Photo of Milwaukee Night Market from NEWaukee website.
Madison’s civic leaders need to focus on making the city “a cool community” to attract and retain millennials, according to a presentation by NEWaukee Founder Ian Abston at the monthly WIN luncheon held Tuesday at the Sheraton Hotel.
“(Millennials) prioritize a vibrant community over a high-paying job,” Abston said. “We want to be in places that are cool.”
For Madison, Abston suggested the city add more public art, create a millennial mayor’s taskforce, host a young professionals week and connect university students to the city. He also recommended organizing a night market, which is a free, open-air market that helped to revitalize Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee.
To complete these tasks, Abston told the audience to allow millennials to help.
“We are the TOMS Shoes generation,” Abston said. “Give (millennials) opportunities to give back and get involved in the community–I can’t stress this enough.”
Let’s go through the list
1) Public art – Madison has a ton of it maybe he has never walked around here.
2) Millennial taskforce – The world doesn’t need another task force where nothing happens just to make someone feel good.
3) Young Professional Week – Doesn’t Madison already do this?
4) Night Market – Why does Madison have to do everything another city does? Not to mention we have a huge market already where people over the state come from.
5) Toms shoes generation – just a dochey comment generalizing 70 million millennials.
Can we get someone leading this generation with a plan instead of throwing out a bunch of random things with no vision?