Assistant To Mayor Loves The Diversity Of Her Job
October 30, 2021 at 12:04 a.m.
Assistant To Mayor Loves The Diversity Of Her Job
By David [email protected]
Born and raised in Warsaw, Young went to college at Indiana Wesleyan University, majoring in recreation management and business administration. She then lived in Brownsburg, working for that city’s parks and recreation department for a few years. When the recreation director position for Warsaw Parks opened up after Janelle Wilson decided to leave, Young was able to take that position in 2009 and move back here. She had interned with Wilson for two years when she was in college.
After Michelle Bormet had served as the assistant to the mayor for 23 years – for Mayors Joe Thallemer, Ernie Wiggins and Jeff Plank – Bormet retired at the end of August 2014. Young was in her fifth year as the recreation director at that time.
“I love parks and rec, and I am an avid parks and rec supporter, but that job requires a lot of weekend and evening hours. You’re providing recreation for families who are off work and who want to do things with their kids and I was pregnant and about to have a baby in 2014, and realized I wanted to be able to do that with my kids, so this opportunity opened up and I decided to step away from parks for now,” Young said. “I could see myself getting back into it some day, because I still love that, but for right now this is just the right fit for me to be able to be with my kids and make those memories with them.”
She and her husband, Thomas, have been married since 2008 and have a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old.
When she started as the assistant to the mayor, Young said it was, “more of your traditional administrative assistant type of position, other than that you’re providing support to the mayor, which, I think, always puts a unique twist on it. But it was very much more of your standard admin. assistant.”
Duties might have included answering the phone, typing a letter, scheduling and putting together meetings.
“I would say my support to the mayor has changed in that I’m helping with larger projects and just higher levels of support. I’m not doing so much the administrative support, but I’m doing more project management and just representing him if he’s unavailable for things and kind of handling that next tier of customer service if he’s not able to do so,” Young said.
She’s also pivoted a lot to cover communications and public relations for the city.
“That was something in the strategic plan that was stressed that needed to be improved, and so I’ve been pinpointed to do that,” Young said.
The other “big” responsibility for her now is the city’s technology – “kind of coordinating the technology for the city, working on improving our technology, our efficiency with technology and that’s kind of now stemmed into the IT Governance Committee that was recently formed. That group has taken on a lot of that responsibility, but I’m a part of that four-person group now,” she said.
It’s a lot on Young’s plate, but she likes the diversity of her job.
“It’s something different every day and I enjoy all the different parts of my job. There definitely are days where there’s a lot, everything happens at one time – when it rains, it pours – but we have a good team. We all get along really well, and we just manage things well,” she said.
Seven years into her job, she’s come to better understand how things work behind the scenes, the complexity of things behind the scenes and that “it’s not a plug-and-play operation most of the time. Projects require a lot of background work. It seems like things move slowly in government, and they do, and I think it’s hard sometimes for residents to see why they’re moving slowly, but there’s so much going on behind the scenes and just the due diligence and the processes that have to take place or the state laws that are involved with things. There’s just so many different facets. I think that’s probably been the most eye-opening thing – just seeing what goes into community development and making our community what it is.”
Young also has grown to appreciate more what Warsaw has to offer.
“I lived away from Warsaw for a few years and saw what another community is like. Brownsburg is a great community, but I’ve learned the differences between being in a metropolitan community like that ... versus being in a community like this where you know your neighbors and everyone supports each other and your community kind of has a common goal and people are just friendly,” she said.
There’s always room for improvement, and for the city of Warsaw, Young said that’s child care.
Young is a member of LaunchPad. LaunchPad is the child care and early learning coalition, established in October 2018 to help solve the child care crisis in Kosciusko County.
“Child care is a big thing for me. I’m currently in that season of life with my kids and we’ve had child care struggles before. And I think that’s one thing, people don’t look at child care beyond just caring for that child during the day, but it becomes an economic issue because businesses don’t have their employees there or they can’t attract employees to the community because there’s not sufficient child care. So it kind of goes hand-in-hand with the housing crisis that we talk a lot about,” Young said.
The child care issue is more personal to her, she acknowledged, because it’s something that she’s been involved in. She’s glad to be a part of LaunchPad to help solve some of those problems and be involved in that way.
With all her responsibilities, Young has learned to be a multi-tasker. She has learned to be able to pivot quickly between different things that have nothing to do with each other and to organize and keep track of things.
“That’s central to this office, and I think it’s central to being a mom. You never know what curveball is coming next,” Young said.
She loves what she’s doing as the assistant to the mayor and loves being able to serve in the role she’s in. It’s an appointed position, but for as long as Thallemer will keep her on board and/or whoever the next mayor is should Thallemer decide not to seek re-election in 2023, Young would love to keep serving in her current capacity if she’s able to.
“And then, later in my career when my kids are grown, potentially, looking back at parks and rec in some sort of capacity, just because it’s where my heart was and still is. I love this job, too. I don’t think it was a far stretch to move up here. I’m still doing project management like I was down there and getting to be involved in the community and seeing community improvement,” she said.
Born and raised in Warsaw, Young went to college at Indiana Wesleyan University, majoring in recreation management and business administration. She then lived in Brownsburg, working for that city’s parks and recreation department for a few years. When the recreation director position for Warsaw Parks opened up after Janelle Wilson decided to leave, Young was able to take that position in 2009 and move back here. She had interned with Wilson for two years when she was in college.
After Michelle Bormet had served as the assistant to the mayor for 23 years – for Mayors Joe Thallemer, Ernie Wiggins and Jeff Plank – Bormet retired at the end of August 2014. Young was in her fifth year as the recreation director at that time.
“I love parks and rec, and I am an avid parks and rec supporter, but that job requires a lot of weekend and evening hours. You’re providing recreation for families who are off work and who want to do things with their kids and I was pregnant and about to have a baby in 2014, and realized I wanted to be able to do that with my kids, so this opportunity opened up and I decided to step away from parks for now,” Young said. “I could see myself getting back into it some day, because I still love that, but for right now this is just the right fit for me to be able to be with my kids and make those memories with them.”
She and her husband, Thomas, have been married since 2008 and have a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old.
When she started as the assistant to the mayor, Young said it was, “more of your traditional administrative assistant type of position, other than that you’re providing support to the mayor, which, I think, always puts a unique twist on it. But it was very much more of your standard admin. assistant.”
Duties might have included answering the phone, typing a letter, scheduling and putting together meetings.
“I would say my support to the mayor has changed in that I’m helping with larger projects and just higher levels of support. I’m not doing so much the administrative support, but I’m doing more project management and just representing him if he’s unavailable for things and kind of handling that next tier of customer service if he’s not able to do so,” Young said.
She’s also pivoted a lot to cover communications and public relations for the city.
“That was something in the strategic plan that was stressed that needed to be improved, and so I’ve been pinpointed to do that,” Young said.
The other “big” responsibility for her now is the city’s technology – “kind of coordinating the technology for the city, working on improving our technology, our efficiency with technology and that’s kind of now stemmed into the IT Governance Committee that was recently formed. That group has taken on a lot of that responsibility, but I’m a part of that four-person group now,” she said.
It’s a lot on Young’s plate, but she likes the diversity of her job.
“It’s something different every day and I enjoy all the different parts of my job. There definitely are days where there’s a lot, everything happens at one time – when it rains, it pours – but we have a good team. We all get along really well, and we just manage things well,” she said.
Seven years into her job, she’s come to better understand how things work behind the scenes, the complexity of things behind the scenes and that “it’s not a plug-and-play operation most of the time. Projects require a lot of background work. It seems like things move slowly in government, and they do, and I think it’s hard sometimes for residents to see why they’re moving slowly, but there’s so much going on behind the scenes and just the due diligence and the processes that have to take place or the state laws that are involved with things. There’s just so many different facets. I think that’s probably been the most eye-opening thing – just seeing what goes into community development and making our community what it is.”
Young also has grown to appreciate more what Warsaw has to offer.
“I lived away from Warsaw for a few years and saw what another community is like. Brownsburg is a great community, but I’ve learned the differences between being in a metropolitan community like that ... versus being in a community like this where you know your neighbors and everyone supports each other and your community kind of has a common goal and people are just friendly,” she said.
There’s always room for improvement, and for the city of Warsaw, Young said that’s child care.
Young is a member of LaunchPad. LaunchPad is the child care and early learning coalition, established in October 2018 to help solve the child care crisis in Kosciusko County.
“Child care is a big thing for me. I’m currently in that season of life with my kids and we’ve had child care struggles before. And I think that’s one thing, people don’t look at child care beyond just caring for that child during the day, but it becomes an economic issue because businesses don’t have their employees there or they can’t attract employees to the community because there’s not sufficient child care. So it kind of goes hand-in-hand with the housing crisis that we talk a lot about,” Young said.
The child care issue is more personal to her, she acknowledged, because it’s something that she’s been involved in. She’s glad to be a part of LaunchPad to help solve some of those problems and be involved in that way.
With all her responsibilities, Young has learned to be a multi-tasker. She has learned to be able to pivot quickly between different things that have nothing to do with each other and to organize and keep track of things.
“That’s central to this office, and I think it’s central to being a mom. You never know what curveball is coming next,” Young said.
She loves what she’s doing as the assistant to the mayor and loves being able to serve in the role she’s in. It’s an appointed position, but for as long as Thallemer will keep her on board and/or whoever the next mayor is should Thallemer decide not to seek re-election in 2023, Young would love to keep serving in her current capacity if she’s able to.
“And then, later in my career when my kids are grown, potentially, looking back at parks and rec in some sort of capacity, just because it’s where my heart was and still is. I love this job, too. I don’t think it was a far stretch to move up here. I’m still doing project management like I was down there and getting to be involved in the community and seeing community improvement,” she said.
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