What Do Rochester's Young Professionals Really Want?

This article was scraped from Rochester Subway. This is a blog about Rochester history and urbanism has not been published since 2017. The current owners are now publishing link spam which made me want to preserve this history.. The original article was published March 25, 2015 and can be found here.

     The following is a guest post submitted by       Clement Chung      , chair of
     RocCity Coalition's Advisory Committee.
      Submit your story today      .

This week,     RocCity Coalition

launched a survey to gather critical information about the state of the region's young professional community. We encourage you to     take the survey

and share it with as many of your friends, family and colleagues as possible...

   RocCity Coalition is a collaborative network of Rochester's young professional groups. Founded in 2004, we now consist of over 40 groups and partner organizations, representing approximately 6,000 young professionals.

Our mission is focused on attracting, retaining and empowering the young professionals of Greater Rochester, by providing information, ways to be involved, a chance to be heard and an opportunity to build a stronger community. As we celebrate our 10th anniversary and look back on how we've grown, we recognize that now is the time to take a strategic look at the future of our demographic, to map out how to get there over the next 10 years. This is why we are undertaking our     Vision 2025

project.

Like RocCity Coalition, Rochester as a community is at an interesting inflection point. We have (or will have) new leadership in government (at the City and Monroe County), business associations such as the Rochester Business Alliance, and prominent community organizations such as the United Way. At the same time, it seems like we face the same old issues we've always faced: poverty, discrimination (based on race, gender, sexuality, age, disability), educational inequalities, economic development, transportation and mobility, etc. These issues are interlinked at several levels, and for the most part, not a thought is given to the role our area's young people can play in addressing them. We look to the community elders, like we've always done, to propose solutions and pass down their wisdom. Maybe it may effect some small change, and we might inherit a slightly different problem by the time we reach their age.

Or maybe not. Maybe we can express a purpose that weaves our generation into the fabric of the future of our city and our region. Maybe we can have a seat at the table, not out of tokenism, but because our voices are recognized as authentic and invested in the outcomes, because we will live (for better or for worse) the legacies being planned today.

Our Vision 2025 project is about capturing what is going on with our young professionals, what the right vision should be to fully align our efforts with those of the wider community, and what support we need to help us achieve our goals. My aspiration is that through our work, people will see what value we can bring/are bringing to the conversation, and what help we need to be integrated into the overall solutions.

I understand this message is short on substance, but it's reflective of the project at this point - we need to hear from the community to tell us where we need to be more specific.

After the survey closes at the end of March, I will share some of the more interesting results, and where that will lead the next step of our research. I'm excited to see the outcome, and I hope you will be too!

Take the survey here

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