Next Generation Men & Women (NextGen), a workforce development nonprofit focused on introducing opportunities to high school students from typically overlooked backgrounds, is celebrating a decade of work in Atlanta.
NextGen was founded by Ian Cohen, Travis Salters and Ben Sperling, formerly public school educators themselves, for the purpose of “serving students traditionally overlooked for enrichment opportunities.” The nonprofit serves students from six schools in South and West Atlanta: Benjamin Banneker, South Atlanta, Booker T. Washington, Carver, Maynard Jackson, and Therrell.
In its 10 years, the nonprofit has had a 99 percent rate of postsecondary education from the 450 current students and 211 alumni — a rate higher than the schools from which it serves and higher than the Atlanta Public Schools average of 88.4 percent.
Data from the Distressed Communities Index shows that much of the southwestern parts of Atlanta fall under the “at risk” or “distressed” categories; this reflects in the school systems too, with some of the zip codes in these parts of the city having rates of no high school diploma of nearly 20 percent.
It should come as no surprise for Atlanta, which regularly ranks as one of the worst cities of its size for income inequality between races in the nation. Historically, these parts of the city were largely minority neighborhoods — something that isn’t overlooked by NextGen as part of its mission to improve the outcome of Atlanta’s overlooked and underserved zip codes.
“We are trying to breathe life into the old adage and proverb that ‘it takes a village to raise a child,’” said Phil Olaleye, executive director of NextGen and representative for the Georgia House of Representatives District 59. “So NextGen builds that village.”
The program has students meet for an hour after school twice a week; it also takes them on monthly trips called ‘exposure trips’ where they visit a variety of workplaces — in industries ranging from logistics, transportation, skilled trades, financial services, art, media and more.
“Our job is to provide access to those environments, to learn from the people doing it in the places that they’re doing it, to build that excitement, that confidence that young people need to one — know that they belong and that those places and opportunities are accessible — and two — to tap into and leverage the teachers and college students who facilitate our program to build plans to graduate high school and connect to the dots [to their career].”
NextGen partners with over 65 local companies and technical colleges to make the exposure trips possible. Additionally, students have the opportunity each summer to participate in 5-6 week part-time internships. These provide opportunities to meet professionals that kids from other neighborhoods have the chance to bump into while doing something as simple as being at the grocery store or meeting through a family event. In other words, it gives the kids an opportunity to expand their network into neighborhoods with more opportunities.
What’s even more exciting, said Olaleye, is that with every year, the NextGen community itself gets stronger.
“Our first graduating cohort was 2018, literally when I first started,” said Olaleye, who joined NextGen in November of 2017. “Now those graduates are in the workforce, and, in some cases, we have graduates of our program who — in a 6-year span — went from going on an exposure trip and meeting professionals and learning about a career field to now being in that career field and hosting exposure trips at their workplace for current NextGen students. So it’s a pretty cool and amazing experience to see a NextGen alum in a position to pay it forward.”
This year, NextGen is looking to reach new heights by setting what it calls its most ambitious goal yet: raising $230,000 by Oct. 31 to sponsor 100 students and cover all their program expenses for the 2024/25 school year. For the week of Oct. 15 through Oct. 22, every dollar raised will be matched up to $50,000.
A familiar tale
Olaleye was reminded of the impact NextGen can have through one student. The student had to move three times — and attend three different high schools — in one school year due to rent increases and financial struggles.
Economic stability broke the student’s family apart, and he was put into foster care in Stone Mountain — but he still found his way to Southwest Atlanta through multiple buses because he didn’t want to attend another school and be displaced from NextGen.
“He found his people, found his brothers, found fellowship, found support, found something that was exciting and uplifting in NextGen,” said Olaleye.
The student went on to attend Georgia State University and worked multiple jobs while taking classes to afford tuition; this past spring, he graduated from the school.
This story, while filled with resilience, support and triumph said Olaleye, is one not unfamiliar to many in the city — including himself. Olaleye, too, came from humble beginnings, remembering all too well the feeling of slim odds at being accepted into college, and even slimmer that he would have a way to pay for them if he was.
During high school, he remembered financial stresses breaking his immigrant family apart, causing a disinterest in school and a greater focus on working an afterschool job to help provide for his family. “What was there to aspire to,” thought Olaleye.
He went on to be accepted to the school he thought was out of reach — Duke University — before joining the U.S. Peace Corps and later attending Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
It’s these memories — both of the financial hardship and lack of opportunity, and the people who pushed him to apply to places that seemed out of reach — that fuel his passion for the work he can now do with NextGen.
“It’s the tale of two lives lived in Atlanta, just depending on what your zip code is,” Olaleye said. “We can build a community that makes it easy for everyday Atlanta show care, who want to be a resource for young people in our city, to show up and open the doors to their workplaces and make themselves accessible, so that you’re no longer limiting a young person to their community or circumstances, but opening up a world of opportunity.”
NextGen’s next steps
Opportunity is being facilitated by everyday Atlantans, Olaleye said, who care about their city and its future. And because of the trailblazers over the past decade, NextGen is looking forward to another Georgia city with similar barriers for high school students: Macon.
Because so much of the work NextGen does is relational and in-person, NextGen wanted to expand to a city that was close enough for leadership to be able to travel there and invest the time that its students deserve. Additionally, the now-superintendent of the Bibb County School System was formerly an associate superintendent with Atlanta Public Schools and had engaged with NextGen’s work in Atlanta before.
With the Macon expansion, NextGen looks to build on its past successes and offer its network to a whole new clientele of students previously out of reach.
Whether it’s the Atlanta cohort or Macon, Olaleye realizes that education alone doesn’t turn an entire neighborhood around —- but that shouldn’t stop anyone from recognizing the power of investing in the youth.
“What we can do is tap into the power of hope, the power of excitement, for a young person around whom they could potentially be beyond high school,” Olaleye said.
