A question that is frequently asked in Albert Lea is &uot;why aren’t we getting youth in this community?&uot;

A workforce collaborative of Greater Jobs Inc, the Chamber of Commerce and advisors from businesses throughout the area believe they have a solution to help to stop this question from being asked.

&uot;We are using alumni postcards jointly with a Web site,&uot; said Cheryl Cerney of the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation, who is involved in the collaborative. &uot;Our goal is to attract quality workers to Albert Lea and Freeborn County.&uot;

The quality workers the program is targeting are alumni of Albert Lea High School who graduated between 1980 and 1995 and went on to live elsewhere. Cerney said they hope to recruit these people to the area.

&uot;Alumni already know the community, they have friends and family here already. So they are much more likely to stay and become part of the community than workers from outside areas,&uot; said Cerney.

Every three months they will send different postcards which highlight positive things about the community. The postcards have slogans on the front, and on the back is the Web site for the program, www.albertleaworks.org.

The Web site, which will be operational in early November, will work to connect potential employees with local

employers. Businesses will post job openings and interested alumni will post their resumes. The site will work to connect the two together and make searching for a job in the area an easy task.

Pam Bishop, executive vice president of economic development for Greater Jobs, said the alumni work connection is the first part of a multi-step process to recruit people to Albert Lea jobs. Bishop said that the most important part of the process is that businesses get involved.

&uot;We want people to know that it is very important that we get larger employers to support this,&uot; said Bishop. &uot;We want this to be successful and in order to do this everyone in the community needs to take part.&uot;

Companies take part in the service for free.