Author Archives: André Natta

NOTE: Don’t forget to share your thoughts on whether or not we have a brain drain in Birmingham over on MCQ.

So apparently when The J. Clyde owner Jerry Hartley and Birmingham mayor Larry Langford had their disagreement yesterday tat the end of the Five Points South Merchants Association meeting, they weren’t arguing about that album by The Ramones. They also weren’t approaching the comments from the same perspective based on the varying accounts of the story. Though based on what’s been going on around the region for the past few years, they should have been.

Perhaps if Hartley had used the term human capital flight instead of brain drain Mayor Langford would have understood his point more clearly. Funny thing is I’ve sat in several meetings both here in Birmingham and elsewhere where the term brain drain has been used with most people agreeing that it is the case. It’s not necessarily a knock on the city’s residents, but the causes for the drain are something to consider when you look at the tools needed to showcase the magic that Mayor Langford says is happening right now in town and needs to continue to happen.

This would be why organizations like the local chapter of the Harvard Club created a program called “Stop the Brain Drain” and several organizations, including  our Regional Chamber of Commerce (it’s on page 2) and Empower Alabama (under education) use the term to describe our community’s perception that we cannot retain our college-educated individuals.

People have been working for years to combat the issue; in 2002, then CEO of CTS Steve Atkins told the Birmingham Business Journal that “we strive to keep these kids here by getting them involved in challenging and interesting projects and actually help with the brain-drain problem.”

When revealing their Top 40 under 40 in 2008, the BBJ reported that according to available data, Birmingham was the only city in Alabama that didn’t show a brain drain.

Even with those efforts and results, we should not be content with just getting by on our efforts to make the region more welcoming and inviting for those young professionals looking for somewhere to call home at the beginning (and hopefully throughout) their careers or to those that want to advance in their career considering metro Birmingham as an option. I’ll aim my comments towards the young professional angle.

There are a lot of active young people in Birmingham, AL nowadays. They are finding a way to have their voices heard, however we are still hearing them say that they need to go somewhere else to advance their careers. They want to make an impact now and have their voices heard; they’re willing to sit on a junior board and wait their turn, though they hope that they are being used as effectively as possible. If they find that they aren’t, they are more willing to disconnect from the rest of the community, depriving us of that one person that could take us to the next level. Sometimes that disconnection doesn’t necessarily mean leaving town but just leaving the high society life that many feel is the only way to become a leader.

We should not just look to young people as prospective members of a junior board or as people who can offer opinions on suggestions but not the reccommendations themselves. There is still a level of disconnection among young professional organizations, despite significant efforts for that not to be the case. There are also young people that don’t necessarily know how they can contribute nor do they feel as though they are going to be allowed to. Communication should be strengthened – which means more than just sharing what’s going on but figuring out how folks can work together to effective move Birmingham forward faster than it’s currently happening and that we’re actually working together and not functioning on two different planets of reality.

Our region’s future is dependent upon everyone being on the same page about the issues. Let’s hope that the buzz surrounding this exchange that exists online already ensures we’ve gotten to that point and that we can move forward to effectively deal with the problem, instead of spending more time hoping that the overlap that needs to be happening for meaningful progress to be made does.

André Natta is the stationmaster of bhamterminal.com.