Youth Office Shenanigans

Since my last post, my May Project has been a lot more interesting! On Monday last week, Nahuel took Erin to a few meetings around town concerning crime, so Adam and I had a bit of downtime during which we took full advantage of the drink closet and office Keurig (Adam’s signature drink is hot chocolate with two French Vanilla coffee creamers added in—it’s as ridiculous as it sounds) and learned a bit about Russian culture (which ended up being very timely since Adam just received his mission call to Yekaterinburg, Russia) with help from Bahh, Adam’s laptop’s narration voice.

When Nahuel got back to the office, he gave me a copy of the Metro St. Louis Export Plan to read and write a memo on. This document was pretty dense to get through, so I just turned my memo in to Nahuel yesterday. Essentially, the plan, which was drafted by the World Trade Center in Clayton, outlines a number of concrete strategies for the St. Louis region to expand its economic presence internationally and increase trade and exports. It will be officially released on June 22, and I think it presents a very thorough set of steps for St. Louis to capitalize on its preexisting export potential, create a support network for exports, and increase collaboration among companies in the area and abroad.

On Monday, we also met a new intern named Claire, who is a rising junior at Regis University in Denver and is the daughter of the former Chief of Staff to Mayor Slay. She is interning in the Mayor’s Office through the summer, and it’s been great sharing the office with her, albeit a bit crowded. She was doing a bit of research on fair wages for workers with disabilities and some other economic development topics that Nahuel assigned her.

A lot of our time the second week at work was spent polishing our Sister Cities PowerPoint and practicing presenting it. We emailed all of the contacts with our sister cities that the World Trade Center provided us, but unfortunately did not receive very much useful information from them, so we stuck primarily to research we found online. On the subject of emailing people, we sent an email to the President of the Board of Aldermen asking him if he would be able to chat for a bit regarding his job, but he never got back to us.

Last Wednesday, Erin and I went to two meetings with Carl Filler, who works in the Mayor’s Office in the areas of crime and education. The first meeting, held at the World Trade Center, concerned education in the Promise Zone. There were many people in attendance at this meeting, ranging from representatives from educational outreach organizations to school superintendents, and they were all very passionate about improving the educational quality of schools in the Promise Zone (primarily encompassing North St. Louis City and County). I am confident that this group will be able to put their grant money to good use in aiding students in St. Louis. The second meeting we went to with Carl was with the Thread STL Founding Steering Committee and was held in the meeting room back at the Mayor’s Office. There were only five people in attendance, excluding Erin and myself, and honestly did not make too much sense to us, given that the purpose of the meeting was (I think) just for the members of the committee to touch base and plan a conference they want to hold in the future. From what we could garner, Threat STL is essentially an organization that aims to train its members on the value of forming and utilizing partnerships effectively.

On Thursday, Erin, Adam, Claire, and I were invited to the World Trade Center’s Board Meeting. During the meeting, they invited everyone in attendance to come to our Sister Cities Presentation the following Monday, which made us a bit nervous because the majority of board members were high ranking officials from various companies in St. Louis. They also presented their financial report and work they are doing with Sister Cities International, but the highlight of the meeting was hearing from the director of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge. She talked about the exciting prospect of establishing a dual customs program with Mexico to facilitate easier transport of cargo between the United States and Mexico, while capitalizing on Lambert’s underutilized potential. There was also some mention of flying livestock internationally. After the meeting, there was a short reception welcoming visitors from Saint-Louis, Senegal. Adam and I helped ourselves to the refreshments, and we all tried to network with Suzanne Evens, who is the President of St. Louis-Stuttgart Sister Cities.

This past Monday, we met two new interns from WashU that will be joining the office for the summer. We also finally gave our Sister Cities presentation at the World Trade Center and it went fairly well! It seemed like those in attendance learned a few things from what we had to say, which was great since they all actually work at the WTC and are thus very familiar with St. Louis’s international presence already. They were especially intrigued by the concept of “trade brothers,” partnerships between cities established with the sole purpose of economic ties rather than traditionally culturally based relationships like those of sister cities.

Overall, my May Project experience was a very positive one. It was genuinely very interesting to see the inner workings of our local government, and it seems like there are a lot of dedicated, hard-working, intelligent people striving to improve our city. I learned a lot and got a great sampling of the many things that our government does on a day-to-day basis.