Crosstown Concourse was loud on Thursday. The City of Memphis and the Collective Blueprint launched NextUp901, a free career program for adults between 18 and 30 who are out of school and out of work, and the room filled with the exact crowd it was built for.
The offer is simple enough to say in one breath: paid training in healthcare, IT and the trades, plus coaching, counseling, childcare assistance and a way to get to class. That last piece carries more weight than it sounds like. Plenty of programs hand out a schedule. This one goes after the reasons a schedule falls apart.
Mayor Paul Young framed it as clearing a path rather than adding another option. “We want to streamline what that process looks like, make it easier for people to access the resources they need to change their lives,” he said. The target is more than 5,000 Memphians trained by 2030, and the door is open now at NextUp901.org.
