Published: December 03, 2006 09:39 pm      

Campaign taking root in Virginia

TAZEWELL, Va. — A campaign aimed at luring 15,000 alumni back home to Southwest Virginia is slowly beginning to take root.

From Charlotte, N.C., to Cincinnati, Ohio, success stories are already being told of former alumni who are returning home to Southwest Virginia as part of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s “Return to Roots” campaign. The effort to lure highly skilled alumni back is deemed vital to such projects as the proposed 680-acre Bluestone Business and Technology Center in Bluefield, Va., as well as current employers such as CGI-AMS and Northrop Grumman in Lebanon. The two Russell County-based companies alone are expected to create more than 700 highly-skilled technology jobs for Southwest Virginia.

“If you look at the economic situation in Southwest Virginia over the last five years, it has significantly improved,” Shannon Blevins, project manager of the Southwest Office of the Virginia Department of Business Assistance in Abingdon, and a volunteer steering committee member of Return to Roots, said. “That is why Return to Roots is so important to us. For some of those folks who left 10 or 20 years ago, the situation was much different at the time with double-digit unemployment.”

Blevins said Return to Roots is attempting to reach the alumni through a website, direct mail, post cards, the news media and even grandmothers and grandfathers in Southwest Virginia who would like to see their children return home to work and live.

“We want them to take that look (at Southwest Virginia),” Blevins said. “We are also trying to reach out to the parents and the grandparents. Because most people still have ties here.”

Blevins said the campaign has already identified alumni living in Cincinnati, Northern Virginia, Atlanta, Ga., and the Raleigh-Durham, N.C. area.

“Those are the areas where a lot of our folks have migrated to over the years,” Blevins said. “But we have received hits on our websites from as far away as Arizona.”

The website — ReturntoRoots.org — includes a listing of job opportunities available to the former alumni in Southwest Virginia. Blevins said a postcard campaign also has been launched in hopes of reach the alumni. Return to Roots is looking for alumni who are now software developers, engineers, IT consultants, health care professionals, technical supervisors, electrical engineers, industrial engineers, and laboratory technicians, among numerous other skills and trades.

Blevins said the Return to Roots campaign is slowly taking root.

“It is starting to,” she said. “We are in our infancy stages right now. We launched in the middle of September. So we are really still only 2 1/2 months into a campaign like this. So we are still just in the infancy stages.”

– Contact Charles Owens at cowens@bdtonline.com