Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

A statewide emergence

The success of Emerge Tampa in bringing under-40 professionals together leads to the birth of Emerge Florida.

By LOUIS HAU
Published May 27, 2006

Among the many Tampa Bay area business organizations with grand mission statements, 2-year-old Emerge Tampa stands out for having a pretty simple goal: Give young professionals a means to strengthen their ties to the area and broader business community.

Now the success of Emerge Tampa and other similar groups in the state has led to the birth of Emerge Florida, a new organization aimed at roughly the same under-40 demographic.

The group is looking to expand and deepen the reach of young people in Florida business circles, said Emerge Florida co-chairman Ron Smith, founder and president of RES Business Education & Training Corp. in Fort Lauderdale.

"We're hoping to create an environment where young professionals anywhere in the state can communicate with one another and expand the network,'' the 38-year-old Smith said.

Emerge Florida will kick things off with an inaugural annual meeting June 23 and 24 at the Royal Pacific Resort in Orlando.

The meeting will overlap in part with the annual meeting of Leadership Florida, which helped arrange much of the funding for the event and will continue to provide administrative support from its office in Tallahassee.

The concept for a statewide networking organization for young professionals stemmed in large part from the encouraging response that Emerge Tampa has generated since its founding in 2004 by the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce.

The group was started to help stanch the exodus of talented young people from the area - a key work force issue for the Tampa Bay area and all of Florida - by providing them with a means to meet and interact with other young, like-minded professionals.

The Tampa organization already has more than 400 dues-paying members, a number that rose to nearly 600 at the end of last year before 2006 renewals were due.

The establishment of Emerge Florida and the earlier founding of Emerge Tampa have come at a time of increased organization and networking among young adults in the Tampa Bay area.

Young professionals' groups banded together last year with local businesses to organize two "Downtown After Six" social events to promote downtown Tampa.

Tampa Bay Hispanic businesspeople recently launched Hispanic Young Professionals & Entrepreneurs, or HYPE. And a new young professionals group organized by the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce will host a launch party June 22 at the Martini Bar in BayWalk.

Judging from the rapid growth of its membership, Emerge Tampa appears to have struck a chord among young businesspeople, according to founding co-chair Mike Griffin, a senior associate at Tampa real estate firm Vertical Integration.

In addition to organizing networking opportunities, Emerge Tampa also scheduled other informational and professional-development events, including a political forum last August on Social Security reform that drew an audience of more than 125.

"Emerge came out at the perfect time," said Griffin, 25. "We knew we had a great area, but we needed something to connect all the dots.''

Meanwhile, young professional groups in Sarasota and Manatee counties continued to thrive. Before long, Emerge Lakeland was formed based on roughly the same model as the Tampa group.

These and other signs suggested the time was right for a statewide group to help encourage the formation of more such organizations and to help them communicate with one another to share ideas, said Deanne Roberts, president of Roberts Communications in Tampa, a former chairwoman of the Tampa chamber and a key force behind the formation of Emerge Tampa and Emerge Florida.

"Various communities will have an opportunity to see how other groups have succeeded in these programs,'' Roberts said of Emerge Florida. "We want to cross-pollinate different programs across Florida."

At the moment, young professionals' organizations are too isolated within their own regions, said Maria Elisalde, 36, an assistant vice president of SunTrust Bank in St. Petersburg who is helping organize Emerge Florida.

Elisalde, co-chair of the new Hispanic young professionals' group, said setting up a statewide Emerge organization would present "a great opportunity for young people to get involved."

Exactly what form Emerge Florida will take is still up in the air.

Although the group doesn't expect to become a political body, "I think, eventually, having a voice and having opinions that matter will definitely be important for us down the road," said Jessica Muroff, a 29-year-old account manager for Raymond James Financial in St. Petersburg, a founding co-chair of Emerge Tampa. "For now, we're just hoping to build that network."

There are issues that young professionals can rally around, Emerge Florida co-chair Smith said, pointing to efforts to bring more major corporations -- and their jobs -- to the state, keeping homeownership affordable and encouraging the development of public transit.

The organization also will be an advocate of the benefits and advantages of working in the Sunshine State, he said.

"Florida is seen as a retirement state," Smith said. "People may be uncomfortable moving to Florida until they come and see how things are.''

Smith, Griffin and other organizers of Emerge Florida are alumni of Leadership Florida's class program, which they said might provide a model to emulate.

The class program selects 50 businesspeople from around the state every year to participate in a series of development workshops over the course of eight months. The sessions are focused on familiarizing participants with the history and culture of Florida, informing them about issues critical to the state and improving leadership skills.

Because Leadership Florida's class program accommodates a limited number of participants from any given age group, there's a void to be filled by a new group oriented toward young professionals, said ex-Tampa chamber chairwoman Roberts, who is also on the board of Leadership Florida.

"In the last several years, acceptance of new members to the class program has skewed older," Roberts said.

"It's so competitive to get in, it's hard for a young person to compete."

Regardless of how Emerge Florida evolves, Griffin said he sees the organization being clearly focused on supporting the activities of local Emerge and Emerge-like groups, rather than the other way around.

"There's no top-down approach," he said. "It's definitely bottom up."

For more information about Emerge Florida, go to the organization's Web site at www.emergeflorida.org.

Louis Hau can be reached at hau@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3404.

[Last modified May 27, 2006, 06:40:03]