Find Your Future: Career Exploration Fair hosts nearly 2,000 youth!

Earlier this month, Hampton Consulting had the honor and privilege of continuing to partner with United Way for Southeastern Michigan (UWSEM) to host the Find Your Future: Career Exploration Fair (Find Your Future) as part of their Education team’s efforts to ensure college and career readiness for Detroit youth. Find Your Future engaged nearly 2,000 freshmen students from 25 high schools across Detroit Public Schools Community District.

Find Your Future provided a space for high school freshman to plan for life, make connections, and build career awareness.  Diverse and robust programming included 15 workshops, from building healthy relationships; to defining success in high school and creating an aligned plan; to applying and paying for college; to launching a strong career immediately after high school.

In addition, 52 companies, organizations, and government and civil service entities hosted unique career exploration spaces that ranged from engineering to the arts. Ten college and university partners also joined us for the day to share post-secondary educational opportunities for students.

As one student eagerly expressed, “I can’t believe all of this is for us! We [standing with two friends] went to the session on college [applying and paying for college]. It was really helpful…I wish everyone our age could get this information. Today was great!   

The energy was simply incredible. As one partner shared, “I’ve never had the opportunity to connect with this many students!” We are thrilled to have contributed to such a powerful and important day.

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The United Way for Southeastern Michigan's mission is to mobilize the caring power of Detroit and Southeastern Michigan to improve communities and individual lives in measurable and lasting ways. Within their education work, the College and Career Pathways Team leads a Linked Learning model in partnership with schools across Detroit. United Way enlisted Hampton Consulting to partner with the College and Career Pathways Team to create a continuum of fairs directly intersecting with their education work across Linked Learning schools.

The Find Your Future: Career Exploration Fair was the second of three fairs in an annual continuum. Hampton Consulting led collaborative design efforts, including focus groups with high school freshman, to create a vision and detailed programming for these events. Ongoing planning, youth recruitment, as well as all facilitator and partner engagement for this fair were led by our team.

Want to learn more? Here are some additional great blogs--from both our partner in this work, United Way for Southeastern Michigan, and one of our fair career exploration partners, DTE.

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