This Charlotte nonprofit wants to help college grads of color beat the odds
When Jonathan Gardner first started looking for a job in Charlotte, he floundered.
“I had no social capital here,” said Gardner, who moved to the city from Philadelphia several years ago. “Especially being African American, trying to break into marketing was something totally different.”
When he did find work in 2016, he realized just how many recent graduates like him had fallen into the same rut.
“I was hearing the same exact thing (from my colleagues),” he said. “Though they went to college, they didn’t really have the support trying to navigate the employment process.”
Three years later, he founded GardHouse, a Charlotte-based nonprofit that is helping students of color bridge the often overlooked gap from college to career.
The program connects students from local universities with career coaching, one-on-one support and local internships in a city known for its humming job market — and limited economic mobility.
Closing the economic mobility gap
Gardner said there’s one particular statistic that spurred him to launch GardHouse: the fact that college graduates of color, over the last several decades, can be twice as likely as their white counterparts to be unemployed after school.
That holds true as recently as 2019, when an Economic Policy Institute study found that Black workers in the U.S. overall had double the likelihood of experiencing unemployment, though the gap for college-educated workers was smaller.
“It’s great to get these students into post-secondary education,” he said. “(But) to see that change in upward mobility for communities of color, they need to have that same level of support throughout.”
Gardner decided to launch GardHouse in Charlotte in part because of the 2014 Harvard study that ranked the city last in the country among major U.S. cities for economic mobility.
“Charlotte quickly became home for me,” he said. “I wanted to at least say that while I was here, I created something that was able to assist the city in upward mobility.”’
How the program works
The selection process for each new group of students begins in the fall.
Then, students from different colleges in the Charlotte metro area get GardHouse support throughout the school year, including resume help, interview prep and one-on-one career coaching meetings once a month.
GardHouse also has worked with more than 140 local nonprofits and small businesses in Charlotte to provide program participants with paid 16-week internships.
GardHouse pays for most students’ $23 an hour salaries, so small employers benefit from extra help they otherwise might not be able to afford.
The program is accepting 40 students into this year’s group. But next year, Gardner is hoping to nearly double that number, thanks in part to a recent $100,000 grant from Ally Financial’s foundation.
Eventually, he wants to take the program nationwide
The recent grant will be an important first step.
This story was originally published September 8, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
