Urban League of Greater Madison’s Young Professionals: Quietly Making an Impact on Madison’s Black Community (Part 1 of 2)
Above: Cameron Anderson (lr), YP Vice-President Andrea White and YP Membership Chair Deja Mason
Below: YP President Kayla Conklin
by Jonathan Gramling
For many years, Madison has been a revolving door for Black professionals with young people coming to school and getting their first professional job before moving on to larger markets or even home-grown young people who leave to go to college and never return preferring to stay in places like Atlanta.
But as Madison continues to boom, especially in the tech industry, young Black professionals are coming to take advantage of the opportunities. But if they stay depends on finding a rewarding “after work” life in Madison.
The Urban League of Greater Madison established a Young Professionals group that slowly faded away during the 2010s. However, it has come alive again with a vengeance since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When we were just getting started, we had about nine members in the chapter,” said Kayla Conklin, president of YP. “And now we have 125 members. The way that we were able to have all of that growth is because there are a lot of young Black professionals in Madison who feel lost. A lot of people who are brought here by an organization to work for them get here and are in total culture shock. We were able to provide a sense of community to those individuals very quickly upon them arriving here. When people feel like they belong, they are more likely to stay.”
Cameron Anderson is a case in point. Anderson is forging his career in higher education and in order to move up, he has had to transplant to another city several times. While that is a positive in terms of his personal growth, it leaves a lot to be desired in his personal life.
“I think when I moved here in July 2023, I only knew 1-2 people,” Anderson said. “I was seeking out different community-based organizations that treat each other like a family. Once I was made aware of the Urban League Young Professionals, I was able to integrate myself and see what I could get from the organization, but also being able to understand that these people generally care for one another. For a person who has moved around the last 10 or so years, finding a community is really important to me. When I was able to find some of the things that Urban League has done over the last couple of years and this year since I’ve been a member, it’s drawn me closer and closer to wanting to continue to be a part of the family that is the Young Professionals.”
That can even be the case for young Black professionals who graduated from UW-Madison. There really is a gown-town divide.
“I was pretty involved at UW-Madison,” Conklin said. “I was a part of the Black Student Union. I was a student-athlete. I was in cheerleading. Shortly after I graduated from UW-Madison, I found that my network was gone. Everybody had gone back home or left the city. I was looking for a network of young like-minded individuals where I could connect with people, but also do something that I felt was intentional. Through mutual friends, I had met the immediate past president of YP, Kurt Rose and connected with him. He shared more about the organization. I attended a couple of events. After attending two events, they asked me if I wanted to be on the leadership team. I said, ‘Oh no what have I signed up for?’ Indeed, I was excited to jump into the opportunity. I became the advocacy chair in 2020. I led the advocacy committee on the leadership team for three years until 2024 when I took over as president. I would say what keeps me in YP is the ability to continuously grow a network of like-minded individuals.”
Deja Mason, the YP Membership chair, had a similar experience.
“I was a student at UW-Madison, so I knew that community of people, but as I am no longer a student and being a working adult in Madison, that dynamic changed,” Mason observed. “And so YP was really awesome for me to build up that network that I wasn’t aware existed and being able to create that social network for myself too.”
And even though Andrea White has spent most of her life in Madison, she too felt isolated and knew that there weren’t many social outlets, feelings that drive many young Black professionals away from Madison when they are of age.
“I actually joined for that very reason, to be around young Black professionals even though I pretty much grew up in Madison,” White said. “I didn’t see a lot of it. And once I joined, I found community in people with the same interests, people in the same career fields.”
YP is a multifaceted organization. While its members enjoy the socialization and the space to be themselves, they are also serious about having an impact on Madison. One way is to use its efforts to complement what the Urban League of Greater Madison is doing.
“I also want to add that I know the Urban League is in that area,” White said about South Madison. “And I know that the Urban League has impacted many families in the area with job training and things like that. So it is really cool that we can impact families in another way. I know a lot of families have youth who are on the South Side Raiders and the South Side Cheerleading Team. And it is just nice to be able to keep that park up and like I said, impact them in different ways than the Urban League has already done.”
The park White is referring to is Penn Park, which is a reoccurring community service of YP. .
“Towards the end of 2023, our previous community service chair — who is now our vice-president — as well as our treasurer were community service co-chairs at the time and were looking into ways to expand our community service and our reach to create a consistency,” Mason said. “And so one of those was adopting a park. And at the time — and still now — Penn Park is very central to the community, especially on the south side. And so for the entire year of 2024, we were able to adopt a park through the city of Madison’s Park Division.”
Anderson has jumped right into the community service projects.
“Even this past Saturday, I helped out with Habitat for Humanity,” Anderson said. “We’re helping to build a home. We put up 2-3 different walls. I helped out with different school initiatives like after school programs and develop robotic courses for students who need things to do during the summer. Once a month, I help out with the Penn Park Clean-Up. Additionally, I also helped out with the Unity Picnic, serving food, and giving tours within The Hub. It was definitely a fun time. One thing I am interested in is community service and being able to help people and having so many good opportunities to do so during the year continues to draw me back to one of the main reasons why I joined YP.”
YP also has one-time projects that bring happiness into the lives of families.
“I think being a former community service chair, not only do you get connected to other people, but you also get connected to the people you are helping,” White said. “Let me give an example. We cooked the meal at the Ronald McDonald House at the end of last year. We got the chance to meet these families who were from different states coming to Madison while their child is in UW Hospital. And they were just average people. They are experiencing a hardship right now and they were just so nice and welcoming and grateful. They talked to us and wanted to know every ingredient that was in the eggs. They needed the communication outside of their situation. I feel that not only did we provide that meal, we also provided company and some smiles and warmth for that night.”
As the YP president, Conklin works hard to keep the organization moving forward, all as a volunteer. In an era where many young people feel that they need to get paid to do anything, Conklin recognizes the benefit that money can’t buy.
“I always tell people I have my 9 to 5 and then my 5 to 9,” Conklin said with a laugh. “People often ask me, ‘Kayla, why do you do this? You don’t get paid to do this work.’ And the reality is I do get paid in so many other ways. Monetary checks are one way to get paid. But I have an extremely strong network. I have grown immensely. I’ve gotten promoted three times since I’ve been a part of YP. And so when I think about the ways that I get paid and why I do this work and what intrinsically motivates me, it is all of those things. And then the ability to say that I have contributed to creating a safe space for young Black professionals in Madison to be able to show up authentically as themselves that didn’t exist before, it feels very, very priceless and something that will continue to be a legacy here beyond me. That’s a contributing factor on why I do this work and continue to be logged into the computer every day after work hours. It’s not easy and it is a very thankless role. We’re volunteers. There are very hard days. There are definitely days when I wanted to give up and quit. It’s always in those moments where the team around me and the leadership team bands together to support each other and bringing us back to our why. That’s been very meaningful.”
YP is not looking to reinvent the wheel. A central value of theirs is to work with people who may already be doing the work and help enhanced their efforts or work in collaboration to create something new together.
“A lot of the things that we do is through partnership,” Conklin said. “We like to partner with other organizations and non-profits that have missions similar to ours. Some of our partners that we work with are the Boys & Girls Club, Urban Triage, the Goodman Community Center, the Urban League of Greater Madison, MMSD and the schools. We’ve had a lot of different ways that we have tried to partner with other organizations to make sure that we are supporting their initiatives and that we are able to provide more resources as a whole. And because of that, in 2023, we were recognized by the National Urban League Young Professionals — we’re a national movement with chapters in most metro cities — for having the most community partnerships in the whole country. We had about 65 partnerships at that point and I think this year we have around 80 already. We continue to expand and build on that.”
And these partnerships are at the essence of what YP is about. While the members have personal needs that are met by the organization, ultimately, the organization is about the community and its health and well-being over the long-term.
“For me, my experience in joining YP was me looking for professional organizations in town that aligned with my own personal values of doing community service and really benefiting my community and how I identify and making sure that I am not only doing the work that is beneficial for me, but is beneficial for other Black people, Black Families, Black children and Black women,” Mason said. “It was really important for me to find a group that centered the club in that work and continued to uplift our world community.”