MOBILE, Ala. — A summer internship program built to keep young talent in Mobile is leaning more heavily on personal relationships to make that happen, city and Chamber officials say, after this year’s expansion of a new mentorship track paired college interns with local young professionals.
FuelAL: Mobile is the local arm of a statewide talent attraction initiative led by the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama and funded by Innovate Alabama.
Each summer, cities across the state host interns from around the country and tailor programming to show off what makes their communities distinct.
The premise behind FuelAL addresses one of Alabama’s oldest economic development problems: the state produces college graduates who leave. Interns come to a city for a summer, do good work, enjoy the town — and then return to campuses in other states or regions, often taking first jobs far from where they interned. The FuelAL model intervenes during that window, giving interns a structured introduction to the city’s professional community, its amenities and its long-term prospects before they make the decision a diploma forces.
In Mobile, that has meant professional development sessions, joint social mixers with Young Professionals of Mobile, and direct access to local leaders, including Mobile Mayor Spiro Cheriogotis.
This year, the Mobile Chamber added a new layer to that experience: the Fuel the Future mentorship program, which pairs interns with members of Young Professionals of Mobile for relationships that extend beyond a single summer.
The mentorship layer is the program’s answer to the question every talent-retention effort faces: what actually changes a young professional’s decision? Programming, mixers and speakers introduce a city, but a relationship with someone who lives the life — who shows an intern where to live, how the professional networks work and what a decade in Mobile looks like — gives the decision a human anchor. Young Professionals of Mobile, the Chamber-affiliated network for early-career members of the area’s workforce, supplied the mentors from exactly the cohort the interns would join if they stayed.
The statewide structure behind the summer matters to how Mobile’s version runs. The Economic Development Partnership of Alabama, the state’s lead economic development organization based in Birmingham, coordinates programs that market Alabama to employers and workers alike, and Innovate Alabama — the statewide innovation initiative created by the Legislature to build an entrepreneurial and technology ecosystem — funds the talent work. Their support lets individual cities design programs without building the administrative machinery from scratch, and it ties Mobile’s efforts to a statewide story about keeping and attracting educated workers.
Mobile’s summer programming sits inside a larger local strategy. The Mobile Chamber and the city have spent recent years courting aerospace, shipbuilding, logistics and technology employers — industries that compete for the same educated young workers FuelAL courts. Austal USA, Airbus and the port complex anchor a growing employment base, but the region’s challenge has been convincing graduates that Mobile offers not just jobs but a life worth staying for. The internship program attacks that gap directly, one summer cohort at a time.
A Deeper Connection to the City
For Nicanor Requena, a senior at Spring Hill College studying computer science with minors in supply chain management, AI and data science, and mathematics, the mentorship component reshaped how he sees his future in Mobile.
Requena, who is originally from Belize, moved to the city in 2024 to continue his education and spent this summer interning with Norton Lilly International.
Spring Hill College, the Jesuit liberal arts college founded in 1830 on Mobile’s western edge, gave Requena’s story its setting — a campus with students drawn from around the Gulf Coast, Latin America and beyond. His academic mix mirrors what Mobile’s growing employers say they need: software and data skills joined to logistics knowledge, the combination that the port city’s shipping, aerospace and supply chain businesses hire for.
Norton Lilly International, the shipping agency headquartered in Mobile with operations in ports across the country, put that combination to work. The firm manages vessel operations for ocean carriers calling at Mobile and other ports, giving an intern a view of global trade from inside one of the businesses that runs it.
Through the program, Requena was matched with Tripp Tremayne of Sam Winter & Company, who offered more than career advice. Tremayne gave Requena a firsthand look at what it means to build a life in Mobile, including time spent with his family and insight into his community involvement.
“Being able to see someone so driven and just getting after it, I think that’s pretty inspiring for me,” Requena said.
Requena said the relationship changed his outlook on the opportunities available locally.
That is the mentorship program’s design in miniature. Sam Winter & Company, a Mobile firm in commercial real estate and investment, put its young professional in front of an intern who had no family in the region — someone whose picture of Mobile might otherwise have ended at the internship’s last day. Time with Tremayne’s family, exposure to his civic involvement and his professional network gave Requena a model of what an established young Mobile professional’s life contains.
For a student from Belize, the stakes of that modeling are higher than for a typical intern. A graduate deciding whether to stay in the United States or return home weighs community as much as career, and the mentor relationship — a working professional who took the time to share his life in the city — supplied the evidence a brochure cannot.
The pairing also reflects how the Chamber’s mentor recruitment works. Young Professionals of Mobile members volunteer into the program, and the matching process pairs interns with mentors in compatible fields or shared interests. The relationships are designed to outlast the summer — a mentor who knows an intern’s ambitions can flag job openings, introduce employers and remain a contact after the program ends, which is precisely the mechanism by which an internship converts into a first job in town.
Mayor Cheriogotis’s involvement signals the city government’s stake. Mobile’s mayor has made workforce and growth central to his administration’s agenda, and a summer program that courts tomorrow’s professionals gives the city a direct line to the cohort deciding whether Mobile is home. City leaders joining the interns for sessions and events — rather than sending a representative — is part of what distinguishes FuelAL from a routine internship fair.
The program’s summer arc follows a sequence the statewide model prescribes. Interns arrive at their host employers in May or June, then join the FuelAL calendar: professional development sessions on everything from networking to personal finance, social events with Young Professionals of Mobile, tours and experiences that show off the city’s waterfront, dining, arts and neighborhoods, and access to executives and elected officials most interns never meet. The mentorship layer runs underneath, from the first pairing through the summer’s end.
Retention economics gives the effort its urgency. When an intern stays, the region keeps not just one professional but the tax base, consumer spending, housing demand and eventual entrepreneurship that young workers generate — and each staying graduate makes the next one’s decision easier, as the peer network thickens. Cities across the Sun Belt compete on exactly this dimension, and Mobile’s version of the competition runs through programs like FuelAL rather than incentives alone.
By summer’s end, the cohort returns to campuses across the country — carrying, in the program’s hope, a specific image of Mobile: a city where they worked at real jobs, met real mentors, saw real lives being built and were treated as future residents rather than temporary help. Whether that image survives the fall semester’s recruiting season is the measure the program is built for.
The Mobile Chamber’s role in the program places the work inside the region’s broader talent pipeline. The Chamber runs workforce initiatives alongside its business recruitment, and FuelAL complements the programs that introduce high school and college students to local employers year-round. The Chamber also staffs the effort — coordinating employers, scheduling the summer’s events and recruiting the mentors — which is why the addition of the mentorship track this year required Chamber capacity rather than volunteer goodwill alone.
Spring Hill College’s participation runs through its placement and career services, which steer students toward local internships with employers such as Norton Lilly. For the college, a student from Belize choosing to build a career in Mobile would represent exactly the international-to-local conversion the region’s universities hope for — a graduate who arrives from abroad, discovers the Gulf Coast through an internship and decides the city he studied in is the city he’ll stay in.
The internship that anchored Requena’s summer is itself part of the story. Norton Lilly International has operated in Mobile for a century, serving the vessels that call on the Port of Mobile, and its offices sit inside the working port economy that defines the city’s commercial identity. Interning there means seeing Mobile’s role in world trade from the inside — the shipments, the schedules and the decisions that connect an Alabama port to carriers across the globe.
FuelAL’s designers measure the summer’s success in the numbers that follow: how many interns report interest in returning to Mobile after graduation, how many accept offers from area employers, how many stay in contact with their mentors. The first cohorts are building that baseline now, and this year’s expansion — the mentorship layer that gave interns like Requena a person, not just a program — is the model’s newest answer to the question of what makes a summer convert into a decision to stay.