Happy Sunday, good people. Congratulations to the Spain natives and fans celebrating an overtime win in the World Cup final. Sympathies to those from Argentina. Terrific tournament.
Free sports idea, maybe for the Charlotte Sports Foundation’s next undertaking: 80 runners in England will compete in a marathon around an Ikea store. It’s 17 laps. The winners, The Washington Post writes, will “probably receive kits to build their own medals.”
This week’s Optimist: Teenagers are a big topic of discussion these days, mostly for the wrong reasons. So it seems like time to run a story we’ve been reporting out, one from a completely different perspective. Let’s dive into one of my favorite efforts, Road to Hire, which began a new chapter last year with the hiring of new CEO Monique Perry-Graves.
Also in this issue: Thoughts on rescinding a rescission on I-77, an incredible story about AI and its relationship with a family, World Brain Day, and a special birthday.
Road to Hire Keeps Raising ’em Up
Road to Hire CEO Dr. Monique Perry-Graves poses for a portrait on the Road to Hire stage. Photo by Logan Cyrus
She took the stage Thursday with Petey Pablo’s “Raise Up” bopping as her walkup song, and 450 teenagers and young adults followed her lead, rising to their feet, waving pompoms and clacking clappers.
“Big energy, big energy,” Monique Perry-Graves opened. “What’s up, y’all?!?”
They were here to celebrate completing an intense summer-learning program with Road to Hire, the nonprofit organization Perry-Graves leads as CEO. The students all come from Title I schools in Mecklenburg County, and a majority of them began their Road to Hire journey with middle-of-the-road grade point averages. Now they’d just finished a four-week program that trained them in artificial intelligence and public speaking, had them hold debates on AI ethics, and gave them networking opportunities with leaders from some of Charlotte’s largest corporations.
Founded in 2014, Road to Hire has reoriented the life stories of more than 3,000 young people in our region. The only prerequisites are a 2.5 GPA or better, some inkling that they might go to college, and a guidance counselor’s recommendation. These are the students in the middle, students who could go one way or another, and Road to Hire finds them and wraps its resources around them … then doesn’t let them go until after they’ve graduated from college and found a job. The organization has partnerships with multiple corporations in Charlotte, and by its own count, its apprenticeship arm has a job-placement rate of 95%, most with salaries of $70,000 or better.
Road to Hire started small, with coding training for young professionals and scholarships for high school kids. For years it was a feel-good story in a city plagued by economic mobility issues. But it’s exploded over the past half-decade. This year it will serve more than 1,500 young people.
Program upon program has been built to help with economic mobility in Charlotte over the past decade. Most do good work. But Road to Hire has become an example of what fully formed infrastructure for teenagers might look like, if we want to take the teetering ones and send them up the economic gondola.
Ah, teenagers.
You’ve probably heard a lot about them this summer! Depending on your media diet, you might find stories about them as the most anxious generation ever, or the most troublemaking, or the most disengaged and rebellious. A driving storyline in Charlotte last week was “teen takeovers,” in which kids circulate flyers for impromptu late-night gatherings through social media. Hundreds show up, creating a flash mob atmosphere. Several business districts, from Birkdale to Camp North End, have imposed curfews for teens after dark. CMPD Chief Estella Patterson last week asked the city council’s public-safety committee to institute a blanket 9 p.m. curfew for any person under the age of 18. The committee agreed, and council will take it up for a vote in August.
It’s not just here. “Believe the Hype About Teen Takeovers” was a headline in The Atlantic a week ago. The term “teen takeover” has surged 1,300% on Google search this summer. And to be sure, some have turned dangerous: A 16-year-old was arrested in connection with a shooting at Romare Bearden Park in Uptown, and 12 teens were arrested during a takeover in University City.
The incidents, though, have fed a much larger and less-genuine national narrative that American cities are under siege by young people. So in reality, how are “the teens” doing? The Road to Hire room on Thursday provided a compelling counterpoint.
Here were 450 young people, mostly from marginalized backgrounds, who would be a natural target audience for troublemaking, and instead they woke up early every morning for four weeks and went to work — some on college campuses at Central Piedmont and Johnson C. Smith, others at Road to Hire’s offices inside Red Ventures. While the city conversation and headlines presented teenagers as a problem to be contained, Thursday’s celebration was an emphatic reminder of what can happen when you construct a community around the same kids.
Perry-Graves said she’d spent much of last week reflecting on the distance between the two paths and storylines. It’s one reason she chose “Raise Up” as her walkup song.
“For one, it’s like the unofficial North Carolina anthem,” she said with a laugh, before getting serious. “And I feel like, as I’ve visited with them, we need them to raise up and feel that. Take some of the power back. Take some of the narrative back.”
A student holds their graduation rope during the Road to Hire commitment ceremony at Red Ventures in May. Photo by Logan Cyrus
Perry-Graves keeps a picture in her home office of Devon Clement, who was 20 years old in 2010 when he was shot and killed at the Cook Out on Sugar Creek Road. But to understand why she’s held that photo for 16 years, we have to start about a decade before that.
Perry-Graves is a Raleigh native whose family goes back generations in eastern North Carolina. She has an aversion to people embellishing their hardship-to-triumph stories, because it’s an insult to those who started in true hardship. She was raised in a good family, with a strong support system. Her grandfather — who was a farmer, janitor, and exterminator in Nash County — had only an eighth-grade education, but strategically decided when to sell livestock and crops so that he could ensure his own kids had an education.
But during her senior year of high school, Monique learned she was pregnant. She’d already been accepted to North Carolina Central, and her parents stepped in to help raise her son in those early years so she could attend school, too.
“To the naked eye, I was a perfect stereotype,” Perry-Graves wrote in a personal essay for EdNC. “But things are never that simple. I wasn’t just a young, pregnant Black girl. I was the daughter of two college-educated, middle-class parents.”
In her freshman year at N.C. Central, she was selected to participate in INROADS, a national program that placed high-performing minority students into internships at Fortune 100 companies. A similar mission, in some ways, to Road to Hire. She took an internship at SAS, and by the time she graduated she was already leading a team of people. She moved to Charlotte and worked in corporate communications, managing a contract with Wachovia. When the recession hit in 2008, and Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia, the contract wasn’t renewed, and she was laid off.
A few months earlier, a friend had suggested she become an adjunct professor. She landed at ECPI, teaching communication skills on a part-time basis.
One year, she had a student named Devon Clement. He was an Independence High grad who, like her, had a child at a young age. He’d enrolled at ECPI to try to “get out of some challenging circumstances,” Perry-Graves says. At the end of the course, she invited students to be creative and share their lessons from the year. Clement wrote a song about how the class, and Perry-Graves specifically, had changed his life for the better.
A few months later, he was at the Cook Out on a Saturday night when other young people started shooting. Clement was hit and died later at the hospital.
At his funeral, his family members spoke about how he kept graded papers on his desk at home. In the stack was one that included a note from Perry-Graves that told him how proud she was of him, and how far he’d come.
She decided then that she wouldn’t go back to the corporate world. She got into higher ed and never looked back. She earned her doctorate from the University of Florida. She worked for 11 years at York Technical College, rising through the ranks from faculty member and adviser, to director of communications, to COO. She figured she’d become a college president, but in 2021, Teach For America hired her as the statewide director for North Carolina. Nearly four years into that job, a recruiter called her in the winter of 2024 to ask her about her interest in Road to Hire’s open position. She was hired early in 2025, and started that June.
“It just showed the power of that level of transformation,” she said of her memories of Devon Clement. “I didn't come from those circumstances. I'm very nuanced, in particular about that, because I think sometimes people try to make it out that they come from worse circumstances than they do. But [I know] the power of education. And if he had finished, he would have totally changed the trajectory of his family.”
TOP: Students stand up and cheer during Road to Hire Commitment Day at Red Ventures in May. BOTTOM: Confetti falls on students and staff at the conclusion of that event. Photos by Logan Cyrus
Charlotte no doubt has thousands of young people like Devon Clement today, and they’ve been on Perry-Graves’ mind during this unsettling summer.
I’ve been talking to her off and on for several months, following along as she settled into her first year with Road to Hire. When I saw her Thursday, I brought up the broader conversations around teenagers in Charlotte, and mentioned that I was thinking about including them in this story about her and Road to Hire. I asked if that was fair, or if I was reaching for the connection. She nodded immediately and said yes, it’s fair. She’d been texting with a Road to Hire board member about the “takeover” conversation, in fact.
The discussion has, like so many other complex issues that meet the context-grinder of internet discourse, devolved into a two-sided argument. On one side are those who blame bad parents for not knowing where their children are late at night — and if those kids get arrested, well, that’s on the parents. On the other are those who say the city needs more “third places,” where children can gather and do more productive activities. Neither side is completely wrong, and neither is wholly correct, Perry-Graves said.
“I think multiple things can be truthful,” she said. “There's definitely something we need to look at and address, but I don't think there's one solution.”
As it happens, on Wednesday of last week, two high school fellows in the City of Hobbies program interviewed me for a project they’re working on. I wound up flipping the questions back around to them at one point. One of them, 16-year-old Rory Vallimont of East Mecklenburg High, said she knows about the takeovers and has known people who attend them, but she doesn’t go herself. I told her about the curfew conversation before the city council, and she said, “That seems not good.” She said that something as simple as providing a blank wall and spray paint can keep some kids from getting into trouble.
She said the rules can be simple: “You can spray the wall. Just don’t spray each other.”
CMPD has said that a few “bad apples” or “bad actors” are responsible for the trouble lately, and it’s difficult to police them because of the crowd sizes. The meetups generally start light-hearted and fun, but then turn dangerous when they get too large. Curfews aren’t new, either. Former Mayor Pat McCrory instituted a midnight curfew in the 1990s, and it did lead to several pickups. But as Andrew Dunn’s new book on McCrory noted, most of them were in the affluent Arboretum area.
Point is, the subject is more complicated than a headline. Yes, some kids may need more third places. Yes, some need their parents to be more attentive. Yes, some may also need the punishment of the law.
What all kids need, though, more than any of that, is a purpose.
And that’s where programs like Road to Hire start. Perry-Graves carries a saying with her. She’s not sure who said it first but it goes like this: Talent is prevalent. Opportunity is not. Road to Hire’s model is manufacturing the second half.
“We pour hope into them. We pour encouragement into them,” she said. “We give them a place, the structure, and expectations. And I think anybody can thrive in that.”
“I think we need to broaden the conversation,” she added. “They do need a third place. But it has to be anchored in something."
Charlotte, for what it’s worth, has already bought into the idea. In the recently adopted budgets for this year, the city and county each committed $1.5 million to Road to Hire to help it scale. It was the first ask of that size the organization’s made, and Perry-Graves calls it “historic.” In other words, the same governments now debating how to keep teenagers off the streets after 9 p.m. just invested $3 million in a program that gives them a reason to get up early.
Perry-Graves waves a pompom as students arrive for the Road to Hire SummerU closing ceremony. Photo by Logan Cyrus
Perry-Graves’ hiring process at Road to Hire was, to put it mildly, abnormal. The first-round phone screening wasn’t with a recruiter or an HR rep, but with Road to Hire founder and Red Ventures CEO Ric Elias.
She barely remembers the rapid-fire conversation, but she knows it was fairly straightforward without much in the way of jokes or smiles. She thought it went “ok.” The next morning she woke up to an email from him, telling her to think about when she might like to come in for an in-person interview. One of the dates the team threw out was January 20 — her late mother’s birthday, less than a year after she’d died, and a day Perry-Graves had blocked off on the calendar. She prayed on it, and went in anyway, spending a full day with the team and CEOs from across the Red Ventures umbrella. She had an offer within a few weeks, but waited several months to start.
Hiring her was a bit of a coup. Perry-Graves’ reputation across the Carolinas is sterling. She was on a path to becoming a community college president when Teach For America recruited her away. And when she left that job for Road to Hire, Teach For America threw her a big going-away ceremony at The Umstead in Cary. A representative from Congresswoman Deborah Ross’s office gifted her an American flag, with a certificate that verified it had flown over the U.S. Capitol. And Governor Josh Stein’s office gave her a North Carolina flag that had flown over the state capitol.
Full disclosure: I’m closer to this story than most I write. Elias and Kacey Grantham, who was Road to Hire’s CEO before Perry-Graves, are friends of mine and helped me get Optimist off the ground. Neither of them, nor Perry-Graves, suggested this story. The idea was mine. I’ve been following the organization since I wrote about its workforce-training program in 2020, back when it was a feel-good story about 58 new software engineers.
Still, when those 450 students walked into the room Thursday, and I thought about how much it’s grown and where Perry-Graves might take it, I got goosebumps. They came back all morning. Every one of the SummerU participants’ names was printed on the back of a closing-ceremony T-shirt, and an emcee said, "That is not a design choice. That is actually the point."
“I had the chance to connect with people from different schools, backgrounds, and walks of life — people I may never have crossed paths with otherwise,” said Saishah Charlot, a 2026 Julius Chambers High grad who’ll be a freshman at CPCC this fall. “For a while, we became one big family, and that's something I'll never forget. I'm taking with me a more open mind, more gratitude, and a deeper appreciation for opportunities that come simply from showing up and being present.”
“To my fellow peers,” Charlot added, “as we each begin this next chapter and go our separate ways, remember that where you start doesn't determine where you finish.”
In late May, Logan Cyrus and I attended Road to Hire’s “Commitment Day” celebration for graduating seniors. Phillip O. Berry’s marching band, the Marching Cardinals, serenaded the seniors as they walked into the building. And the big moment was when the screen lit up with the dozens of colleges, universities, branches of the military, or workplaces that will receive the seniors this summer and fall.
(Many of those students, by the way, participated in the summer program, during which they built an AI agent that will help them navigate their future campus.)
At that Commitment Day celebration, Elias asked the students to write a letter with their goals for the next four years, and asked them to open it after they graduated from college, then send him a note to tell him how the expectations met the reality.
About a week later, a Road to Hire team member approached Perry-Graves with two envelopes with letters, one for her and one for Elias. Perry-Graves opened it and read.
It was a note of gratitude from a senior who’s college-bound in the fall. The letter-writer apologized for writing four years early, but wanted Perry-Graves and Elias to know immediately what the year-long program meant to them. The student has some family struggles, with a younger sibling who needs help. There were times, the student wrote, that they wanted to give up. But they didn’t, they said, because they wanted to set a good example for their family.
Then, at the bottom of the letter, the student wrote with a piece of information they’d kept under wraps: They’d spent most of their senior year homeless.
Perry-Graves broke down in tears. She called Elias and said, “This is what it's about. Not the fact that [the student] was homeless, but this is why we have to get this right.”
The decision came after the state legislature included a measure in the budget that demanded repayment of $60 million in preliminary engineering and planning costs from the localities that voted to rescind. That’s a frightening prospect for smaller localities, which have much smaller budgets than Charlotte’s.
Naturally, some see the reconsideration as a step toward restoring sanity, and others see it as a forceful stomping on the will of the neighborhoods most opposed to the plans.
Action NC’s Robert Dawkins sent an email to supporters and public officials last week saying, “Charlotte deserves better than this. It deserves real transparency, honest planning, and infrastructure decisions that respect the people who pay for them.”
Charlotte Regional Business Alliance CEO Robert McCutcheon told the Charlotte Business Journal, “I think we’re in a good place. The project’s been paused and there’s an understanding on the government side and the community side that there’s a reason to come together (and reach a solution).”
My take: I hope McCutcheon’s right that both sides are coming together, but I’m not sure the neighborhoods that fought hardest against the lanes would describe the mood the same way.
I spent a bunch of time reporting on the city’s I-77 vote in May, and left feeling sour about the whole process and conversation. Clearly, we need to do something with that highway — or with the overall highway network — and plenty of community benefits were being added to the project, including pedestrian improvements along the dangerous West Boulevard corridor. The votes from city council and the regional board happened too hastily, with too little information, and they felt too reckless and oversimplified for my taste.
But they happened.
And now this response? A state forcing the hands of a region? It may be the right move on a spreadsheet, and one could argue it will lead to the best outcome. That’s not for me to say. Certainly it’ll save $60 million in immediate repayments. But the long-term cost is less about pavement than it is about trust.
We’ve now lived for two months with the idea that the lanes aren’t happening, and that time has forced us to think of alternatives, such as architect Terry Shook’s vision of re-routing regional traffic around the city on I-485.
Rescinding a rescission, if it happens, would need to be handled very carefully — with heavy investments in communication and genuine engagement efforts. It would require strong leadership from new mayor Robert Harrington, and a healthy majority of council members’ approval to build community confidence. In other words, it’ll need more than airy optimism from the backers.
Skip that work, and it’ll feel like forcing a highway down the throats of people who live here, and likely lead to a political comeuppance in future elections.
Also in the news …
Operation Charlotte’s Web encounter: One of the most notable encounters between Border Patrol agents and locals during last November’s raids occurred in Plaza Midwood, where two women driving an Acura got blocked in by agents in a townhome development. Tatyana Reisini and Kristen Roos, both mothers, shared their story about the encounter with the New York Times. Assault charges filed against the women were weak, to say the least, and later dropped by the U.S. Attorney’s office.
The Times investigation found that of 400 cases where people have been charged with assaulting officers during the immigration crackdowns across the country, nearly half have ended up like the one against Reisini and Roos — with charges either thrown out by a U.S. attorney or dropped by judges, or acquittals.
The Times noted that typically the Justice Department wins more than 90 percent of its criminal cases.
Not-basketball Hornets: As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, what with lettuce threatening our bellies, there’s a troubling breed of hornet destroying honeybee colonies nearby. The Times covered South Carolina’s battle against the yellow-legged hornets last week, and Axios Raleigh’s Mary Helen Moore asked North Carolina officials whether they were a threat here.
“It’s only a matter of time, unfortunately,” N.C. State professor and extension apiculturist David Tarpy said in an email to Moore. “Just one more [thing] beekeepers have to deal with.”
Food: Jeff Tonidandel and Jamie Brown can’t miss. The husband-and-wife restaurateurs — who own Leluia Hall, Supperland, Haberdish, Ever Andalo, Olivelli Deli, and (personal favorite) Growlers — are now nominated for an Emmy. Their “Fork & Hammer” documentary series is up for Outstanding Culinary and Cultural Series, CBJ noted.
More food: The summer Queen’s Feast begins Friday, July 24, and runs through August 2. About 120 restaurants participate in the program, offering three-course, prix-fixe menu deals. More details.
History: Demolition began last week on The Excelsior Club, the historic Beatties Ford Road venue that hosted James Brown, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, and many other prominent Black artists in its heyday. Local developer Shawn Kennedy is planning an $8.3 million redevelopment that will revive the club with a similar appearance, but also include a restaurant and meeting spaces. QCity Metro has more.
This Wednesday, July 22, is World Brain Day. We don’t usually concern ourselves with these sorts of “holidays,” but then I got an email last week about The Ivey, a SouthPark memory-wellness center, and its suggestions for brain health.
An estimated 16,700 Mecklenburg County residents 65 and older are living with Alzheimer’s, a share slightly higher than North Carolina as a whole. Statewide, more than 380,000 people serve as unpaid caregivers.
The Ivey says that everyday habits matter, and that it’s never too early or late to start doing these six things: move, learn new things, eat good food for nourishment, protect your sleep, practice mindfulness, and — maybe the biggest one these days — nurture human connections.
Charlotte skews young, with a median age of about 35.5. Still, 21% of area households now include someone 65 or older, according to a UNC Charlotte analysis of census data.
Think I’ll take a World Brain Day walk down on semi-recently opened Liz Hair Trail — the section of the Little Sugar Creek Greenway from Morehead to Freedom Park.
Contrera spent months with a family whose lives had become so intertwined with artificial intelligence that the mother imagined an Alexa product giving a speech at her funeral.
The story starts off in a way that makes you think it’ll be a typical warning against a dehumanized, dystopian future. But it turns so hard in the middle, and Contrera is so effective at seeing the humans for who they are, that I left feeling sympathy for every character, even to some degree the robots.
An interesting story behind the story: Contrera was among those laid off by The Washington Post a few months ago. She “kept showing up for this family,” as her former editor Kelley French wrote, despite not knowing if she’d have any place to publish it. She did. Bad journalism always gets noticed. But I gotta say, the majority of the people in this field are good like that.
The New Yorker doesn’t offer gift links, but it’s worth paying for. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Number of the week: $160 million
UNC Charlotte will receive an award of up to $160 million from the National Science Foundation to modernize the energy grid in the region. The effort includes 36 counties across the Carolinas, and it’s backed by 100 partners, including energy companies, universities, and local governments.
In it, I don’t go to that charity pancake breakfast in 2015, and she isn’t standing against the wall, brown eyes holding a world I just had to explore.
In this sad story, she doesn’t meet me for a happy hour that turned into four hours of happiness, and she doesn’t meet me at that concert in Charleston, and we don’t spend every day after that together, and we don’t get married at the Mint on Randolph, a hawk blessing the union with a well-timed flight behind us.
In this exceptional horror story, we don’t adopt a mutt with different-colored eyes, one brown and one blue, and then we don’t bring two boys into the world, one with blue eyes and one with brown.
Thank goodness, we don’t know that story.
Laura has a big birthday tomorrow, July 20. “The day we landed on the moon,” my dad always said. He’d have been 82 tomorrow, July 20. Nobody made me laugh as much as he did … until she came along.
It’s a milestone birthday for her, they say, on account of how easily it divides by 10. She groans when she thinks about it, but no doubt it’ll be her finest decade yet. She’s gotten sharper each year, strong-minded and decisive about what she wants.
I could name a great many more things I admire about her — her grace, her laugh, her laser-focus with our kids — but then I’d have to watch her roll her eyes as she reads this.
Marriage is like that. It isn’t always glorious or lovely. Sometimes you roll your eyes. We can forget all that “love is patient and love is kind” stuff.
What love is, is interesting. Love is interested.
From that pancake breakfast to today, she’s the most interesting person I know.
Happy birthday, Laura.
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