some good news for once

N.O. a beacon for young people

Molly Reid
August 18, 2007
Times Picayune

http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/08/no_has_become_a_beacon_for_you.html

Five days after she graduated from college in Philadelphia, Miji Park was gutting houses in New Orleans.

Bright and articulate with a degree in urban planning, Park said she was "not the world's best gutter," so the 23-year-old volunteered for a month at The Idea Village, a local nonprofit group that supports entrepreneurs.

She interviewed more than 60 entrepreneurs that month, from New Orleans and everywhere else. Each was passionate about contributing new ideas and services to the post-Katrina economic landscape, as were her colleagues.

Park had been here only a short while, but she realized that if any city in the United States could take a Katrina-induced breath of progressivism and turn it into something truly groundbreaking, it was New Orleans.

"It was amazing," she said. "This to me was really the spirit of entrepreneurialism. It really drew me to the city."

Park had lined up a well-paid research position in her hometown of Berkeley, Calif., and was to start in July 2006. She saw her work in New Orleans as more urgent and relevant, and she resisted the pull of a nice salary and a ticket home.

"The job in Berkeley was just a number and nothing else," she said. "What I could get from New Orleans was so much greater."

Park took a full-time position with The Idea Village in August as an associate in community development and urban planning, and she has been here since.

It's a story told over and over with every out-of-state young professional who arrives in New Orleans, bright-eyed and typically not long out of college, or every young native who returns home with a renewed sense of civic pride and duty.

Although the influx is by no means massive, it is substantial enough that experts cite plenty of anecdotal evidence that New Orleans, cast nationally as a place where many residents have not returned and others are still mulling whether to leave, is quietly attracting young people drawn by a sense of purpose.

Philadelphia native Jennifer Glick, 28, graduated from Tulane University's School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine and stayed in New Orleans to organize a sexual health program for teenage girls. Dan Favre, 25, from Joshua Tree, Calif., completed a summer internship for the Gulf Restoration Network and lives in the Faubourg Marigny working as a full-time campaign organizer for the nonprofit organization. There's John Alford, 32, who started a new charter elementary school in Mid-City, and Stephanie Slates, 28, a project manager for New Leaders for New Schools.

Many, like Park, arrive to volunteer for a couple of weeks and decide to stay. Others hear about post-Katrina life from friends who have settled in New Orleans and become intrigued by the wealth of opportunity the rebuilding city seems to offer. Many feel compelled -- called, even -- to help right the host of New Orleans' social ills that Katrina showed to the world.

"All the problems the city is facing -- economic development, health care, education -- are not that unique," Park said. "I think post-Katrina, New Orleans is the greatest challenge our generation will ever face, and it'll also be our greatest legacy."

It's a bold statement, especially for someone who describes herself as "not much of an optimist to begin with," but therein lies the sentiment driving young people to a suffering city that before the storm was hemorrhaging young talent as graduates sought job opportunities elsewhere because of New Orleans' moribund economy.

Now, instead of the brain drain, the city is nurturing a brain gain. New Orleans has become the testing ground for a new career and lifestyle ideal among today's 20-somethings -- called "millennials" by some -- one that places less importance on the value of money, title and a swift climb up the corporate ladder.

Faced with an increasingly global economy, less job security and more awareness of global problems, many graduates are seeking a more fluid and socially responsible career. New Orleans, with its myriad systems in crisis and authentic laissez faire charm, has emerged as a new mecca for adventurous young people hoping to start their careers, have a good time and make the world a better place.

City on the radar

To Tim Williamson, 42, founder of The Idea Village, the influx of young people is more than a trend. He sees it as part of a shift in New Orleans' collective ethos, one moving away from an entrenched old guard toward what he calls the "vanguards" of post-Katrina New Orleans.

The blow Katrina dealt to the city's centuries-old economic, political and social patterns has created an unprecedented amount of room for new ideas to take hold, which is precisely the kind of gap Williamson hoped to fill in 2000 when he founded The Idea Village to focus on innovations in business.

"It's based on the belief that how you fundamentally change the city is innovation, and innovation is based on the execution of ideas," he said.

From 2002 to August 2005, The Idea Village received 215 applications for entrepreneurial assistance; since September 2005, the applications total 978. While the nonprofit group does not track age, Williamson does acknowledge a rise in the population of young professionals, citing it as an indication that post-Katrina New Orleans is a magnet for fresh talent.

"Post-Katrina, there's an opportunity for talent to be attracted to us because there's an environment of social change. The people who are coming here are passion-driven. If you graduate from Harvard or something, you can move to New York and be just another person, or you can come here and be a part of something that's going to put your mark on changing the city," he said.

Richard Campanella, a geographer and associate director of the Tulane University Center for Bioenvironmental Research, estimated in early 2007 that 2,000 to 3,000 new young professionals had arrived in the city since Katrina.

Robert Edgecombe of GCR & Associates, a New Orleans research group, said the number of young professionals coming to the city is difficult to quantify but that "anecdotal evidence suggests that the number is significant and that it represents a range of skills being applied to government, nonprofit and private employers."

'People want to be here'

In June, Forbes magazine ranked New Orleans 17th among major American cities for attracting young professionals, beating out larger metropolises like Houston, San Diego and Chicago. New Orleans also placed third for its concentration of unmarried people in their 20s and 30s.

According to data from Hire Tulane, the university's career services center, 25 percent of students who registered with the center during the 2006-07 school year said they planned to stay in New Orleans after graduation. Amjad Ayoubi, director of Hire Tulane, calls it a "very decent number," considering that 80 percent of the student body is from out of state.

Teach for America has placed 120 new teachers, almost all of them age 22-35, in New Orleans for the 2007-08 school year. In addition, more than 200 Teach for America alumni, who have completed their two-year stints, decided to stay in New Orleans to continue their careers, 100 of them working within the education system.

"The need is great, and people want to be here," said Mary Garten, executive director of Teach for America's New Orleans arm. "We're definitely approaching a critical mass of young professionals in the city."

In something of a reversal, the long-suffering Orleans public defenders office recently cherry-picked 10 new hires from some of the nation's top law schools. Washington lawyer Brian Privor, who clerked in New Orleans after law school and recently completed a six-month post with Tulane University's Criminal Law Clinic, said that before Katrina, public defender positions in New Orleans often were seen as an inferior alternative to private practice or other government jobs. With impossible caseloads and scant funding, the office tended to attract only the most devoted public servants and those hungry for trial experience, as well as law school graduates who couldn't land more attractive positions.

After garnering national media attention about the deplorable state of the criminal justice system after Katrina, the public defenders office began to see more interest. They hosted hundreds of law school volunteers to help clear a Katrina-induced backlog of indigent defense cases and received 110 applications for 10 public defender positions. Among the applicant pool were graduates from Harvard, New York University, Columbia and University of California-Berkeley, as well as Tulane and Loyola universities.

The public defenders office is "happy to be one avenue by which professional people are choosing the city of New Orleans post-Katrina," said Christine Laymann, director of the office. "I know from personal conversations that those around the country who have applied to the OPD or who have offered their time on a volunteer basis are doing so in large part because they have been touched by the crisis in our city and want to do their part to help rebuild."

'Generational marker'

Why does New Orleans resonate so strongly with today's graduates? According to a 2006 survey conducted by a Boston think tank, so-called millennials, the demographic group born after 1981, are more socially and environmentally conscious than any previous generation.

Sixty-one percent said they "feel personally responsible for making a difference in the world." A whopping 79 percent say they want to work for a company that benefits society, while 54 percent stated they would "refuse to work for an irresponsible corporation."

Researchers Neil Howe and William Strauss anticipated the do-gooder trend in their 2000 book "Millennials Rising." They see it as a result of several factors: the rise in college attendance, the child-oriented culture millennials have enjoyed since they were born, and the apathy and disillusionment that, in their opinion, characterized Generation X.

From the "Baby on Board" stickers in the 1980s to the endless media reports on child safety, millennials have been protected, cared for and encouraged -- often pressured -- to succeed. They grew up in a time of uninterrupted economic prosperity, only to come into adulthood with several global crises looming -- namely the fight against terrorism and global warming. Mix in a five-figure college education and the passing of Generation X slacker-chic, and the current generation of young adults are, Howe and Strauss hypothesize, poised to "embrace a world-saving role."

"Katrina is absolutely .¤.¤. a generational marker," Strauss said recently. "I've heard a lot of millennials say that the failure to prepare for Katrina, as well as the very problematic failed response to it, is an illustration of the older generations not getting their act together on this, and they are committed to making sure that this doesn't happen again."

Shifting work attitudes

Also at work is a vastly different professional landscape for today's graduates than what their parents enjoyed. Millennials are leaving college to find work in a deunionized, outsourced, pension-free economy, with more and more entry-level positions becoming contract or temporary spots without generous salaries or benefits.

Apparently unable to rely on a lifelong career and healthy retirement plan, graduates are turning toward what they expect will be a more varied, entrepreneurial career. Instead of signing on with a large corporation with clearly defined advancement, some graduates are opting for multiple employers through freelance and contract work. They rely more on external networks and see themselves as more open to changing career directions.

There's also a greater importance placed on the balance of life and work, and New Orleans' traditionally easygoing pace combined with a newfound sense of recovery-driven urgency make it appear to be a perfect place to work and play.

Labor and management researchers Michael Arthur and Denise Rousseau identify this new professional path in their 1996 book, "The Boundaryless Career."

"Firms today cannot promise a lifelong career, or anything close to it; people can no longer expect such a prospect," they write.

"The boundaryless career perspective suggests that people take responsibility for their own career futures. If they are to do so, cultivating networks and gaining access to other people's knowledge and resources are fundamental steps."

Building networks

Already, a number of young professionals are building the kind of networks and resources that could foster this new career ideal in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Nathan Rothstein, 23, a native of Massachusetts, works three jobs, one as a recruiter for New Orleans College Prep Charter School, another developing the Newcomer Incentive Program for the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans, and an unpaid position developing the NOLA YURP Initiative, a Web site and nonprofit dedicated to helping foster a strong community of young professionals in New Orleans.

As a graduating senior, Rothstein had been offered a full-time position with the Democratic National Committee. He turned it down and headed south in June 2006, intent on absorbing as much of post-Katrina life and politics as possible.

"The minute I got here I decided to go to one meeting after another just to get a sense of what was going on. I didn't speak; I just listened," Rothstein said.

In April, Rothstein founded a Web site to help young professionals network, share resources and find jobs in New Orleans. While The Idea Village prefers the term "vanguards," Rothstein's project caters to "YURPs," or young urban rebuilding professionals.

The Facebook-style Web site, www.nolayurp.com, has attracted more than 500 members in the past two months. A list of 59 "member objectives" ranges from the vague and lofty -- "alleviate the causes of poverty in New Orleans" -- to the simple and specific -- "create a political action committee .¤.¤. that could create and prioritize political objectives for young New Orleans professionals."

Rothstein hopes to attract financing through grants and sponsorships in order to work full time as director of the organization.

"A lot of people who are contacting me are saying, 'I've heard a lot about everything that's going on down here, and it sounds really exciting.' There's this buzz," he said. "I think there's this energy that maybe young people can do things differently than the current generation. If we start unifying now, in the future, all of us will be more well-connected and .¤.¤. will be able to accomplish a lot more."

Also helping to connect young professionals are marketing associate Michael Karnjanaprakorn, 25, and Lauren Baum, 26, who works for The Idea Village. The pair founded a New Orleans chapter of Likemind, a national networking movement with groups across the country who host monthly meet-and-greets for young, socially conscious professionals.

The group has met five times since May, with attendance growing from an initial 15 to more than 40. Karnjanaprakorn also is developing a New Orleans version of the New York-based Web site All Day Buffet, www.alldaybuffet.org, which hosts and lists fun events with a social-minded bent that tries to make young people "full on good."

Heather Mack, 27, a repatriated New Orleanian who works as a freelance nonprofit consultant, founded the Job Seeker's Alliance, a networking group for people looking for work in the nonprofit sector. Mack is emphatic about the importance of networking to her generation.

"A lot of people only think of it when it's time to find a job. So many people think that a job search is only a temporary thing. I know a lot of people who want to come down and are eager to rebuild, but are unlikely to find paid work right away. It's an ongoing process," she said.

Still finding their voices

Such eagerness sometimes makes New Orleans' young professionals come off as naive to residents worn out by the daily grind of post-Katrina life.

It's an easy criticism: They're carpetbaggers, they're dilettantes, they're just here to get their do-gooder fix and after six months, they're gone.

But several young people interviewed for this story said they have no plans to leave. Rothstein and Favre say they can see themselves settling down in New Orleans. Park says she'll probably return to the West Coast ultimately but has resolved to stay through the summer of 2009, after which she plans to attend graduate school.

"I don't see myself staying here for the long haul .¤.¤. but I'm a very loyal person, and I think in order to make an impact, you need a few years," she said.

Williamson says the young professionals trend is going through a "sorting process," wherein the newcomers are still finding work, finding one another and finding their voices.

"Once they gain the traction and momentum and realize they have influence -- economic, social, political -- when that happens, that's when you're going to see this movement reach the tipping point, I believe," Williamson said.

Privor, the Washington lawyer whose six-month rebuilding stint has come and gone, acknowledges that the wide-eyed moxie of many young newcomers has a certain tinge of naivete and sanctimoniousness. However, he said, they still fill an important role in the rebuilding. What's more, their experiences in New Orleans, whether they last six months or six years, will form their sense of civic duty and social justice for the rest of their lives -- and he should know.

A self-described cynic, Privor calls his time with the Criminal Law Clinic a "transformative experience," helping him to better see the social obligation of his work.

"I think if you spend any significant amount of time here, I don't think you can avoid being changed by it," he said.