What area of digital is growing right now where I could quickly find work for unemployed young people?

Nearly every market is experiencing demand right now - especially for digital marketing services.

Many brands are overworked, meaning tasks like social media management, blog/content creation, digital marketing strategy, and online customer service is being neglected.

If you or your part-time workers can fill this need, there will be nearly endless work.

There is no directory of people who need your help - they are too busy being busy to make their way to such a place. Your sole task would be to seek them out. Look for markets mentioned in national, regional, and local news sources.

Just last week NPR showcased a family-owned business shipping fresh lobster across America. If you can educate these entrepreneurs on why they should care about investing in tomorrow, you'll find plenty of work for your students.

All the best,
-Shaun

Question requires far more detail.

If I had 100 kids, I'd put them to work doing lawn care + power washing, because I know they could succeed at these activities...

And... as important... these activities would get them off their phones/screens.

Having a "Digital Marketing" background... you already know how many lies + myths exist about the effectiveness of DM.

If you're interested in teaching them effective marketing, have them mow lawns + powerwash for a year, then teach the most diligent of the 100 about copywriting for email + direct mail.

As copywriting + list selection is the core of effective marketing.

Data-driven marketing, implementation & integration of various tools & technologies for data consolidation, integration, digital/ marketing analysis, account based marketing, data visualization, programmatic, ecommerce & whole suite of AI/ML in optimising marketing. Having a Digital Marketing background, I would strongly recommend for you to pivot in the MarTech/ AdTech domain. Highly in need across geographies & business also the you may plan to upskill the 100 manpower in various functions in your venture viz. Cold calling, pre-sales, inbound promotion, customer service, project planning & so on with some amount of upskilling/ training. Hope this helps. Good luck.

I've always been of the opinion that small business IT services is a very low barrier to entry. Just by virtue of being digital natives (not guaranteed, but likelier than older people), the young people probably have enough of the skills they need to get started.

There are still an uncomfortably high-level of small businesses (and non for profits) that have little to no help with IT services. Basic problems like making sure everyone can connect to the local printer, computers are running antivirus software, and everyone is viewing data with the most up to date browsers. I have been working with an adoption agency in my state, and they lack all the basics: their own domains, any notion of IT security, document sharing, etc.

Given your short timeline and large group, you would be well positioned to partner with small businesses and small non-for-profits in the community. It would make a big impact and produce achievable results. Larger IT projects are hard to get any progress in less than 6 months, even when you have experienced staff. The problems are BIG, and therefore require a lot of implementation and follow-on analysis.