New Orleans’s Youth Movement

Nonprofit leaders work to persuade young professionals who arrived after Katrina to call city home

Not long after Jonathan Graboyes graduated from college last year, he headed to New Orleans in search of nonprofit work.

“I sort of made a leap of faith in the city,” says Mr. Graboyes, now 23. “I drove down in my 1996 Subaru Outback from Philadelphia with no house to go to and no job. I knew that’s where I wanted to be.”

While still in college, he had made several trips to New Orleans to do research on the rebuilding effort after Hurricane Katrina, a topic he turned into the theme of his senior thesis.

Now Mr. Graboyes is the first full-time employee of the Broadmoor Development Corporation — and one of hundreds of young nonprofit leaders who have made this Gulf Coast city home in the three years since the storm struck.

Mr. Graboyes spends his days helping residents of the Broadmoor neighborhood find money to rebuild their homes. “I’ve definitely grown up a lot, by having residents put their trust in me to actually do something to help them,” he says. “You can’t not commit yourself 100 percent to that — anything less just feels horrible.”

The energy and enthusiasm of newcomers like Mr. Graboyes have provided a welcome lift to New Orleans charities, many of which are taking on ambitious new projects as part of the recovery effort. In some cases, the new arrivals are bolstering organizations that lost employees who decided not to return to the city after the flooding.

They are also helping to build the ranks of new groups that have sprung up since the storm.

With the city’s charities in a state of flux, young people are finding opportunities for jobs at a higher level than they might obtain in other cities. As a result, the recent transplants are playing an important role in rebuilding, but the long hours and stressful nature of the work can be emotionally draining.

Some observers believe that how many of these young people stay will be one factor that determines the pace of recovery.

So as the urgency of the disaster fades, nonprofit leaders now are turning their attention to how they can encourage employees who have relocated to make New Orleans their permanent home, not just a way station before starting careers or going to graduate school somewhere else.

Influx Continues

So far, however, interest among young people in the rebuilding of New Orleans shows little sign of abating. For example, TeachNOLA’s program to attract teachers from elsewhere to New Orleans received 2,439 applications to fill 103 positions for the 2008-9 school year, up from 2,228 applications last year.

But to keep interest high, a coalition of roughly a dozen nonprofit and business groups is starting 504ward: New Orleans Calling, an effort to persuade young people that they will find plenty of opportunities to advance their careers if they move to or stay in the city.

The three-year campaign — whose name is a play on the city’s 504 area code — will include a Web site with job listings and other information for professionals in their 20s and 30s and a program to connect newcomers with longtime residents and local leaders.

Too many of the young people who have moved to the city look at their time in New Orleans as temporary because they don’t know what their options are for advancement, says Leslie Jacobs, the local insurance executive and philanthropist who started 504ward.

The path for career development isn’t as obvious as it might be in a large city, she says, because New Orleans isn’t headquarters for many big corporations or national nonprofit organizations.

“We have to build a bridge to the young folks who are coming in town — who mainly are talking with each other — and the establishment, who are really interested in connecting with these young folks but don’t know how,” says Ms. Jacobs.

Idea Village, the charity leading 504ward, has seen firsthand the impact that new professionals have had on local charities.

Founded in 1999 to promote entrepreneurship and provide assistance to business owners, only two of Idea Village’s six employees, its co-founders, returned to New Orleans after the storm.

The organization has hired 10 people since Katrina, six of whom are new to the city. Two first learned about the group after participating in a volunteer program Idea Village created after the storm, in which teams of graduate and undergraduate students provide assistance to local entrepreneurs.

“What keeps me up at night is, how do you engage and retain talent beyond Katrina?” says Tim Williamson, president of Idea Village.

One of the things that Idea Village has done is try to help its new employees connect to longstanding leaders and organizations in the city. For example, Mr. Williamson introduced the new staff member who is leading the group’s effort to build business support centers to revitalize key commercial corridors to leaders of Greater New Orleans Inc., a regional economic-development group, where she is now the organization’s youngest board member.

“Pre-Katrina New Orleans was an insular, closed community,” says Mr. Williamson. “Katrina has opened up the networks, and it’s made it easier for someone not from here to get involved because there is this spirit of change.”

Bypassing ‘the Line’

Many young people say they have found opportunities in New Orleans to take on challenges that wouldn’t have been possible in other cities.

“So many times when you go into the working world, you’re expected to wait in line and wait your turn before you start making decisions,” says Nathan Rothstein, a 24-year-old charity leader. “Here people are able to come down right away and make a significant impact.”

Mr. Rothstein moved to the city in 2006 as an AmeriCorps member working with a rebuilding organization, and last year he formed the New Orleans Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals Initiative — NOLA YURP, for short — to help young professionals in the city connect with one another and attract more of them to the city.

The organization holds networking events and seminars for people working in New Orleans and workshops for college students to let them know how they can get involved in the city’s recovery effort.

Mr. Rothstein says that some 2,500 people have signed up to receive information about the group’s activities.

Shantrelle P. Lewis, 30, returned to her hometown after more than 11 years away to become executive director and curator of the George & Leah McKenna Museum of African American Art, which had just opened when Hurricane Katrina struck.

Ms. Lewis doubts she could have landed a position leading a museum fresh out of graduate school in any other city. But after a little more than a year on the job, she has realized that the flexibility and creative freedom come with greater responsibility.

“At the end of the day, either I can be very successful or I can be a huge failure,” says Ms. Lewis, “so that’s a lot of pressure.”

For others, the move into nonprofit work in the city seems like a natural transition from the storm-related volunteering they did.

Mischa Byruck, 26, left San Francisco for the Gulf Coast soon after Hurricane Katrina. He co-founded Emergency Communities, a volunteer effort that provided cooked meals, clothing and household items, Internet access, and child care in St. Bernard Parish and Plaquemines Parish, La., for roughly two years.

As the relief effort wound down, the thought of returning to California and trying to explain to prospective employers what he had been doing was daunting, says Mr. Byruck. “It’s just so abstract to people who haven’t been down here.”

Instead, he accepted a job with marketumbrella.org, a New Orleans organization that runs the Crescent City Farmers Market and helps local food producers find new markets for their goods.

“I’ve been working for people who could really appreciate the work that I did,” says Mr. Byruck, “and that was important to me.”

‘Life-Defining Moment’

Not all of the recent transplants are in their 20s and 30s.

In January 2006, Iray Nabatoff, 56, left his home in southwest New Hampshire planning to spend 18 days as a volunteer at a fledgling relief operation in St. Bernard Parish, which borders New Orleans. More than two-and-a-half years later, he’s still there, and serves as executive director of the Community Center of St. Bernard.

The organization continues to provide hot meals and distribute food, clothing, and household items, but it also offers a computer lab, prenatal care, legal services, and a place for residents to get together for evening activities, such as movies, arts and crafts, and dancing.

With a small staff, Mr. Nabatoff says that his job runs the gamut from fund raising and project management to making a run to Sam’s Club to pick up last-minute items for a group dinner.

“If I really realized when I took this project on how arduous and difficult it was going to be, I can’t really say that I would’ve stepped up the way I did,” says Mr. Nabatoff.

But at the same time, he says, “this has been my life’s defining moment, and I knew in my heart the right thing to do was to step up to the plate and give this my best shot.”

Newcomers who are directly involved with rebuilding work say that taking the time to really get to know residents, understand the challenges they face, and listen to their concerns has been important.

“In the beginning, you’d say street names wrong, and everyone would say, ‘OK, he’s from out of town,’” says Gill Benedek, 24, community-programs manager at the Neighborhoods Partnership Network, a clearinghouse to help groups in different parts of the city build relationships with one another.

He says his strategy for winning over skeptical residents was to “listen and shut up” and to go to as many neighborhood meetings as he could.

“Over time that trust is built when people start becoming familiar with you — even though you’re from out of town,” says Mr. Benedek.

The 11-person staff of New Schools for New Orleans, an education-advocacy organization that got its start after the storm, is roughly half longtime residents and half newcomers.

Employees new to the city really need to understand its socioeconomic history, says Sarah Newell Usdin, founder of New Schools for New Orleans.

“You’ve seen, post-Katrina, some of the most wonderful resiliency of people, but you’ve also seen some of the greatest trials and tribulations and frustrations,” says Ms. Newell Usdin. “Why those things exist — because of institutional racism and other things that are from our past — are incredibly important to understand and recognize as we move forward.”

Obstacles Remain

Despite efforts to keep young nonprofit workers in the city, some people who moved to New Orleans after Katrina are starting to think about leaving — or have already gone.

The birth of Michelle Shin’s first child in June 2007 prompted her to start thinking about whether she could balance her recovery work with the needs of her growing family.

With a new baby, the 60-hour work weeks, at minimum, she had been putting in as program manager for a mobile mental-health unit, based at Tulane University, were no longer possible.

Ms. Shin, 31, found another job as a fund raiser at the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association, but she says that even with a less-demanding schedule, high-quality, affordable child care in New Orleans was difficult to find.

So in June, Ms. Shin’s family relocated to Naples, Fla., where she continues to work for the New Orleans charity. Her plan is to spend a week in New Orleans every six weeks or so.

“I guess we’ll ultimately have to decide what to do, and I’m not sure what that is,” says Ms. Shin.

“I love New Orleans,” she adds. “I’m passionate about my work with the Lower Ninth Ward, and I’m not ready to let that go.”