Young Detroiters the program's online course reaches
Detroit keeps saying it wants to keep its young talent. NextUp 313 is one of the clearer attempts to actually do it. The initiative, led by Council Member Latisha Johnson's office alongside the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, is built for a specific group the city cannot afford to lose: residents between 18 and 30 who are trying to start something.
The structure is not vague. NextUp 313 runs an online course that reaches up to 140 young Detroiters, roughly 20 per council district, so the access is spread across neighborhoods instead of concentrated downtown. It places seven selected entrepreneurs into micro internships, three to five days embedded inside high revenue small businesses and funded tech startups. And it puts fourteen participants in front of investors and industry leaders to pitch what they are building.
"The gap was never talent. It was access, and access is something a city can actually hand you."
That last part matters more than the pitch prize. For a lot of young founders in Detroit, the missing piece has never been the idea or the work ethic. It has been proximity: knowing how a real operation runs day to day, sitting inside a company that has already figured out payroll and margins and hard weeks. You cannot Google your way into that. You have to be in the building.
NextUp 313 treats that proximity as something the city can distribute. A few days embedded in a working startup will teach a 22 year old more about execution than a semester of theory. The online course meets people where they are. And the pitch stage does the thing Detroit's young builders ask for most: it gets them seen before they have a logo everyone recognizes.
There is a bigger signal underneath the program too. When a city organizes its own resources around people who have not made the news yet, it is telling a generation that they do not have to leave for New York or Atlanta to be taken seriously. That message compounds. Every young Detroiter who builds here and stays makes it more normal for the next one to do the same.
A program like this will not fix everything. Fourteen pitch slots and seven internships is a start, not a finish line, and the real test is whether it grows and whether the people it touches build things that last. But the direction is right. Detroit is putting structure behind its young talent instead of just hoping they stick around.
That is the work. The next class is already coming up behind it.