Mayor Barry calls on Nashville employers to step up for 10K youth job goal

By next summer, Mayor Megan Barry wants 10,000 youth in Nashville to have employment — and she’s depending on the private sector to help meet that goal.

Barry on Tuesday called on Nashville businesses to partner with a mayor’s office program called Opportunity NOW as she formally launched the employer recruitment arm of an initiative that's been in the works for months.

At a news conference to lay out details, Barry said the private sector needs to account for an estimated 7,500 of the 10,000 jobs, with non-profit organizations and Metro government accounting for the rest.

“Our community has to step up,” Barry said in an appeal to Nashville employers to help reach a jobs goal she touted routinely during her first year in office.

“Think about where you can put a young person to work, because, by putting them to work, you are giving hope and opportunity, and that’s opportunity that they need right now," she said.

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Opportunity NOW, which the mayor’s office and Nashville Career Advance Center will oversee together, is targeting young people between the ages of 14 and 24.

The initiative will offer youth employment summer programs for recent high school graduates, according to the mayor’s office. The plan is for a separate high school internship program for rising 11th and 12th graders. Interns would be paid by Opportunity NOW, which is to serve as the “employer of record.”

The mayor’s office plans to announce job openings through the program in January.

Barry has outlined multiple ways companies can get involved:

• Partner with Opportunity NOW to hire a young person directly.
• Provide work sites for young people who can participate in the internship or summer programs overseen by Opportunity NOW. This requires the employer to pay $2,500 to sponsor an intern — which covers wages and programming costs — and $700 for a student who is taking part in the summer program. 
• Donate toward the per-participant costs of serving the young person in Opportunity NOW.

To help kick off the business recruitment, Nashville-based HCA on Tuesday announced a donation of $250,000 to Opportunity NOW that will cover 100 internships.

“We have a huge demand and need for talented employees, and we know that the future of HCA is in the young people of today,” said John Steele, senior vice president of Human Resources at HCA. “We are looking to employ as many of these young people that we can find.

“We hope some of our fellow companies join us, including our health care peers.”

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Although the goal is for 10,000 jobs for youth, these don’t necessarily have to be new jobs under parameters outlined by the mayor’s office. Barry has also asked that employers notify the mayor’s office of existing jobs that are filled by youth that would count toward the benchmark.

Charles Story, chairman of the Middle Tennessee Workforce Development Board, called Opportunity NOW “one of the boldest and most positive initiatives in our city in a generation.”

“This initiative is going to transform a lot of lives,” he said. “Employment is a powerful thing, no matter how old you are or far you’ve gotten into your career.”

But the initiative has also comes with a significant cost to Metro government.

Barry and the Metro Council carved $1.4 million into the current 2016-17 budget just to get the program off the ground. Nashville-based public relations firms DVL Seigenthaler was hired to promote Opportunity NOW. Organizers say they will need $3 million for the next fiscal year in combined public and private dollars.

The initiative is being led by Ronnie Steine, a longtime former Metro councilman and vice mayor who was hired as a consultant by the mayor’s office and Ellen Zinkiewicz, youth and community service director at the NCAC.

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Barry’s youth employment initiative was borne out of recommendations that came from a series of summits that the mayor’s office hosted earlier this year to address spike in youth violence in Nashville. Public feedback found that youth have increasingly struggled to find access to employment in Nashville, particularly during the summer.

Nearly three-fourths of students at Metro Nashville Public Schools students qualify for federal free or reduced lunches.

“A lot of the kids at our Metro schools are at or below the poverty-line, so let’s give them the best chance that they have to get out of that,” Barry said.

Barry said organizers circled 10,000 as the jobs goal because she said this was the estimated number of youth in Nashville that need employment next summer.

Reach Joey Garrison at 615-259-8236 and on Twitter @joeygarrison.