Sustainability Resources for Home and Work
August 13, 2010Too Good to Be Thru: A New Greater Homewood Gem!
August 19, 2010Submitted by Jocelyn Durkay
This was my second summer facilitating our YouthWorks program here at GHCC. YouthWorks, a program from the Mayor’s Office on Employment Development, gives summer jobs to youth ages 14–24.
Placement at a worksite, only contingent on submitting your application correctly and early enough, gives valuable job skills to teens with little or no experience. With youth employment at its lowest point in over half a century, this program gives 30 hour per week jobs to young people who likely would otherwise be unemployed. Unfortunately, for financial reasons this year YouthWorks was only able to hire 5,100 of the 9,000 applicants. I wish more of Baltimore’s youth could have had this opportunity.
While I strongly believe in the fundamentals of the program, it comes with its unique challenges. In previous years, discipline, tardiness, and work attitudes resulted in headaches and firings. However, this crop of workers had fantastic work ethic. In fact, I think this has been one of the best years for YouthWorks at GHCC. After some trying incidents last year, I must admit that I had underestimated our Youth Workers. They proved to be bright, hard-working, prompt, and a lot of fun to be around.
This summer’s program also had a lot more extra substance than previous years: workshops on college and careers, plus an oral history story collection project that provided me with the best experiences of the summer.
Youth Workers interviewing Dr. Jacqueline Waters-Scofield, Principal at Margaret Brent Elementary/Middle School in Charles Village.
For this project, our youth split into three groups to conduct interviews of Greater Homewood residents. The final product consisted of three audio files between 20 and 30 minutes long, but some groups recorded conversations up to an hour long before editing! While our intern, Zack, and I were present for the interviews, the youth were responsible for everything: choosing the questions to ask, following up to learn more, and final editing.
The interviews were powerful and memorable for me: hearing teenagers speak with older adults about their lives during segregation and changes to their neighborhoods and communities over the decades. I was most definitely amazed at the depth and quality of their questions and how fearlessly they jumped into what could easily be seen as an intimidating task. Even though my voice or name doesn’t appear on the finished products, they are one of my proudest achievements from this year.
Edit 8/18/2010: GHCC has been a YouthWorks host work site for the past six years. This year, we hosted seven youth, all of whom participated in the oral history project.
