to Tupelo in the early years of its work remain, though they may operate under different names. The greatest change is in the kind of work their employees perform. The workplaces of 1948 are as different from 2009 as will be the jobs of 2069.

Adaptation succeeds when strong communities embrace a vision that change is not an enemy but an enabler. Had CDF's founders not understood that the whole community had to change with the times and an always evolving economy the 60-year story would have been very different, and less successful.

To its credit, CDF from the start knew that increasing educational attainment and better jobs training were necessary for the long term.

Even with the wrenching, necessary and ultimately beneficial transition to fully integrated public schools, CDF did not back off its view that education is the key to the larger goal of more and better jobs.

Every major step forward in industrial and manufacturing complexity and sophistication has included a parallel commitment to education and training.

The community, always heavily invested in public education, broadened its inclusiveness with location of the Itawamba Community College branch campus in Tupelo, then the opening of a degree-granting branch of the University of Mississippi.

CDF's support was pivotal and formative in both those developments..

The ability to change and adapt include, as Richard Florida writes in "The Rise of the Creative Class," the "basic notion that diversity and creativity work together to power innovation and economic growth."

However, as Florida notes, the diversity element in growth too often does not include African Americans and other non-whites.

CDF, Tupelo and many other communities in our region continue struggling with that harsh fact, but related developments offer hope of quantifiable progress.

A new and concerted emphasis on dropout prevention and recovery, plus CDF's cooperative work with other agencies and county government to provide a community-college tuition guarantee for all high school graduates in Lee County could be the positive tipping point in that situation.

The offer of higher education attainment extends hope to many young people who would otherwise give up and become a dropout statistic.

But educated, as Florida notes,, young people can and often do become the "workhorses. They are able to work longer and harder, and are more prone to take risks, precisely because they are young and childless. In rapidly changing industries, it's often the recent graduates who have the most up-to-date skills ..."

Recent CDF leadership emphasis has been placed on making Tupelo more attractive as the residence of choice for the population segment Florida describes. Education brings more choices in employment, with an easier ability to relocate from the "home town."

More and better jobs must include greater appeal in quality of life to young workers - precisely the people whose education attainment is being encouraged by CDF and its partner organizations.

CDF clearly is focused on preparation for additional significant growth opportunities after the 2008-2009 recession ends.

In CDF's first full decade Mississippi continued losing population because jobs in the region and state were both scarce and less desirable. Thousands of young adults left our state, returning only in retirement, their most productive years lived elsewhere.

The population drain has largely reversed, and new growth must include retaining the young, best and brightest in our region and state, those whose education attainment has been promoted and empowered.

Pulling together all the elements for sustained success is always difficult, and nothing can be taken for granted.

CDF, after 60 years, has significantly leveled the playing field. Now, the larger community must seize the opportunity.