Position wanted: A chance to improve city

[sg9018]

A article from Free Press Rochelle Riley,
http://www.freep.com/article/20090419/COL10/904190463

Position wanted: A chance to improve city

BY ROCHELLE RILEY
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST I had just finished taping a C-SPAN special at Harvard when a young man walked up to shake my hand.
"Hi, Miss Riley," he said. "I'm Bryan Barnhill. I'm a freshman here. I told you I'd get here."
I nearly cried.
That encounter happened four years ago, and Bryan was among the high school student leaders I had chosen the previous spring for a panel discussion on the Detroit Public Schools. He'd said then that he would get to Harvard. And I wasn't surprised.
Bryan was part of a cadre of hard-working leaders from high schools across Michigan who had excelled in spite of obstacles. I remember them talking about not having the lab equipment that most suburban kids had and not having the same curriculum in some of their schools. But they also talked about their hopes and dreams and goals in ways that stayed with me.
Today, Bryan Barnhill, 22, is back home in Detroit with a Harvard degree in government and a passion for urban development. He eschewed other opportunities to come home and help his city. But he can't find a job.
"It would be a very sad sign if I, and people like me, were not able to secure employment in Detroit," said Bryan, who even met once with Gov. Jennifer Granholm about her cool cities initiative to lure college graduates back to Detroit.
His situation today perfectly illustrates one of the city's greatest challenges: How can Detroit replenish its aging population with vibrant, young college-educated workers if there is no work for them? How can Detroit retain its best young minds if the city's economy can't support them?
Rising above surroundings
Barnhill grew up in a rough part of the city's east side, on Promenade off Conner and Gratiot. Survival was a learned skill.
"I remember going to sleep to an orchestra of gunshots," he said. "There were shakedowns, and there was a crack house on my block. I was one of those kids that walked around the corner to the liquor store to get candy.
"I played in the street with some plywood and a milk crate that was nailed to a pole so we could play basketball. I had to learn how to fight and have an aggressive glance and a slant in my walk.
"If it had not been for my parents, who had the courage to tell their children that they can be better than their surroundings ... if it had not been for the teachers who went above and beyond to be not only educators but nurturers ... I wouldn't have been here," he said.
His mother, Marcia, was a postal worker who enrolled in Wayne State University to become a nurse when Bryan was in middle school. When Bryan reached high school, his father, Bryan Barnhill Sr., also a postal worker, enrolled at the University of Michigan to study business. He later transferred to the Center for Creative Studies, but the economy forced him to take a truck driving job from which he was recently laid off.
"It's been kind of discouraging," said Bryan, who wants to work in urban planning and development, real estate and politics. "I attempted to get in contact with various city agencies. I even bombarded the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation and had to beg someone to look at my résumé."
Crisis and opportunity
John Fitzgerald Gates, an associate dean of administration and finance at Harvard College and faculty adviser to the Black Men's Forum, sees hundreds of students. Bryan Barnhill, he said, is special.
"Detroit is in a particular place in American history, and in this economically challenged time, given Detroit's challenges, Bryan is exactly the sort of person that the city needs," Gates said. "It would be a shame, a real shame, for Detroit if that city were to allow someone like Bryan to slip through their fingers. ... Bryan's calling is really to be a servant leader."
Bryan not only led the Black Men's Forum, but he also mentored poor kids in Boston, spoke before the Boston City Council on community issues, led demonstrations in support of equal rights, and still looked out, long-distance, for his little brother Andrew, now 17.
Bryan almost didn't come home after Harvard.
"Initially, I was planning on working elsewhere," he said. "I had ... been exposed to different professions, different industries, different locations, and ... had already started interviewing in New York and D.C. I had an offer to work at a firm in Boston."
But Detroit seemed to cry out to him.
"I was inundated with the negative press going on in Detroit, and I was also being inspired by the political and social transformation that was happening in our country with the election of Barack Obama," he said. "I'm not prepared to take flight and leave Detroit, because where there is crisis, there is opportunity.
"One of the triumphs of my life was my ability to recognize that I could achieve the best ... and Harvard represented the best in terms of institutions of higher learning, but also a symbolic step where my life was headed," he said. "I represented what Detroit was capable of producing."
And now Detroit can't find a place for him?
Contact ROCHELLE RILEY: rriley99@freepress.com

[6nois]

Thats great that he wanted to come back and all, but didn't he think about a plan to maybe set up his own way. Detroit is not exactly the place where you show up and get offered a job helping to improve it. It so DIY, and if you want to make a difference you have to find a way to do it outside of the typical power structure. If he really wants to stay he better be in for a bumpy ride. Financially one would do better elsewhere but he needs the commitment to stick around even if he isn't getting jack for what he does.

[Retroit]

Well said, 6nois.

Either get to the back of the line or start your own line.