Emily Wagner Is Changing The Cape Cod Landscape For The Better

For decades, a familiar refrain has echoed across Cape Cod: young people don’t live here — at least not year-round. Emily Wagner challenges that assumption and hopes to play a meaningful role in changing the narrative once and for all.

Since 2024, Wagner has served as the executive director of Cape Cod Young Professionals (CCYP), a nonprofit dedicated to connecting, engaging and supporting locals across the region. “Young” is a relative term, one that does not put constraints on the membership, she said. 

While Wagner has spent the last two years working to grow an eclectic community of engaged Cape Codders, her background reflects a similarly diverse path.

Originally from Pittsfield, Wagner moved with her family to Brewster when she was just 8 years old. While the move was exciting (her family had summered on the Cape), it was necessary for Wagner’s father, who was transferred from the Berkshires to Barnstable through the state department of children and families services.

“I was sad to leave Pittsfield because, you know, you’re attached to your home place,” she said. “But just seeing (her parents') pure joy about the thing, it was pretty catching.”

Wagner considers herself a local, much to the dismay of born and bred Cape Codders. “We have to lower the bar,” she said with a laugh. It’s her hot take that surviving two years here gives newcomers the power to own the local title, which should come as no shock given her fight for acceptance. 

A Nauset School graduate, Wagner went on to graduate from Mount Holyoke College in 2008 with a degree in English literature. At the time of her high school graduation in 2004, CCYP didn’t exist, and off-Cape was the focus of the conversation about career trajectory after college. 

“The conversation at the time was like ‘go and keep going,’” she said. “There wasn’t a lot of education about what industries are here (on Cape Cod) and what people are needed to stay here and how do you stay here.”

With an array of jobs already in her rear view — seasonal gift wrapper at a local bookstore, Stop & Shop bagger, ice cream scooper, and bed maker — Wagner’s future was still undetermined at 18. One thing, however, was certain: the hospitality industry had taught her how to hustle.

“My introduction to the workforce was in hospitality, and frankly, I draw from that every single day of my life,” she said. 

While in school at Mount Holyoke, Wagner found a position at the local university newspaper and quickly started to run it, issuing new deadlines that provided structure and stability. She said she loved holding a position where she got to see how it all worked. That experience fostered a love of community journalism and local news, something she still believes in wholeheartedly to this day. 

“I want to do community reporting,” she said. “I think the local media scene and being supportive of a democratic information universe and getting people connected to info is the thing I believe in.” 

The caveat? It was 2008. Newspapers were not in their prime.

Wagner applied to every single alt-weekly newspaper in the country. At the time there were 28. She ended up working at The Washington Blade, a metropolitan D.C.-area LGBTQ independent newspaper, for the summer. By the end of just four months, they had been bought out by a parent company and gone bankrupt, and she had been poached by the Washington City Paper, another local independent newspaper.    

Nine months later, after witnessing a brutal lay-off season and wanting to do more, Wagner entered the nonprofit space. 

“Generally, I was like, ‘I believe in access to information and art, what should I do with this?’” she said. “So I scooted into the nonprofit universe.”

Wagner worked for around seven and half years for the Pew Research Center, an independent, nonpartisan organization that uses data and research to help inform the public, improve public policy and support civic engagement. Wagner calls these years her most informed because she was able to gain insight into how the nonprofit sector functions. 

“This job is sort of like peak nonprofit experience,” she said. But she was still missing her passion for disseminating and facilitating access to information. “So I went to library school.”

Wagner earned her master’s degree in library and information science from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Her study was specifically focused on information architecture, which basically taught her the process in which people find information on the internet. Her approach was digging through digital pathways to understand how accessible information was within library databases and how they could be better. 

For three years, Wagner took part in the master’s program on a part-time basis while she worked for the college as a writer. After earning her degree, she found an information manager position with the American Library Association, which mimicked a number of responsibilities she experienced at Pew. 

“It was right at the beginning of the Trump administration when I took that job,” she said. “So it was really intense. Libraries were eliminated from the budget, [there was] misinformation, book bans — the level of onslaught that was specifically waged on public information at this moment was really intense and hard to navigate, especially for a community that is historically underfunded.” 

Wagner said that on her third or fourth week of the job, Melania Trump tweeted “Happy Library Week.” She sent the tweet to a lobbyist and organized a nationwide response where every librarian and library-adjacent worker “ratioed” the tweet with responses asking why the budget was eliminated. 

“It was very effective, actually,” she said. “We saved the budget that year.”

After working through the full term of that administration, Wagner needed a break. She did some freelance, took some time off, and found she was almost addicted to the rush of lobbying for policies she believed in. In 2021, she became the communications director for the National Head Start Association, a nonprofit organization that advocates for early-childhood education. 

In the same year, Wagner moved back to Cape Cod with her husband and six-month baby in tow to care for her ailing father who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. While the move was never meant to be permanent, Wagner said, they quickly found themselves registering to vote, changing their car registrations and updating their licenses. 

After coping with the loss of her father in December 2023, Wagner felt the need for change in her professional life too. By April 2024, she had started as the executive director at CCYP.

Since coming back to the Cape, Wagner said, the most surprising thing is how supportive the community is. 

“I knew that the Cape was very supportive as a kid,” she said. “But not as a person who’s trying to make things happen. And so when I took this job and was like ‘what are we going to do now?’ There was so much love and support and cheering that was happening.” 

That feeling of success and support is what she is trying to emulate within CCYP. Wagner said she wants locals to experience the tight-knit community and know there are resources in creating the dream jobs that might not seem attainable on the Cape. 

Many of the members set to speak at the annual “Shape the Cape Summit” include choreographers, filmmakers, illustrators, mobile-coffee founders, nanny network brand creators, custom balloon artists, fashion designers and other, well-known occupations involving environmental science, real estate, banking and social work. 

Wagner hopes to make the Cape feel more approachable when it comes to finding a career, something that to many feels financially impossible.

At the origin of CCYP, Wagner said they were very focused on investigating outmigration and the reasons why young people weren’t staying on Cape Cod. 

“The pain points have always been the same: childcare and housing,” she said. “But I’m tentatively very hopeful about it because our membership numbers and our engagement has never been more robust. We had record numbers at the summit last year.”

Wagner said she has found that young people are hungry for connection. While it can be hard to find an opening on Cape Cod, more than ever, she has seen people searching for that entry point. 

“I think outmigration is, of course, a problem from a systemic point of view,” she said. “But the energy has never been stronger.”

In many ways the conversation over younger generations and families living on Cape Cod has always come from a negative perspective. That there is absolutely no way for it to work. Wagner said she is hopeful that within the CCYP universe, she can give folks the confidence, the resources and the connection that helps establish roots and find new paths of growth here. 

Work can seem scarce, but she has cultivated a network that proves working here is not limited to specific industries. 

The summit takes place on April 8 this year, with a list of different sessions to be announced soon. You can visit ccyp.org/summit for tickets and more information. 

When Wagner isn’t working, she is spending time with her husband and two daughters in her childhood home in Brewster.