How far Northern California counties are creating more jobs for young people

by Fiona Kelliher – CalMatters
December 20, 2024

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People living in the northernmost reaches of California refer to their community as the “Redwood Curtain,” a nod to the region’s abundance of redwoods and natural beauty — but also its remoteness.

With a combined population of less than half a million people scattered across Del Norte, Siskiyou, Modoc, Humboldt, Trinity, Shasta and Lassen counties, the area faces relatively lower wages, extremist politics and brain drain, and fewer educational opportunities compared to other parts of the state.

Most of the seven northernmost counties have seen decreasing or stagnant population trends in recent years, U.S. Census Bureau data show, along with the outmigration of working-age young people. 

But workforce development boards, local officials and employers are looking to shift that narrative, using one-on-one mentoring, paid training in growing industries, and inclusive recruitment practices to help young Californians find — and keep — jobs in the region they grew up in.

“Young people in our counties are looking at either leaving the area, or not. That’s the first choice they make,” said Heather Chavez, director of workforce programs at the NorTEC Workforce Development Board. “It’s unpopular if you’re not leaving high school to go to a four-year college. There’s definitely a stigma around that — it’s students, it’s teachers, it’s parents, it’s employers, it’s everyone.”

Within that landscape, part of Chavez’s mission is to find “great, great, great jobs” for young people who can’t afford to leave their hometowns, or who find themselves without a high school or higher education degree. 

Funded largely by the federal Department of Labor, NorTEC, which stands for the Northern Rural Training and Employment Consortium, aims to improve education, employment and upward mobility across 11 northern counties.

NorTEC provides one-on-one intensive mentoring — plus financial support for bus passes, interview and work clothes, or supplies required by a training program — to those between 16 and 24 who aren’t in school. Last year, 267 people were enrolled in the program; twelve months later, 77% were still employed in industries ranging from food service, hospitality, tourism, seasonal forestry or recreation-related jobs, manufacturing and food processing and health care, Chavez said.

The region’s data is mixed when it comes to population dropoff among young people. Between 2017 and 2022, northwestern Del Norte County lost up to 1.2% of its population in every age bracket between 15 and 59, while Humboldt, Lassen, Siskiyou and Trinity also saw losses among young workers, according to state Employment Development Department data. Shasta County, however — home to the roughly 93,000-person city of Redding and Shasta-Trinity National Forest — made gains among those between 15 and 44. 

California overall has seen a declining population in the last few years, a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, low birth rates and relatively low levels of immigration, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

In the far north, these trends are expected to increase the demand for health care, even as those jobs remain difficult to fill, according to Randall Weaver, a labor market researcher at the state employment department. In Modoc, for instance, about 30% of the county’s 8,500 residents are over the age of 65.

Five of the region’s top 10 employers were health care-related in the past year, Weaver said, while the industry also accounted for about 50% of the top 10 occupations with the most online advertisements. But lower wages and stereotypes of rural living — along with fewer resources for cutting-edge medical infrastructure — make it tough to compete with “larger institutions with deeper pockets” in the Bay Area or Los Angeles.

“There’s clearly demand,” Weaver said. “The question is whether some of the limitations have a dampening effect on the market, and keep the positions from getting filled.”

Employers want to grow the hiring pool by finding and nurturing local talent. Earlier this year, Lassen Community College in Susanville launched a registered nursing program, which the program director described as “strategically designed to meet the escalating demand” for nurses locally and across California. Meanwhile, the Alliance for Workforce Development, one of three services providers contracted by NoRTEC in the region, is helping to grow three in-house training programs with Lassen and Modoc health providers, which provide free, paid training for entry-level health care roles such as certified medical or nursing assistantships.

The idea is not only to receive an education locally, but to “get jobs here, locally, that pay well,” said Kim Keith, the alliance’s director of youth programs. This autumn, a cohort of about a dozen students attended a $17 hourly certified nursing assistant training program, performing their clinical hours in-house at the Lassen Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.

Of course, not all of California’s far north is dealing with the same challenges. Coastal Humboldt, which has a relatively larger labor force and a four-year university, has attracted major recent investments in two offshore wind farms, along with a yellowtail kingfish farm, that officials hope will spawn permanent jobs.

But the county — which has the highest poverty rate of about 18% compared to the other six — is still “scraping and clawing” to recruit people into certain industries, including lawyers, engineers and law enforcement, said Zachary O’Hanen, the county’s director of human resources.

To combat that, O’Hanen’s team has spearheaded efforts to embrace “belongingness” and inclusivity in its recruitment tactics for the public sector, looking to attract the best talent in a county that is rapidly diversifying. The approach has shown anecdotal success in terms of a jump in applications to county positions and recent diverse hires, O’Hanen said.

And while the “Redwood Curtain” stereotypes may persist, the region has a way of pulling people back in: After moving away to Oregon, O’Hanen returned to Humboldt, craving access to nature, the snow, the coast, and the slower pace of life.

“You leave, because you want to see the world, and then you go, ‘Well, maybe the grass wasn’t greener,’” O’Hanen said.

This article was originally published by CalMatters.

Fiona Kelliher

Fiona Kelliher is a freelance journalist who has reported in the U.S. and internationally. Her California reporting for the Mercury News on racial inequalities during the Covid-19 pandemic earned several awards, while her work from Southeast Asia has appeared in the Guardian, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera, Nikkei and other publications. She is based in London.

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