I had the pleasure of meeting Carolyn Boyle and Dinah Miller of Texas Parent PAC yesterday, as they were in town to publicize their endorsement of Sherrie Matula. They gave me a list of their endorsed non-incumbent candidates for the 2006 cycle, and the one name on there that I had not been aware of before now was Phillip Shinoda, who is running in HD114 up in Dallas against Rep. Will Hartnett. Here’s the press release (Word doc):
“Phillip Shinoda has served Dallas for decades as a business executive and avid community leader, and he would bring fresh energy and innovative solutions to the Capitol,” said Pam Meyercord of Dallas, a Texas Parent PAC Board member and resident of H.D. 114. “It’s time for a change in Austin, and Phillip Shinoda will make us all proud. He is an open-minded man of faith and integrity who represents the mainstream values of our community.”
[…]
“Since 2003, whenever there was a critical ‘line in the sand’ vote about public education, incumbent Will Hartnett ignored the voices of parents and educators and voted as directed by the political leadership ” said Dinah Miller of Dallas, Texas Parent PAC board member. “Dallas families deserve an independent representative who stands up for children and their neighborhood schools rather than a politician who falls in line and plays follow the leader.” She noted that in the recent special legislative session, Hartnett voted to keep all revenue from Governor Rick Perry’s new business tax from ever funding public education.
Shinoda is the only candidate in this race who has taken a stand to oppose siphoning money from public schools to fund private school tuition vouchers. In 2005, Hartnett supported legislation that would have spent hundreds of millions of tax dollars to enroll low-income and Spanish speaking students in private academies.
Texas Parent PAC leaders said Shinoda epitomizes the type of intelligent and dedicated public servant who should be elected to the Texas legislature.
I’m going to skip the bio stuff from the press release because the first page I found when I googled Phillip Shinoda was this profile of him in Philanthropy World Magazine.
In life there are couch potatoes and there are tireless volunteers. Phillip Shinoda is the latter.
For more than 20 years, Shinoda has devoted vast amounts of time to service for a plethora of high-profile boards and civic groups in Dallas. He has been instrumental in helping to plan a new addition at the Sixth Floor Museum, improving the Chamber of Commerce’s leadership programs, and bringing together city leaders for dialogues on racial relations. He has worked closely with the prestigious Zale Lipshy University Hospital on its vision as well as the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center, an agency that serves victims of extreme child abuse.
As if all that weren’t enough, Shinoda has been a spokesman for the Center for Nonprofit Management and the Asian American Forum, and has helped guide the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas’ finances.
“Phillip has been in places of privilege, power and influence, but he has not forgotten his background. He uses that power to help those of lesser influence. That’s a true leader,” Suzanne Ahn, the late local Asian American activist, told The Dallas Morning News recently.
Shinoda is a modest, mild-mannered man who plays down his accomplishments, but his friends describe him as a driven intellectual who has risen to become one of Dallas’ power brokers. Nevertheless, he maintains a strong tie to his Asian roots.
Ahn credited him with helping her and other Asian-Americans find their hereditary cultural identities. “But he’s just as likely to help with the symphony as Asian-American issues.”
Currently the director of corporate and community relations at University of Texas at Arlington, Shinoda has served on the boards of the Dallas Museum of Art, The Hockaday School, North Texas Public Broadcasting, the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, the Better Business Bureau, Japan America Society, Zale Lipshy University Hospital, and the Leadership Dallas Alumni Association, and was a member of the Dallas Citizens Council.
[…]
His parents, Peter and Yoshiko Shinoda, a hard-working couple who owned a floral business, San Lorenzo, in Dallas’ design district, influenced their son’s desire to serve others. His father was active in the Lions Club and his mother with Zonta. Shinoda also cites his religious faith’s obligation to tithe as strongly influencing him to give selflessly.
Shinoda’s parents – both American citizens – fled California to avoid internment along with 120,000 other Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor at the onset of WWII. First living in a boxcar in Idaho where they were relegated to harvesting sugar beets, his parents later joined other family members in Grand Junction, Colorado, where they continued farming throughout the war. Although they escaped internment, they had family members in every camp.
Shinoda was born on March 22, 1944, in Grand Junction while his parents were fleeing persecution. In 1951, his parents moved to Dallas, where his father distributed flowers that his brothers grew. It was a difficult time for Japanese Americans. One wholesaler refused to “buy flowers from Japs,” he recalls. And, his parents were also asked to leave a Dallas church because they were Japanese.
But his family never allowed their negative experiences to dissuade them from being part of their community. To the contrary, Shinoda became a devoted civic leader who works diligently to improve race relations.
“It’s just part of the Dallas ethos – the importance of getting involved in civic affairs,” he says.
This is one impressive dude, and both Boyle and Miller spoke highly of him to me after I said I didn’t know anything about him. The district is redder than many of the ones in which ParentPAC is supporting a Democrat, but it’s not impossible. The two Congressional races there in 2004 split 57-43 in favor of the GOP, which is not far from what Juan Garcia and Kristi Thibaut face.
I’ll always have respect for Will Hartnett for the way he treated the Heflin/Vo challenge in 2005. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some way out beliefs, as the ParentPAC release notes, nor does it mean that I can’t support a clearly outstanding candidate against him. Shinoda easily hurdles any bar you want to set, and now that I know more about him, I’m happy to see that ParentPAC is behind him. Congratulations to Phillip Shinoda, who joins Sherrie Matula, Juan Garcia, Joe Farias, Valinda Bolton, Allen Vaught, Kristi Thibaut, Ellen Cohen, and Joe Heflin on the Parent PAC endorsee list.