Paying Young People to Achieve Their Goals and Support Their Communities Pays Off
By Patrick Hart, Program Director
Member of the Lower East Side Hub at Henry Street Settlement. She took several classes and then begin teaching screenwriting to middle schoolers through the Hub. She has also interned with the Youth Leadership Council.
As the COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on the economy in 2020, many pieces of the government response have prioritized cash assistance and support for affected households. Strategies such as rent relief, enhanced unemployment benefits, and direct stimulus payments have been a lifeline for families across the country.
Most of these strategies have focused on payments to adult wage earners and renters, but financial support for adolescents and young adults is also critical, particularly for young people who may be disconnected from work and school and who may be facing greater barriers such as homelessness or contact with police and/or the juvenile justice system.
Manhattan’s five Youth Opportunity Hubs (a flagship investment of the Manhattan DA’s Criminal Justice Investment Initiative (CJII)) have recognized the importance of financial security and work experience as protective factors for young people from the beginning. Over the past four years, they have deepened their investment in cash supports for young people and developed thoughtful approaches to meeting participants’ immediate financial needs. From the start, all the Hubs have included at least some type of paid internship or job program that is available to young people.
As the Hubs have grown, one thing they have heard consistently from the young people they serve is the need for more earning opportunities that
respond to their interests,
address their serious financial needs,
provide an alternative to other ways of earning money that may have serious negative externalities; and
go outside the box of what early work experience typically looks like.
The arrival of COVID-19 and the resulting significant impact on the economy amplified these needs. The Hubs have responded to these challenges with creativity and commitment and, in the process, have generated some key principles that may be helpful to other organizations and funders looking for new or better ways to support young people financially.
Lesson 1: Broaden the Definition of Work Experience
Many programs that work with young people have traditionally included paid internship and job opportunities in sectors such as retail or food service, and those remain important sources of employment for young people. However, there are many young people who are not drawn to those sectors and who want to do something more in line with their particular passions.
In response to this—and to the substantial job loss within the retail and food service sectors due to the pandemic—several Hubs began broadening their definition of internships and compensated participants for all sorts of work, including arts-based projects and civic leadership.
At New York Presbyterian’s Uptown Hub, young people in the Hub’s Learn-Try-Apply (LTA) internship program had the opportunity to participate in several internship options, including a written-arts internship with Uptown Stories called Untold Uptown, which helped young people tell the story of their Washington Heights and Inwood neighborhoods.
Henry Street Settlement’s Lower East Side Youth Opportunity Hub developed the Hub Hustle program, a 13-week paid internship program at the Hub organizations themselves, including everything from experience in nonprofit offices to culinary training, and more.
This broader definition of work experience has helped Hub participants earn money, gain new and different experiences, and take part in exciting and fun activities. As New York continues to recover from the pandemic, even as internships in the retail and food service sectors rebound, youth service providers should also continue to compensate youth and support a broad range of activities.
Lesson 2: Broaden Incentives Beyond Work
Traditional internship programs provide cash rewards for work to incentivize young people to participate in those programs. However, this approach doesn’t always acknowledge things beyond work experience that are important for youth to achieve for so many reasons. In some cases, these other personal milestone items may be essential in order to enable a young person to enter the workforce to begin with – examples of these include specific educational milestones, which are pre-requisites for many jobs, and housing stability, which is necessary in order to support a young person being able to keep the regular hours and schedule that are necessary for most jobs.
In response to feedback from their participants, the Living Redemption Youth Opportunity Hub in Central and West Harlem has developed the Individual Success Plan (ISP) program. With the ISP program, Hub participants receive payments when they reach particular milestones and goals. The participant and the Hub staff develop these milestones together after discussing the young person’s goals and interests. Some ISP milestones include
enrollment in an educational program,
meeting goals for participation time in particular programs or experiences,
housing or legal milestones, and more.
By designing a thoughtful incentive system tailored to each young person, Living Redemption has helped their participants earn much-needed money, explore their passions, and take important educational and professional steps forward.
Lesson 3: Incentivize Community Uplift
COVID-19 demonstrated the critical importance of community-based organizations in providing support for hard-hit neighborhoods and families. The past year has shown that many of these organizations and the individuals doing the most to uplift communities are often not compensated for their time and labor. The Hubs have been advocating to change this systemic problem and have been modeling how to do it: especially through the pandemic, the Hubs have been helping young people take part in providing critical support for their communities and making sure those young people are compensated for that work.
During the pandemic, the Lower East Side Hub launched a virtual cooking program, led by Hub partner the Sylvia Center. Hub participants both received a stipend for participation and received a box of ingredients for meals they could prepare each week over the 12 week program. Each meal in the box was designed to feed a whole household, so this program had the positive benefit of reducing food insecurity not just for Hub participants but for their families as well. This Hub has also been paying their peer Group Leaders to facilitate workshops, and have been incentivizing participants to attend these workshops – the story of Hub participant Tiana Burgos, who taught a screenwriting class for Hub participants, was featured in Henry Street’s annual report (see page 12 for Tiana’s story).
The Uptown Hub’s virtual LTA program included community organizing, sustainability, and public health tracks, all of which gave participants helpful tools to support their communities. Additionally, this Hub partnered with New York Presbyterian Hospital’s Choosing Healthy and Active Lifestyles for Kids program to provide monthly food deliveries to families in need across Washington Heights and Inwood.
Living Redemption’s neighborhood food distribution is also a great example of this work. In response to the pandemic’s impact and the deep community need in Harlem—which already had high levels of food insecurity—Living Redemption quickly established a community food distribution site at its Hub location. Partnering with anti-hunger organizations and government agencies, Living Redemption began regular distribution of meals to the community to anyone who needed food. Hub participants have been able to play a role in the food distribution efforts to help meet their own community’s needs and receive stipends for their time spent distributing these critical resources. The food distribution effort has achieved three critical goals at once:
providing financial support for young people,
meeting an essential community need, and
giving young people experience in logistics, project management, and food justice awareness, all of which may be helpful in the future.
Final Thoughts
The calamity wrought by COVID-19 has shown us the importance of direct cash supports and subsidized jobs as a policy response to massive economic turmoil. This is a lesson that the Youth Opportunity Hubs and other youth providers have been taking to heart as they develop new ways to support young people. Funders, policymakers, and program designers should consider the lessons shared here as they look at programs to embrace and support:
take a broad view of what “work experience” can be,
be thoughtful about what incentives or milestones payments should be associated with, and
connect paid opportunities for young people with community uplift and support.
Although the post-COVID economic story is not entirely written, economic security will continue to matter for young people, and programs that put cash directly in participants’ pockets are an important way to help them attain that economic security.