Dustin Earley's educational journey took him through LCC from 2012 to 2015, where he built a strong foundation before completing his Professional Communications Bachelor's degree at Sienna Heights University at the University Center on LCC’s campus. Dustin has built a successful career as a communications professional, earning his accreditation in PR designation while leading engagement and outreach efforts for Michigan's county road infrastructure.

Website: Country Road Association of Michigan

You're listening to LCC Alumni Stories, a show celebrating the amazing alumni of Lansing Community College.

I'm Steve Robinson, President of lcc, and on each episode I have the privilege of meeting inspiring alums and hearing about their experiences at and since leaving lcc.

Our alumni community is diverse and far reaching, representing all walks of life and working in various industries nationwide.

And LCC Alumni Stories highlights those who make positive contributions to their communities and showcases those who've overcome obstacles to achieve success.

These are their dynamic stories.

My guest today is Dustin Early, Deputy Director of Engagement at the County Road association of Michigan.

And at the University center right here at lcc, Dustin has built a successful career as a communications professional, earning his accreditation and PR designation while leading engagement and outreach for Michigan's county road infrastructure.

Dustin, welcome to the show.

It's great to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate it.

Well, I've been looking forward to our conversation because we met on campus and started reminiscing about your times here at lcc.

So it is great to have you here.

Tell me a little bit about what you do for the county Road association.

Yeah, so you hit the nail on the head there.

I'm the Deputy Director of Engagement.

Okay.

One of those mysterious job titles, but important.

Absolutely.

So what does the Deputy Director of Engagement do?

So I lead our communications, marketing, outreach, educational events, kind of everything in that member facing communications area.

How many members does the association have roughly?

So there's 83 counties in Michigan.

Right.

Each one has either a county road commission or department.

So all 83 are our members.

And then each one of those have various numbers of staff under there.

So somewhere around three to five thousand people at any given time.

That's incredible.

And you know, Michigan being so focused on the automobile and roads, this is a really important part of life in Michigan.

The road infrastructure across the state.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, county road agencies are responsible for 75% of the roads in Michigan, and they also maintain the roads for the state in 63 counties.

So we, our members are responsible, I mean, truly for the overwhelming majority of roads.

With Michigan's background in it and our history and with what's going on in the news at this time, with a lot of discussions surrounding transportation funding and revenue initiatives, it's very exciting work to be doing.

Yeah, we just.

There was a big event at The Capitol recently with a lot of folks talking about road infrastructure.

It's such a huge part of our life here.

I was just doing math in my head of the 83 counties and all the people involved in those.

We're really talking about thousands and thousands of people working on the road infrastructure in our state.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's just through just the counties.

I mean, the cities have their own.

MDOT has their own employees from there.

MDOT meaning the Michigan Department of Transportation.

Right.

And then there's private contractors, too.

So, I mean, there are tens.

I mean, I don't know if I could even really peg a number on how many people work in the industry.

And I'm just thinking of those counties and all the people involved.

Your title is engagement.

At our academic Senate meeting this morning, that was the topic we were talking about.

How do we keep administrators, faculty engaged?

What kinds of engagement are you working with on these county road commissions?

How do you want them to work with each other and engage with each other?

Yeah, man, that's a really good, very complex question.

So we're doing engagement in a lot of different ways.

You know, one of the main things we're doing is we receive a lot of information at the association, help digest it, work with the parties that are putting that stuff out.

So whether that's at the state, federal, local, or whether it's private partnerships, we're getting in a lot of information all the time.

And then we're working to help organize our members to engage with that.

So whether it's through, like, committees, coalitions, work groups, you know, whatever, we're helping facilitate a lot of that engagement.

There's also engagement with the legislature, where there's constantly new legislation being written, topics being discussed, and we get to.

I mean, I feel very fortunate that we get to help represent the county road agencies, their perspective and their needs in that fashion as well.

Well, you're always a topic of discussion politically.

Right.

Fix the damn roads.

Right?

I mean, party.

Both parties, candidates from all over the state talk about this.

It's an political topic.

Do you find that there is bipartisan interest in the work of the road commissions?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Transportation infrastructure is one of the most nonpartisan issues.

There's a lot of, at least, like, tent pole issues.

I would say, for, you know, that the state government and the administration's always working on education, access to clean water, the environment, infrastructure being one of the main ones.

And it's, again, really nonpartisan because everybody drives on roads.

That's right.

Everywhere in the state.

You're driving on roads, you're using the bridges, the right of way.

Everything involved in transportation infrastructure is.

It's very invisible until it's not.

But it's pervasive in every way.

It's in everybody's lives from the moment they leave the house to the moment they come home.

So just talking to you is making some memories.

Sort of fire in the back of my.

Early in my career, I was a city councilman in a small city in Michigan.

And it just dawned on me.

I was on the planning commission and we did a lot of local roads.

What a complex system we have of municipalities, counties, state, federal.

There's a lot going on in your universe.

Yeah, absolutely.

All the time.

There's one of the things I love the most about my job and something that I learned through my time at LCC is that I love to learn.

Just can't get enough of it.

So speaking of that complexity, always new things to learn, new ways to understand complex problems, that's just never ending.

And I'm very thankful for that.

So, I mean, that brings a couple of questions to mind for me.

First of all, the role of an association.

I'm assuming your headquarters are here in Lansing.

Right.

Cause that's where the lawmakers and people you need to talk to.

But folks who don't interface with associations may not have an appreciation for just how important it is to be here in the state capitol and be telling the story of the.

These road commissions.

Like, what do you do to get the message across to the lawmakers and policymakers?

That's such a good question.

And before I tell you, I just wanna say that, yes, absolutely.

I had no idea what an association was.

And there's so many of them here.

We have the Community College association and it's a really important thing that not a lot of people know about.

So how do you do it?

Yeah.

So it all comes down to just speaking with our members and hearing what they have to say.

A lot of them don't really know or maybe don't believe that they have a very compelling, very interesting story to tell.

It's just getting that story out of them and then finding an engaging way to tell it, to retell it.

I should say to get that in front of the audiences that need to hear it.

They need to understand how things are functioning and the things that they're going through.

Yeah.

Just walking through downtown Lansing, a lot of your counterparts in all the associations for grocery stores, for every aspect of our life that you can think of, and it's really, really Important.

The second question I had for you, and it's a Michigan question, this is true of the community college world.

Michigan is a pretty decentralized state.

You mentioned 83 counties.

When you compare the county road system, the way it's set up in Michigan to other states across the country is the same thing that's true of community colleges, true of our roads is that we're sort very decentralized, less than other states.

We are, absolutely.

Michigan's the only state that has county road commissions.

Really?

Yeah.

Their own.

Oh, I'm today years old when I'm learning that.

Wow.

Yeah.

Their own independent form of government with their own separate board of county road commissioners.

But a lot of associations have kind of like a national mother association.

We don't really have one.

The closest thing we have is the national association of County Engineers because each county road commission is required to have a certified professional engineer on staff.

But other than that.

Yeah, we're very unique in that way.

So I learned that today from you right now sitting here.

But it is completely consistent with what I know about Michigan.

And I think it's also.

It's a strength and kind of a challenge in Michigan is that the strength is that there's a lot of local control.

What you just said about the county road commissions is true of our community colleges.

There are 28 statutory community colleges plus the three tribal community colleges.

And we're our own entities.

We're really not accountable to any other state agency and we have to come together.

So Michigan is the only state that is set up like this.

Yeah, to my knowledge.

I mean, you know, I always gotta hedge my bets here, but.

No, no, that's really fascinating to me.

Now, I'm sure you're used to answering this question.

We don't have a great reputation nationally about our roads.

Right.

What are your thoughts or what are your first strategies of dealing with complaints about Michigan roads?

Of course we have different weather.

Right.

We got a lot of freezing and thawing and stuff like that.

But talk to me about what you say when you hear complaints or negative assessments of our roads.

Yeah, I mean, you hear that from a lot of different people.

Whether that's from people that are approaching it from a policy making perspective or when you just Google county road commission, our number pops up as the association.

So we get a lot of calls of people just out on the road.

The first thing we do is always ensure that people are heard.

That's very important.

Make sure that they're heard and acknowledged and let them know we understand what you're experiencing then from there, depending on where they're coming from.

It's easier approach from a policy perspective to explain that.

Well, decades of underfunding and our unique soil types, the regional differences between the tip of the Keweenaw down to metro Detroit, those things are all hard to account for.

I couldn't agree more.

As a lifelong Michigander, it's something I've understood growing up here.

I stepped out of the state for about six years to be in Toledo, Ohio, which in some ways is still culturally Michigan.

But you've mentioned a couple of times some experiences or knowledge and abilities that you gained while you were here at lcc.

Let's transition to talk about that.

You're a communications and engagement professional, but clearly you learned how to do that.

What did you study when you were here at lcc?

Yeah, so I took an interesting path, but I very, you know, much appreciate the lcc.

Let me kind of really explore a lot of different avenues.

So I started out in the Digital Media, Audio and cinema program.

Yeah, our DMACC program.

Yeah.

Loved that.

Absolutely loved it.

I spent, you know, I did a couple.

I mean, I took the bartending class.

I did some computer programming with Python to try that out and landed on.

At the time, I had been professionally writing, doing freelance work.

Oh, cool.

And was working with a lot of PR firms at the time and figured, you know what?

I feel like I could do this.

And I think they get paid a little bit better than I do.

And it just, you know, it seems like a nice, stable, interesting job.

So why don't I explore some of these communications classes and really just kind of fell in love with that path through that.

Well, it sounds like that's what you do every day for the Association.

Right.

So talk to me a little bit about some.

The of some classes or memorable experiences you had here that maybe you draw upon when you're telling the association story.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, so I took a lot of the PR classes.

One of my absolute favorite things about OCC is that the professors here are real people that generally have other professions that they're working at the same time.

That's right.

So I worked with multiple professors.

Kate Snyder, I've worked with her since graduating.

Oh, you have?

Cool.

Yeah.

Doug Klein has been at, you know, he was at a lot of the Public Relations Society of America meetings that I had been going to.

I was on their board of directors for like, I think, six or seven years.

Fantastic.

Yeah, so he was at a lot of the luncheons and stuff.

My Big story, really is that.

My public speaking teacher, the first day after class, I asked her, you get kind of nervous about am I on the right career path?

Right.

You're investing a lot of time and a lot of yourself into, you know, something like this.

So I asked her, is this a good town to work in communications in?

She said, absolutely, absolutely.

You know, I'm involved in a lot of association work.

She had been working closely with the Michigan Society for Association Executives.

So she ended up throughout the semester trying to get me to come take an internship at her office.

And sure enough, I ended up doing that.

That's where I've been for 11 years now, with her still serving as my boss, now as our CEO.

That's fantastic, you know.

Well, first of all, you know, without even planning to do it, pulled out some of the major bragging points about community colleges and LCC in particular.

Our faculty are amazing.

Oh, absolutely.

We have incredible faculty.

But you're right, so many of them are active in their fields.

They're practitioners in their fields.

And so what an incredible story.

So your current supervisor is one of your professors here?

Yeah, that's right.

I think she just taught her last semester.

Okay.

But yeah, we got to know each other through the public speaking course, which again, funny enough, I public speak quite often, multiple times.

I can imagine, for a living.

So I've used so many of the skills I learned in her class to this day.

We actually have an intern right now who was her student as well for her last semester.

So.

And that's another one of those brag points is internships.

And I think when we first met, I shared with you.

I have an internship story too.

I mean, I am where I am because of an internship that I had here at LCC when I was studying at Michigan State.

I wanted to become an English professor.

And I had a great opportunity to teach English 121 here all those years ago.

Without that internship, I couldn't have started my career.

And it sounds like that's the case for you.

Yeah, absolutely.

I did not have the best relationship with education prior to coming to LSU and kind of wanted to give it a shot.

I had been working freelance for a long time in professional writing.

But a lot of the jobs I was looking for to move into that were more stable, that had all the benefits you were looking for to start a family, really put down roots.

They all required four year degrees or some type of continuing education.

So I gave LCC a shot, not knowing really what to expect.

And Vaughn vowels was my psychology professor, and he really, absolutely, completely changed my perspective on learning.

And his class was so good, and my experience was so good my first semester at LCC that it really is what transformed me into a lifelong learner.

And I can kind of trace that moment of transitioning to LCC and wanting to further pursue professional, educational, personal development through this way to so many things that I've done in my life since then.

That is incredible.

And I'm really happy to tell you that that's a unique and powerful experience.

But I actually hear this a lot.

I really do.

In my line of work, as I move through the community and talk to folks, I'll be grocery shopping or interacting with a server at a restaurant.

I hear stories about classroom experiences that have really changed the trajectory of people's lives.

And it sounds like that's what that psychology class.

What was it about that psychology class that had that impact on you?

You know, it was just finding, kind of finding my place in terms of being around my peers, feeling like I was more plugged into my community, having somebody in that position, a professor who I felt really respected me, who had a lot of really great experience coming downtown.

I'm born and raised in Lansing, so I felt a lot of pride in coming here.

It's just kind of the culmination of all these factors happening at once, really.

Just I felt like I belong, like I had found my place.

I had started to find some passions, and it was again, just a new path that was, I felt like, hadn't really been available to me before.

Well, I think I can speak for everybody who works here, that this is exactly why we come to work every day.

I mean, hearing stories like this, and you took the words out of my mouth about our tagline, we tell everybody at lcc, you belong here.

There's that transformative experience where, you know, everybody who comes to higher education has some form of a little bit of imposter syndrome or feeling like they don't fit in.

And one of the great things about our amazing faculty and staff is we're aware of that.

We went through it ourselves.

And so, you know, your psychology professor, all these folks you worked with in dmacc, they thrive on making those pivot points for students.

So it sounds like that was really your launching off point and you didn't stop with, with the associate degree programming here.

You continued on a three plus one with one of our university partners.

Right.

Tell me how that worked and how you gained your other degree.

Yeah, so I kind of dabbled in a few things here.

My public speaking professor, Denise Donahue, when I spoke to her about communication, she said, it's a great degree.

She had a degree, a master's in journalism.

It's a great.

Communication is a great path.

I really think it's worth exploring for a four year degree.

So I said, okay, well, let me look into this a little bit more.

Found out about a university center through an advisor here at llcc.

Found a program.

I was like, oh, there's a communications program right here.

I can stay at LLCC for another year, then finish out right across the street.

There's a lot of flexible learning options for online classes as well because work was starting early.

Pickup for me at the time and yeah, one thing after another.

First person in my immediate family, my mother, father, grandparents, first person to have a four year college degree.

So you're a first generation college student?

I am, yeah.

Fantastic.

You know, on that point when you were talking about growing up in Lansing, what was your impression of Lansing Community College as you were a young person, as you were going to high school?

I mean, what did you think about us before you actually got here?

Yeah.

So going to Lansing Public School, LCC had just kind of been a fixture of education in the community.

I mean, there was a lot of programs where through the high school.

And I remembered hearing about, well, these kids get to go to LCC to do a couple classes.

I love that.

I just want to.

You described it like it was a privilege, like they get to go.

Absolutely not.

They have to.

Or they are going, but they get to go.

That's so cool.

Yeah, it was the coolest thing.

And my mom took some art classes through LCC and she always talked about it as it's a very accessible way to continue your education and to, you know, kind of find out what you want to do and explore.

And I mean, it's always to me been framed in that way that it's accessible.

I think that there's a lot of barriers to continuing your education to, you know, really getting into anything and.

And I was shocked.

My then girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife.

Okay, congratulations.

Was also going to LCC with me.

She was another person that really encouraged me to look into it because she said, oh, it's great.

She worked here at the time as well.

Fantastic.

She said, it's really cool.

I think you'd really like it.

You'd probably meet some cool people and they have a lot of classes.

You'd be surprised how many classes they have.

So for me, the reputation of it being this cool place, lots of fun stuff to do there.

Always interesting things happening attached to it with the auditorium, it was just, it always seemed.

I grew up downtown and had a lot of jobs downtown before, you know, in my teens and stuff.

So I'd always seen the buildings and I just always thought it was this really cool place.

It is a cool place.

And you've touched on a couple of our major themes, right?

Because you're right, there still are a lot of barriers to higher education.

And one of the reasons that partnership with Lansing schools is so close.

We originally were founded with the school district.

So this community was very visionary in starting a community college.

There are other communities that had to colleges, but they started off as junior colleges.

You know, Phil Gannon over at msu, he studied what was then a groundbreaking idea, this idea of a community college.

And so you grew up downtown, so you had a sense of the importance of our place right where we are.

We've really as a college transformed our part of downtown, haven't we?

Isn't it a really cool part of downtown?

I've loved over the years watching, watching all the different things come in, the art pieces, just, you know, the modern design.

I mean, it's been fantastic watching it all come together.

I'll tell you very quickly, I gave one of our trustees and I gave a tour of our downtown campus to a trustee from another community college in Michigan and she kept having to pull her jaw up off the floor.

We have incredible diversity of architecture, right?

We've got buildings that date back to the 19th century and then we've got got some of our brand new gorgeous facilities.

And you mentioned the place making.

We have public art and sculpture.

It's something that we're really, really known for.

Well, when you and I bumped into each other, I could just tell that you were proud to be associated with our college.

Do you tell people a lot that you went here?

Oh, absolutely.

I wear it as a point of pride that, you know, I attended lcc, met some of people that have been still with me and support me to this day and my role models, my mentors.

I could never downplay the importance of LCC in my life.

It has played such an important role.

Well, you coming on this show and telling that story is a continuation of that, and I really appreciate it because you can have billboards and great TV ads, but the way people really get to understand our institution is through relationships and stories like yours.

So the fact that you tell people about your experiences here and connect it to your current success because you're doing amazing things for the road commission.

And you also taught me a lot.

Today we have a really cool state.

Our state is really, really a wonderful place.

But when you think about just how diverse and again, decentralized it is, I never thought about it until, like you said, the roads from the Keweenaw all the way down to to the Ohio Michigan border, where I spent some time.

There's so much diversity in the road infrastructure here.

Yeah, absolutely.

We just did a big series of news releases on fall color tours, so we have a thing called My Backroads.

I'm totally going there this afternoon.

So it's on your website?

Yeah.

Yep.

You can go to.

What's the website?

Cause I definitely want to do a couple color tours this time.

You can do micountyroads.org MI back roads.

All right, well, that is perfect timing for me because I want to get out there with the top down and enjoy our beautiful state.

Dustin, it has been wonderful to connect with you today.

I've really enjoyed this conversation.

So thank you so much for sharing your journey with me.

Thank you so much for having me.

I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to share with everyone.

Well, it's been a great conversation and Dustin, I look forward to Bumpin India on Campus or other places.

And thanks for all that you do.

Absolutely.

LCC Alumni Stories is recorded and produced by Steve Robinson on LCC's downtown campus.

The soundtrack, who Told you'd?

Is licensed through Dewolf Music and was performed by Ian McCanty.

Thanks for listening.

Discover what our other alumni have been up to and Explore more than 30 podcasts on LCCConnect.com and if you're an LCC alum and you want to share your story with me, send me an email@steverrobinsoncc.edu.

until next time, keep learning.

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