“After college, making sure I worked somewhere where every employee was treated like an individual — and we weren't seen as just an army of people, just chugging away — was really important for me,” says Tyler Allen, creative production associate at Floyd. “What's really nice about start-up culture is just that there's a lot of camaraderie between everybody there, it feels like a family. It's not a huge corporation.”

"Everyone can learn and everyone can play a role in the future," says Nicole Brown, a senior program manager for Detroit Future City, and leader of the Land + Water WORKS Coalition. "It has to be all hands on deck to move the needle further."