Fuel Boise lights way for young professionals

Area leads groups left John West with a bad feeling.

“There are a lot of them around here,” he said. “You go to the meetings, there’s lots of people and they base the success of the group on the leads they get, not on what they give.”

West wanted something more from a professional organization. So he started one of his own, called Fuel Boise. He had a twofold motivation that actually involved a former girlfriend who left town in search of bigger, better things than she felt Boise had to offer. West agreed with her, in part.

“I think Boise is sheltered,” he said, noting its conservative nature. “It’s divided into two sets: young people involved in the downtown nightlife and married couples.”

If a person doesn’t fit into one of those two groups, he or she can feel a little disenfranchised.

West said the split with his girlfriend was amicable, and operating on the theme “you can get bitter or get better,” he decided to start Fuel Boise as a place where young professionals could foster career-based relationships that would help them thrive in the Treasure Valley.

West, 27, launched the group two years ago with co-founders Christina Moore-Ward, a real estate agent he describes as a Type A personality, and Amber Johansen, who runs an event planning business and is, according to West, “a social bug.”

West, who currently works as a mortgage banker, said he’s the dreamer of the group.

Fuel Boise got off to a rocky start. In its original inception, with about 25 members, older speakers were brought in to impart their business wisdom. While West said he valued what they had to say, many other members weren’t keen on the senior viewpoint.

“One girl said she felt she was being talked to by her father,” West said. “They disengage with people who have gray hair. They like someone in the game now, in the trenches, their sleeves rolled up - they’re leading the way now.”

Two speakers who were a hit with members were Mark Rivers, developer of BoDo and founder of The WaterCooler, and David Hale, owner of the Linen Building.

West decided to refashion the group and called a temporary moratorium on meetings last December. He said Fuel Boise lacked a clearly defined focus. “You can only build on paper so much. The followers wanted to tell us what to do. They were defining the group. The leaders were not defining it. We had three leaders, but we needed a chief.”

He said the group lacked vision and with a smile offered up the biblical quotation “without a vision, the people perish.”

December’s sabbatical allowed the leaders and members to decide if Fuel Boise was worth continuing. The decision was a vote in the affirmative.

West and the others devised a written set of guidelines and delineated a three-pronged purpose for the group: education, community service and networking. A chairman was elected for each category, along with a budget coordinator, database coordinator and technology coordinator.

However, in refashioning the group, West sought to avoid complexity. “I wanted to keep it simple,” he said. “If it’s too complicated, we’d miss our vision.”

West was also particularly eager to have the organization contain a giving-back component. “I’ve always been involved in giving back,” he said.

Many members of Fuel Boise have multiple memberships in other associations; and whereas West feels networking overall is valuable, there are other young professional organizations he himself prefers not to join, stating they are “too big, too impersonal and feel like a dating club.”

The people in his group, he said, have common shared interests of bonding together, of backgrounds. “With Fuel, if we can create something unique and different and show them the way, we can help young professionals connect, and we can engage and empower them. It gives them hope,” he said.

He’s heard too many young people who’ve left the area say they feel returning to Boise would be taking a step backward. Fuel Boise seeks to ignite in the 25- to 35-year-old demographic a desire to stay here, or to come back.

“We are the fuel of the future,” he said.

Fuel Boise currently meets the first Thursday of every month at 6 p.m. at various locations. For more information, contact West at (208) 353-5458 or by e-mail at John_L_West@hotmail.com.

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4 Responses to “Fuel Boise lights way for young professionals”

1. cna classes boise id | CNA Training Says:
   March 5th, 2010 at 6:37 pm

   [...] Idaho Business Review » Blog Archive » Fuel Boise lights way for young professionals [...]

2. Bill Says:
   March 5th, 2010 at 10:15 pm

   What a colossal waste of time. If you’re 35 or younger, are talented, degreed, legally unencumbered & ambitious, you’d better be spending ALL your time figuring how to get out of Idaho.

3. John Says:
   March 8th, 2010 at 9:26 am

   We simply wanted to fill a need that we thought was not being met entirely by other groups but in no way do we want to separate ourselves by talking against them. We want to be a part of benefiting other young professionals in the Valley and whether that is through Fuel Boise or through any of the other groups, we seek only to be a part of a change. Working together with all the other groups in the Valley will be far more effective for our overall goal then working against them. Many of Fuel’s members are in other local groups as well and we encourage that.

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