Program to retain millennials facing budget ax

Serve Here CT funds positions, school costs

When Alva Greenberg and Thomas Gullotta set out to create a program that would help Connecticut retain millennials, their goals were these: drive down college debt, start new careers and get the millennials involved in their communities.

Now in its second year, Serve Here CT, which uses public and private funds to match qualifying millennials with nonprofit jobs, has accomplished all three.

The problem? The public funding is about to go away.

According to Gullotta, Serve Here’s chief adviser, somewhere between onefourth and one-third of the organization’s budget is funded by ConnectiCorps, a program to curb urban unemployment.

In the budget Gov. Dannel P. Malloy released last week, the $125,458 ConnectiCorps budget line becomes $0 for the next two fiscal years.

Gullotta said he understands why lawmakers have to make cuts and knows they’re making tough decisions. But Connecticut, he pointed out, is one of about 20 states losing young people faster than most — particularly well-educated young people.

In a state whose core industries include insurance and banking, it’s important to retain people who are capable of filling the jobs, he said.

“Unless these states come up with ways of changing not only the economic environment, but also their appeal to young people who are looking for jobs and careers ... we’re going to be sort of in the same situation as those we call the Rust Belt,” he said.

Serve Here works like this: For each 18- to 29-year-old accepted to the program as a participant, called a fellow, the agency hands out $20,000. Half of that amount helps the fellow’s employer fund the position, and the fellow can apply the rest to pay off academic debt or use it for further education.

As she testified at the Capitol in Hartford earlier this year, Taylor Shelly almost certainly wouldn’t be in Connecticut were it not for Serve Here.

Shelly, whose field of study was theater, came to Connecticut from Texas in 2014 to intern with the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Although her transition was tough — the climate, the drivers and even the word “soda” made it feel like a foreign country — Shelly liked the work she was doing.

The theater liked her work, too. But when her internship drew to a close, theater officials realized they couldn’t fund another position.

“It’s an idea whose time probably has not yet come. It’s something people five, six, seven years from now will say, ‘We should have done this. Let’s try it now.’” THOMAS GULLOTTA, SERVE HERE CT’S CHIEF ADVISER

Enter Serve Here CT. Shelly, one of the project’s four inaugural fellows, became a marketing and communications associate for the theater. It was her first professional job in the arts. Now she’s a digital marketing coordinator at the Bushnell Performing Arts Center in Hartford.

“It’s bringing culture to the state, and new, fresh ideas,” Shelly said of Serve Here CT. “It’s a sense of community in a place where I had none. It’s the idea of doing something better for the area, for the state.”

“I really wish they would keep it,” she said.

Sandy Dursoier, who is one of eight second-year fellows, spoke just as highly of the program, which also features a class that teaches networking and other real-world job skills.

A native of Haiti who was forced to immigrate to the United States in 2005, after things got violent there, Dursoier overcame obstacles to obtain bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both in the field of biology.

She got a job working in a lab at Yale University. Then funding for that project ended. Dursoier found herself unemployed.

But with Serve Here’s help, she landed a job as a success adviser at Higher Edge in New London. It’s in line with a second love of Dursoier’s: Even as she was studying biology, she spent time working in residential life, advising other students and substitute teaching.

Higher Edge was a better fit than she could have imagined. Most of the students she works with, she said, come from low-income backgrounds and become first-generation college students.

“I was poor,” Dursoier said of her own past. “I don’t consider myself that now, but I came from a low socioeconomic status.”

Because she was able to rise, she knows others can, too. She tells them so. And then she helps them do so.

As for the job skills class, Dursoier at first dismissed it with an I’ll-go-if-I-have-to kind of attitude.

“But the funny thing is,” she said, “it has helped me so much in my professional life.”

While Gullotta and Greenberg, the Old Saybrook resident who is founder and president of Serve Here CT, are disappointed the government appears to have given up on the idea, they have reason to believe it might launch elsewhere. They wrote a book detailing the concept and their larger vision — one that, for now at least, won’t come to fruition.

“This was an attempt by Alva to do something out of the box,” Gullotta said. “It’s an idea whose time probably has not yet come. It’s something people five, six, seven years from now will say, ‘We should have done this. Let’s try it now.’”