YOU summer jobs program offers long-term benefits - Crain's Cleveland Business

The summer jobs program offered by Youth Opportunities Unlimited (Y.O.U.), a nonprofit workforce development organization, provides its participants long-lasting benefits beyond the direct work experience, according to a new study.

In the two years following completion of the Summer Youth Employment Program, participants are less likely to be charged with delinquency offenses and less likely to be incarcerated in the adult system when compared with other youth who applied to the program but weren't selected to participate, according to the study by Case Western Reserve University's Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

Those who complete the program also had higher attendance rates the year following their summer job. Students who completed the program and are enrolled in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District were more likely to graduate.

"We've been blown away," said Craig Dorn, president and CEO of Y.O.U. "It had a greater impact than we even thought."

Y.O.U. helps connect young people to six-week summer job experiences and then pays the bill, offering free labor to businesses and valuable experience to the teens. Some of the opportunities also add an educational component for the workers. The cost of a six-week summer job is about $2,250, more than half of which goes to the young person's pocket to save and to add back into the economy.

Y.O.U. currently has the capacity to serve 4,000 youth a year, but only enough funding to regularly support 2,000 to 3,000 jobs.

Y.O.U. was founded by the business community to coordinate summer jobs in 1983. It began as a business-supported initiative. Until the mid-1990s, the public-private partnership was a pretty even split, Dorn said. Today, it is completely government-subsidized. Many of the companies that initially supported Y.O.U.'s summer job program no longer exist in the market.

The organization is trying to flip that model to get the corporate community involved in supporting these young workers, who will be the ones filling jobs down the road.

Dorn said he believes it is possible to regain the business community's financial support, but recognizes the primary challenge in doing so: getting community buy-in to financially support a program that has, in recent years, been providing subsidized labor to companies.

"What Y.O.U. brings to the table is labor and the money to cover labor," Dorn said. "What you do with that six weeks, 120-150 hours, the sky's the limit. So we think that it's a great opportunity and, again, this is not just young people learning, but depending on what the job is, they also might be helping a company. So until all the workforce issues are solved, we think the time is right."

The Rainey Institute, a nonprofit community arts center, typically takes between 15 and 20 kids who work as teen counselors to help teach classes and engage with kids to support the institute's summer camps, which serve 200 to 225 kids. A handful of these teen counselors were once campers themselves.

"They just really mentor kids and they love it," said Regina Foster, director of operations for the Rainey Institute. "Some of them have decided to go into child care or go into child psychology and different things."

She said the program has been a "blessing," because it allows Rainey to serve the number of kids it has and maintain its high standards with the summer job participants.

"They are learning responsibility, they are learning work ethic, they are learning how to interact with co-workers, with adult staff and with the children, the campers themselves," Foster said.

Y.O.U. hired CWRU about a year ago to perform an independent external evaluation of the jobs summer program, which attracts as many as 15,000 applicants each year. Even in its best years, the program is able to connect roughly only 3,000 of those to jobs, Dorn said.

This meant the researchers had a built-in comparison group with similar demographics and poverty challenges that the program was unable to serve. Plus, more than half of the young people served are selected randomly, Dorn noted.

The program keeps students off the streets during their work hours, which can help with safety during that time period, but the study revealed longer-term impacts.

"It also has an effect on do they get involved with the criminal justice program after they participate? And the answer is at pretty high rates, they don't," Dorn said.

Participants who completed the program (defined as those who were present on the job for at least two-thirds of the program days) also saw positive educational outcomes in attendance and graduation rates, which Dorn attributed to the experience teaching students the value of school.

The summer job either shows them the reality of work that they don't want to ultimately do and need further education to avoid or it introduces them to a field that interests them and pushes them to step up in school to be able to enter that field.

Last year, after the period of time the study examined, Y.O.U. added case managers to its summer program. Previously, students were connected with a job coach who supported them through the six-week program. The case managers can stick with the teens for up to a year. Dorn said he believes that if the study were to be repeated in a couple of years, the benefits would be even greater given this added support.

"What's amazing about this is the summer jobs program isn't some really deep, expensive intervention," Dorn said. "And it has all these other benefits, like generating more money back into the economy."

He hopes the study serves as a call to action and urges the community to consider investing more in summer jobs for youth.

"And not just one summer at a time, but long-term, because these benefits really speak to everything the community's talking about: You have a path out of poverty, you stay out of jail, you do good in school," Dorn said. "So who knew that a simple summer job could increase the odds of that happening in a dramatic way?"

Let's block ads! (Why?)

"term" - Google News
April 12, 2020 at 03:00PM
https://ift.tt/3aYqNGe

YOU summer jobs program offers long-term benefits - Crain's Cleveland Business
"term" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35lXs52
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update

Bagikan Berita Ini