The Opportunity Youth Challenge in Memphis

By Jamie Griffin, Assistant Director of Creative Outreach and Special Projects, Memphis Public Library

This blog post is part of a March 2025 series highlighting the Creating Youth Opportunities (CYO) initiative, a ULC program that directly supports the capacity of 11 participating libraries to serve a total of 222 communities and reach more than 411,000 opportunity youth. The blog series features several guest authors, including partners and library staff who participate in the CYO program.

Mama Maxine, as the kids who walk by her house after school call her, looks out from the porch of her home located in the heart of Orange Mound in Memphis. She’s watched the evolution of the neighborhood, which was the first in the United States built by and for African Americans, over the 40-plus years she lived in it. She has stories upon stories to tell. She tries to maintain a sense of optimism, but admits it is difficult at times.

Like many Memphians, she reads the headlines and watches the top stories on local news stations. It doesn’t always paint the best picture for our future. Especially, “the young folks” as she calls them. “What we gonna do with them?” The question may come across as rhetorical to some, but Maxine prefers an answer.

Why? Because the young folks have been, in Mama Maxine’s words, “cutting up.” The statistics support her assessment, as does Steve Mulroy, the District Attorney of Shelby County, which Memphis is the county seat.

“The demographic between 16-24 is the dangerous period,” Mulroy said during a Memphis City Council Committee meeting addressing crime last year. “That’s when people are most likely to offend and to offend violently.”

That age range, when not working nor part of higher learning or training, is considered “opportunity youth.” Memphis, according to a 2021 national study, had the third-highest percentage of such youth in the country with more than 34,000 people in the city’s population fitting that distinction.

A University of Memphis crime study shows over a three-year span nearly 50 percent of gun arrests in Memphis were made of people between the ages of 18-24. It also concluded neighborhoods with high levels of school dropout rates had the highest numbers of homicides and that gun violence, homicide, domestic violence and youth are all connected in Memphis.

The challenge of opportunity youth is not just about crime, however; it’s about the future and how bleak it becomes for someone when they lack work experience coupled with low educational attainment. That is what our library system, Memphis Public Libraries, had to consider when thinking about ways to address the opportunity youth numbers in the city.

We were and are aware of some of the challenges, including economic, transportation, and, of course, overall lack of opportunity. So, when we were told the Urban Libraries Council (ULC), with the help of a generous grant from the Walmart.org, wanted to assist our community and others around the country take on the opportunity youth challenge, we were ecstatic.

But how? The initial thought was having an Opportunity Youth Fair, similar to a college fair or job fair to which we would invite as many agencies and organizations in the city as possible that offered services to this age group to come to one place: the Central Library. Over one day, these organizations would share information about what they have to offer and, when applicable, enroll youth on the spot.

This was certainly in line with the goals of the City of Memphis, which created Opportunity R3 (rethinking, rebuilding, rebranding), to provide an economic pathway for those 16-28 by providing training in software development.

There are other organizations in the city providing services for opportunity youth too, including nonprofits like Seeding Success and The Collective Blueprint. With the help of the Memphis Public Libraries’ LINC 2-1-1, which compiles organizations in a database by service type, finding most of these agencies wouldn’t be nearly as difficult as starting from scratch.

The challenge would be getting young people to the Opportunity Youth Fair. We would need an aggressive marketing campaign but also a means to address the transportation issue. For the latter, we planned to work with the Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA), the city’s bus system and Uber, to pre-pay for rides to the library and back.

We also planned to give the participants a printed catalog with information about the organizations, both in attendance and not. Attendees could take this catalog with them, as well as access it on the library website.

Although all of it seemed doable, it just felt like something better was looming, yet I didn’t know what that was. My concerns were multiple: the biggest being it was just a one-day, four-to-five-hour event. Plus, it’s one location on that one day. Still, it’s a plan and could hopefully help move the city forward with the bigger picture.

But as I was working on my library goals for 2025, it came to me. We had started Continuing Education & Lifelong Learning (CELL) classes for adults during the Fall of 2022 with about 12 course offerings. The courses were made available courtesy of the Memphis Library Foundation. By the summer of 2024, it had grown to 20 classes with a focus on older adults who want to improve their chance for advancement at their current place of work or just wanted to learn something new as a hobby. The first session included classes like sign language, intro to Spanish and creative writing.

Now, what if we opened this up to those age 16-and-up?, I thought. And, we could look to offer some classes that would help kick-start a career as opposed to enhance one.

Some people say luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Well, I got very lucky. I was sharing these plans at our Teen Services meeting and a representative from one of the branches said she wanted to be part of this shift in thought.

I’m not sure who was the preparation part of the equation and who was opportunity, or maybe we were part of both, but Damonic Davis of our Hollywood Library Branch was just what the CELL team needed.

Her hands-on connection with teens and teen services providers took planning to another level. The Spring session, which will start April 1 and end May 31, 2025, will include courses of particular interest to the young adults, like filmmaking with your smartphone, mastering A.I., and starting a business from scratch. With those additions and many more, we now have at least 33 offerings for the spring with great potential for more to come.

Another bonus is having 18 library locations, as the classes will be offered in various communities throughout the city and some online. This means we are able to help address the transportation concerns. Times for the classes include mornings, afternoons, evenings, and even weekends.

Although I learned this lesson before, it was a refresher: don’t be afraid to make changes, especially if it is for the better.

When I shared this with ULC staff they joined in our optimism. But the real test was getting the endorsement from people like Mama Maxine, who make up the DNA of the city. I told her I had an answer to her question about the young folks. Upon hearing the plan, she smiled and shook her head up and down and said, “You know what, you might be on to something good. It certainly can’t hurt.”

Read this article on urbanlibraries.org.