Anchorage Daily News

When Liz Posey, Jonathan Teeters, Kokayi and Toccarra Nosakhere took their seats in a small Midtown boardroom on a recent snowy afternoon, it wasn't to talk corporate strategy, it was to plot a revolution.

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Their plan: change the face of Anchorage's professional elite.

What started as a discussion among Posey and friends in the spring has grown into the Urban League's Young Professionals, an organization pushing civic involvement and grooming a budding class of professional leaders among the most ethnically diverse generation of workers in the city's history.

"(We want) to strengthen young people in different ethnic communities ... to nurture young leaders, and get more young people of color to be socially engaged," said Posey, 27, the Young Professionals president and owner of a community-development consulting business.

The Young Professionals are an arm of the city's Urban League, a chapter of a national organization focused on helping blacks enter the economic and social mainstream. What makes Anchorage's Young Professionals different from any other similar Urban League group is that their membership is multi-ethnic, not just black. That makes sense in Anchorage where the black community is relatively small, but the nonwhite population made up of Alaska Natives, and a wide variety of ethnic groups continues to multiply.

"We have the first multi-ethnic charter in the country," Posey said.

Since launching in October, the Young Professionals membership has grown rapidly, populated with political activists, nonprofit organizers and small-business people in their 20s and 30s. The group's first high profile project: a voter registration drive aimed at training young people to register their friends.

The goal is to have 1,000 new minority voters by the 2008 presidential election. Young Professionals will host a series of civic engagement workshops with George Martinez, head of the New York-based Hip Hop Association, and the first hip-hop artist to be elected to public office, as a city councilman in Brooklyn in 2002. Martinez preaches that the popular musical genre is rooted in a community desire for social change.

Young voters may play a big role in the next presidential election, Nosakhere said. Look at Iowa, where a surprising number of young caucus-goers turned out, helping bring a majority behind Barack Obama, he said.

"Those who questioned if young people are interested in politics and the direction of the country now have their answer," he wrote in an e-mail the day after the Iowa caucus. "A new generation is screaming to be engaged."

Getting people involved is all about relationships, Posey said. People influence each other in social settings, which is why cracking into social networks is key.

The Young Professionals want to build a new, multicultural professional network, where young minority and white professionals can make social and professional connections. Posey was motivated by her own experience. She graduated from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., in 2003 and came back to Anchorage. In the workplace, she felt isolated.

"Those of us of color find ourselves alone more," she said. "I wanted to find a way to get connected with young movers and shakers who looked like me."

She broached the issue with friends, and soon saw there were many young people hungry for community. She started pulling the group together over the summer.

The workplace won't look the way it does now for long. With each generation, the labor pool in Anchorage has become more diverse, with the largest increases among those who identify as biracial. Among boomers, born between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s, roughly one in every four people is nonwhite. Among Generation X--those in their mid-20s to mid 40s--that number is roughly one in three. For the Millennial Generation, including those in their early 20s and younger, the number may approach half the population, according to U.S. census estimates.

The Young Professionals see doors opening as aging baby boomers -- who make up roughly a third of the work force-- approach retirement, Nosakhere said.

"As the work force does see this tremendous increase in diversity, what is that going to mean in terms of how we look at work and how we get along?" said Neal Fried, a state economist. " It's going to be very interesting."

The latest generation of workers is more likely to form relationships across cultures, said Teeters, 26, an organizer for the Democratic National Committee. Teeters himself is black, Native American, Scottish and German. Young Professionals offers everyone a home, he said.

"That struggle with multiethnicity, that is one thing we share," he said.

Nosakhere, 33, said the workplace won't just be influenced by cultural dynamics, it will change because of new, generational attitudes toward work. Generation X and Generation Y want to be more self-directed, and are more quality-of-life focused than their parents, he said. He gave the think-outside-the-box company Google as an example of emerging work culture.

Young Professional Jose Rodriguez, 24, just graduated from Alaska Pacific University with a degree in business management. He's Dominican, and moved to Anchorage from New Jersey. His ambition is to work on the business side of broadcasting. At the moment he's working on hosting a public affairs and music radio show in Anchorage. Part of his final project was a market study, where he discovered an untapped niche for Spanish-language radio advertisers.

Many young minorities have parents who are working class, he said. Young Professionals offers him connections the middle-class young people get though family.

"To me it's a matter of who you know," he said. "If your parents have a good job that pays a lot of money and they are in a business in town, you have a better chance of having a good job than me, just moving here."

Mariko Churchill, 31, is a volunteer coordinator with the Food Bank of Alaska. Her ethnic heritage is Japanese and American. She comes from an established Anchorage family and sees her role in the organization as someone who makes connections.

"You have folks that are intimidated by the process; even if they are welcome to step in the door they don't know they can," she said.

Eleanor Andrews, a semi-retired government services contractor and community activist, is board chair of the Anchorage Urban League, the group's parent organization.

She sits on other boards for several organizations that seem to all be made up of people of the same baby boomer generation, she said. Everyone complains about how hard it is to get young people involved. The growth of Young Professionals astounded her.

"These are kids who grew up here and everybody is their friend. Things aren't divided along color lines," she said.

"This is a petri-dish for maturing Alaska's next generation of leaders who represent everybody."

Find Julia O'Malley online at adn.com/contact/jomalley or call 257-4591.

New faces, new city In the past decade, Anchorage has become more ethnically diverse than many larger cities Outside. In occasional stories, we're looking at what the changes mean to Alaska's largest city. For previous stories, interactive graphics, photo galleries and audio clips, go to

www.adn.com/newcity

Group meets monthly Young Professionals meet at 6 p.m. the third Thursday of every month at the Anchorage Senior Center, 1300 E. 19th Ave. For more information visit www.nul-anchorage.org, or call 279-6022 Group meets monthly

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