Doing Good in the Community: Retaining Young People

As a group, we all found that it is becoming increasingly obvious that employers in our community are having a challenging time retaining employees. Often employees will find themselves directly out of college starting out their working career in the Waupaca community. Once they have a couple years of work experience, they will move to larger areas that can offer more lucrative pay and a larger variety of opportunities. We chose this topic because we wanted to find a way to retain these employees in our community and in our workforce. Our group researched what the issues are and why people choose to move out of our area. In our research, it became overwhelmingly obvious that as college students earned their degrees, they were taking on more debt. The higher paying jobs in bigger cities is hard for many of our smaller community employers to compete with. It would make sense that if our community could offer to help decrease the burden of student debt to members who reside and work in our community, that it would benefit them to stay. We looked for different directions on how to make this idea a reality. We approached three bodies; government, an employer and a local community foundation to assist us in getting our idea off the ground.

https://youtu.be/og4fDXbrg8w