We’re looking for more examples of programs to connect rural youth to local jobs.
Twitter friend Jenise Cook asked:
I’m wondering if you and your rural small biz network might have some experience helping students/young people find work in their area, so that they don’t have to leave their towns to go live in huge metropolitan areas. I’ve just begun volunteering with a group that wants our local businesses to partner with our local school district. We have ideas to implement, but I’d love to know who is also doing this, so we can learn from each other. And, so we don’t “reinvent the wheel”. :-) Thank you in advance for any information on the above you might have.
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| Get kids hands-on with local jobs. |
We have a few stories on this kind of thing. One small town did a blue collar career fair, and every small town should start one. Lots of blue collar jobs go unfilled in nearly every rural community.
Another larger town set up a project to connect local students to local employers, so they see opportunities before they just leave.
We think the workforce is such an important issue, we have an entire category of rural workforce articles and one on rural youth.
Do you know of other examples of small towns connecting their youth with local work opportunities?
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We all should help the locals because this will greatly affect our country as well as the government. Great post!
Jeremy, helping each other is pretty essential in small towns. Thanks!
Here’s an example from Kat Long, with the Ponca City Development Authority in Ponca City, Oklahoma:
“PCDA started a program roughly a year ago called Blue Wave (www.PoncaBlueWave.com) to recruit specific, skilled & educated blue collar workers to open employment positions in the Ponca City job market. As an extension of that program, we are currently aligning students (university and college) with internship possibilities for this and future summers. The next tier of this program will be aligning high schoolers with job shadowing and training programs for specific jobs in the target industries in Ponca City: sensor development & testing, oil & gas, high tech manufacturing, green & sustainability training as well as back office/sales.”
Thanks for sharing, Kat!
Another example from Oklahoma, this time from my friend Laura Girty:
“My fav ever ‘connecting youth to the needed jobs in a community’ was the long running medical scholarship program Fairview, Oklahoma, had: ANY Fairview graduate could go to college full scholarship in any medical field used in Fairview (Dentist, nurse, Dr. pharmacist, etc.) as long as they committed (signed) to return to Fairview to serve for some designated period if that position was needed at the time of their graduation!! It has been an amazing program and kept hospital, nursing home all well staffed and going for as long as I can remember while the other little towns in the area have struggled to keep their medical facilities alive.”
The Environmental Resources Training Center (ERTC) at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville (SIUE) has a one year program to train young people to be water and wastewater operators. They work with many small towns in the area to place their students as interns – and even help find them jobs – and really emphasize the value of serving their community.
Thanks, Jennifer. That is another excellent example.