How do summer jobs programs empower their youth through short programs? What leads to the lasting impact that we see in decreases in violent crime well after the programs conclude?
How do summer jobs programs empower their youth through short programs? What leads to the lasting impact that we see in decreases in violent crime well after the programs conclude? In episode four of J-PAL Voices: The Impact and Promise of Summer Jobs in the United States, we hear from service providers like Danielle Ellman at Commonpoint Queens about the “whole person” and “whole family” approach that these organizations take towards their participants. Researchers Sara Heller and Alicia Sasser-Modestino describe their findings around the conflict-resolution skills that these programs inculcate in their participants. And as Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend tells us, the resilience that program participants develop stands them in good stead, even leading to many of them eventually working at the same organizations that provided them their summer experiences.
We would love to hear your comments and feedback at podcasts@povertyactionlab.org. J-PAL Voices is brought to you by J-PAL North America (https://www.povertyactionlab.org/na). Stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/JPAL.NorthAmerica/) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/JPAL_NA).
Please take the short, one-minute survey at https://j-p.al/voicessurvey.
Danielle Ellman
The agency, as hokey as our name is Commonpoint, we want to be the common point within community. We want to be the one thing that a family can have in common with each other. So, again, it's not atypical that you might have a family, for instance, who lost a parent in COVID. And because we have a mental health clinic, we have that parent in bereavement counseling while we're supporting the young person in supports in high school while we're supporting, you know, the other child in the family in some sort of after-school program that is for free. And so, we really try to look holistically at all families.
Narrator
Commonpoint Queens is a community-based organization in New York City’s borough of Queens. They provide career readiness training and paid employment opportunities under New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program. As CEO Danielle Ellman tells me, those programs are just one part of Commonpoint’s broader commitment to its community.
Danielle Ellman
You can come to Commonpoint Queens to have your first parenting experience with a newborn toddler. You can come to Commonpoint Queens for assistance when your older parent is aging and is in need of support for social adult day care. We have mental health clinics. We have afterschool programs, day camps, NORCs, senior centers, sports, health, and wellness. You name it, we have it, where we're a pretty one-stop shop social service agency in the borough of Queens.
Narrator
Summer Youth Employment Programs empower youth by teaching them valuable skills and building up critical social networks. In addition, they serve as a valuable entry point into a broader support system.
Danielle Ellman
The connector again, is the thing that grabs a young person's attention is a summer job, but that summer job is packaged in a whole host of social services and educational opportunities to really make sure that we as a community are putting our arms around these young people and embracing them.
Narrator
From J-PAL North America, this is J-PAL Voices. I’m your host, Rohit Naimpally. On this season of J-PAL Voices, we take a close look at the impact and promise presented by summer jobs programs in the United States. We will bring you the stories behind the impact, as told by the people who create, participate in, and sustain these programs. Episode Four: Provide Support That Empowers.
Danielle Glick
We serve as that connection for youth that might not otherwise have it. So, we become that networking piece. We become that, you know, support in helping them write a resume or prepare for an interview. We link them to their first job or their first work experience to help them build their resumes and sort of create that stepping stone for them. So, when they are ready to go out into the real world, they feel prepared. So, that's where we come in and we offer the social and emotional supports, we, we do it all.
Narrator
In her role as the Assistant Vice President of High School and College Success at Commonpoint Queens, Danielle Glick thinks a lot about how to set Commonpoint’s youth up for success in the real world. The support that Commonpoint provides runs the gamut, from helping participants with specific skills like resume writing, to thinking more broadly about the needs of participants’ families.
Danielle Ellman
We reached out to our high school students and said, “If we can be helpful, let us know.” And we delivered breakfast in bed to all of our single moms out there. And then we did the same thing for Father's Day, but in a way that we did it through the kids. So, if Danielle Ellman was a young person who was at SYEP, we dropped the bag to the young person so that they could deliver breakfast in bed to their moms, just because they couldn't get out and they also were cut off from employment at that point in time. So, you know, it's those kinds of things where once you're in our systems, we're able to communicate with you. You're able to communicate with us.
Benjamin Babayev
My family loved it. It gave me something to do in the summer. I wasn't just like being lazy and it gave me something to do. So, they loved how I was also interacting with my community more. I was being aware of the issues around myself. So, they said that they know that I grew as a person a little bit this summer because of Commonpoint Queens.
Narrator
Organizations like Commonpoint Queens play a vital role in connecting youth across communities, and helping them feel empowered within these communities. As the COVID-19 pandemic jeopardized summer jobs programs across the country, Angela Rudolph at Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services tried to salvage the essential elements of these programs.
Angela Rudolph
We had a number of conversations with the agencies that we fund, we call them delegates. And one of the things that we learned from delegate agencies was that young people were really challenged by what they had lost. They had lost the ability to kind of have business as usual. They lost the ability to interact with the people that they cared about. And it wasn't just their friends. It was around teachers or coaches or folks in programs who really helped to ground some young people who had challenging circumstances. And so, for us, we wanted to figure out ways that we could really build a program that would center all of those things and help people felt like they were gaining something when we got to the summertime.
Narrator
Angela and her colleagues focused on the elements of the One Summer Chicago program that are most important: enabling community, providing opportunities for learning, and above all, empowering by providing hope. Nearly ten years since she participated in the program, my colleague Yiping Li reflected on the role that the program plays every summer.
Yiping Li
I think, we always talk about summer melt and people losing their learning from the school year. And I think it's one of those things that also happens when you are sort of just inactive over the summer and you don't have any meaningful activities to keep yourself engaged. And also you exert so much time thinking about planning your summer when you have limited network and maybe you don't know a lot of people, maybe you don't have a local community center or it isn't open and you are spending so much energy trying to plan for your summer that eventually you get exhausted and you feel a little bit hopeless when you don't have plans.
Narrator
So how do summer jobs programs empower their youth through these short summer experiences? What supports do they provide people like Yiping? I asked Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend, CEO of the Philadelphia Youth Network, about her vision for Philadelphia’s WorkReady summer jobs programs.
Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend
We want these opportunities to be a space where young people are bolstered, right, where they can make the connection to what they're learning in school and what their future career goals will be. We want the experience to be a place where young people will find an adult that they can connect with in order to get some of that guidance that they need in order to think about their next steps.
Narrator
Program directors like Chekemma in Philadelphia and Angela in Chicago identify connection and learning as aspirational goals for summer jobs programs. The research bears out that these are, indeed, crucial channels through which these programs help youth navigate relationships. Alicia Sasser-Modestino is an economist at Northeastern University who has studied Boston’s summer jobs program in great detail.
Alicia Sasser-Modestino
Summer jobs programs help youth develop these relationships with adults and peers that are critical in that process. So, we can think about the early work experience that summer jobs are giving youth to have an opportunity to engage in tasks that help them develop a sense of agency, identity, competency that's necessary for taking on these adult roles.
Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend
I am the beneficiary and the product of the investment of many caring adults, the investment of many great educational opportunities and also many great mentors who have helped me along the way.
And I can remember those mentors all the way back to second grade until now, people who are still advising me on how to be the best President, you know, best President and CEO, the best wife, the best mom. I'm always, I've always been fortunate to have people helping guide me. And so, when I came to the Philadelphia Youth Network, that was an opportunity for me to create more opportunities.
Narrator
In Episode Two, Rashad Cope took us through his journey from being a participant in Boston’s summer jobs program to now playing a key role in managing the program. His story is echoed in the experiences of Chekemma at the Philadelphia Youth Network and Danielle Ellman at Commonpoint Queens. Recognizing the crucial role that adult mentors played in setting them up for success, these program leaders now ensure that the next generation of youth have the same opportunity to build supportive connections.
Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend
The other thing that we hear a lot about is the networking skills and also the social capital that young people are gaining. I mean, I think that alone is very valuable to thinking through what are my plans for my future. And also, we hear from participants often that the experience that they have with WorkReady sometimes is the first time that they fill-in-the-blank, right? The first time that I went into an office, the first time that I navigated public transportation. And what it builds in young people is confidence, right? It builds confidence. It builds curiosity. It builds their ability, the resilience in them. And so, they learn that they can accomplish things that they had not, they had not previously done.
Narrator
This resilience that Chekemma identifies carries over outside the work environment. Some of the biggest impacts from summer jobs programs are felt in decreases in violent crime. Economist Sara Heller lays out how the inter-personal skills that youth gain while working summer jobs, also translate to inter-personal interactions in their daily lives.
Sara Heller
When I talked to one of the employers at these programs, I asked him what he saw as his job as a supervisor on these programs. And he said that the biggest problem that the kids have when they show up in his workplace is that they can't take constructive criticism. That he tells people, “You have to wear closed-toed shoes to work”, and they blow up in his face because they just sort of can't take constructive criticism. And he viewed his job as an employer as helping them learn how to do that, helping them sort of regulate that initial impulse to lash out and respond more constructively.
And so, you can imagine that learning that skill in the workplace might also help you navigate conflicts with your friends or with people who aren't your friends on the street, right, is that, that ability to sort of take a breath, think about where you are and whether it's worth fighting or not and walk away could also reduce violent crime.
Narrator
Similarly, Alicia Sasser-Modestino’s research in Boston finds that participants’ increases in soft skills and community engagement are strongly correlated with a decrease in violent crime.
Alicia Sasser-Modestino
It turned out that after the program completion, the participants were far more likely to report that they felt connected to their neighborhood. They had a lot to contribute to the groups that they belong to, they were also more likely to report knowing how to manage their emotions and temper asking for help when it's needed resolving conflict with a peer constructively.
Rashad Cope
Some of her studies have also linked back to how summer jobs, within a community like the City of Boston, improves behavioral outcomes, and young people are more engaged by way of them participating in summer jobs. They're more engaged because they develop a sense of who they are by participating in summer jobs. They develop increased competency in certain areas, they know how to deal with conflict resolution, and they just know how to engage better with adults and peers.
Narrator
The conflict resolution and peer connection skills that Rashad talks about are skills that all young people benefit from, regardless of where they come from. However, not all youth have the same level of access to the environments where they can learn these skills. Individuals from lower income or vulnerable backgrounds may often not have access to the mentoring and confidence-building opportunities that their better resourced-peers might. Julia Breitman at New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development sees this gap as one that city agencies can help fill through summer jobs programs.
Julia Breitman
You don't know that you have to make those connections. It's a skill, it's something that's taught, it's something that's maybe taken for granted by middle class young people, but it's not something that most of the young people we serve understand. And so, it's been my privilege to take my experience, something I wish somebody had told me, and make sure that our young people are getting that experience. Because that really is the role of our programs, it's to help families, and help young people where the government needs to step in, right? Where, if a family doesn't have those skills and resources, this is where our programs come in, to make sure that young people have the same opportunities as somebody who's growing up with parents with connections.
Narrator
In speaking with program directors like Julia and Rashad, I am struck by the genuine excitement they feel in seeing the growth and empowerment of summer jobs participants taking place before their eyes. At the Philadelphia Youth Network, Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend’s team proudly employs WorkReady alums and interns.
Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend
And one of them, her name is Jaelynn and she is a first-generation college, she's in her first year of college. But what was so spectacular, was me getting to know her, let's say week one in an internship where she was very, very shy, and maybe soft – softer spoken, I would say she wasn't soft spoken – she was softer spoken. She didn't always readily jump into the conversation. And I watched her go from not being as sure about her thoughts or what she was seeking to accomplish to, by the end – I will say during the last week and in the subsequent week, following the end of her internship – she not only did a national presentation call with me, but we also had a meeting with the Senator. And she was able to articulate very clearly what having the WorkReady experience did for her in those six short weeks, how she found her voice, how she was empowered, how she was able to learn to solve problems. And she readily got to know people.
Tatiana Arguello
When you hear from young people about just how much they've grown over a summer, it just makes it so meaningful. It makes it worth it, you know, because the team and it's not just, it's not me. It's the team that really puts in hard work, sweat, tears, and really tries to build out this program that is meaningful.
Narrator
That feeling of pride that Tatiana Arguello at United Activities Unlimited feels is echoed by the pride that participants themselves feel when given the tools, skills, and support that they need. While studying the impact of Boston’s summer jobs program, Alicia Sasser-Modestino is aware of just how meaningful someone’s first job experiences can be.
Alicia Sasser-Modestino
If we think back to our own first jobs that we had and the things that we learned, and the mistakes that we made, they were very transformational kinds of experiences.
I think about my own kids, my oldest kid, when he got a job at the YMCA [cut: um, frankly, he's not the most scholarly kid in our family, but] he got a lot of self-worth out of showing up to work on time, doing a good job, getting paid for it, getting praised by his supervisors that he could take away and then build on that during the school year or in other parts of his life.
Narrator
Ultimately, real empowerment involves recognizing that young people desire agency and the tools to play an active role in shaping their own lives.
Julia Breitman
They make these independent decisions, and there's a real feeling of empowerment. It's their job, we make sure that young people understand that it's their job. Parents sign off, but income is theirs. They get a bank account or a debit card in their name, they get an ID that shows that they are a Summer Youth Employment Program participant, and there's such a feeling of empowerment. And that stays with a young person. I mean, all of us can think back to our first jobs. We all remember our first jobs, we all remember our first paychecks. That feeling of pride never goes away.
Narrator
To close things out this week, we hear again from Yiping Li. Even all these years after she participated in One Summer Chicago, she can testify to the strength that the program gave her…and continues to give her.
Yiping Li
I think it was interesting because there was sort of the immediate impact and then the other wave of emotions and reflection that I get when I think back to this program. So initially when I immediately came out of it, I definitely felt more independent, like I could take on these responsibilities. And like I mentioned, it was sort of the summer after I graduated from elementary school and it's going into high school and you certainly don't know what that new next phase of your life is like. And so, having gone through this program, it gave me the confidence that I could take on the next four years, the next chapter of my life, just knowing that I could take on new responsibilities and be more mature.
Narrator
J-PAL voices is produced by Dave Lishansky and written and narrated by Rohit Naimpally. Elizabeth Bond designed our logo. Special thanks to Yijin Yang for her inputs and support. Transcription assistance was provided by Caroline Garau and Yiping Li. For this week’s interviews, we thank Danielle Ellman, Danielle Glick, Benjamin Babayev, Angela Rudolph, Yiping Li, Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend, Alicia Sasser-Modestino, Sara Heller, Rashad Cope, and Julia Breitman. Our email address is podcasts@povertyactionlab.org; we would love to receive your comments and feedback.
Narrator
On the next episode of J-PAL Voices...
Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend
We have to teach young people, not just about becoming employees, but also about job creation and entrepreneurship. And so, this is an opportunity I see for us to not only continue doing the necessary work of preparing our future workforce, but to expand how we're doing it and to use technology and impactful ways to create a greater impact.