ARPA at Work: Providing Youth Opportunities
During the pandemic, unemployment skyrocketed and Worcester didn’t escape the trend. As a result, the municipality made it a priority to use a portion of its American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars to address job loss.
In this edition of ARPA at Work, my administration’s campaign highlighting how the city spent its ARPA dollars, I’ll be discussing the $1.5 million we allocated to fund youth employment opportunities in the city.
In May, it became apparent that state funding to the YouthWorks program for Worcester and Southern Worcester County would be reduced by 70%. If no action was taken, the cut would have eliminated roughly more than 600 opportunities for youth aged 16 –22 and curbed the hiring ability of nearly 100 employer partners in the region.
I know how important getting work experience can be to a young person’s future, so I knew we as a municipality had to step in.
We allocated ARPA funds to help close the gap, with $100,000 going to help fund Recreation Worcester this summer and $1.4 million going to the Worcester Community Action Council (WCAC), the local administrator of YouthWorks.
WCAC provides emergency and social services programs to people in the city and 45 surrounding towns.
Through the funding, WCAC placed 697 youth in paid positions this summer.
“We determined how many youth we could accommodate at each site based on the site needs; type of position – including hours worked per week and length of need; and whether the site could provide a supervised, high-quality experience for the youth,” WCAC CEO Marybeth Campbell said of the process.
19-year-old Joshua Lighten was able to get a paid internship with 2Gether We Eat.
2Gether We Eat is a youth hydroponic farming program that donates 100% of what it grows back to the community through food banks and other nonprofit organizations.
Lighten is interested in biology, and being involved directly with botany at 2Gether We Eat was one of his favorite experiences over the summer, saying it gave him pride to tend to a plant and come back the next week to see it had grown larger. He also said he enjoyed the public speaking aspect of the internship.
“Getting to tell other WCAC members or other non-profits about what 2Gether We Eat does was definitely a highlight,” Lighten said.
Lighten’s full-time position with 2Gether We Eat is funded by ARPA funds through November and he is now pursuing his associate degree in Biology at Quinsigamond Community College with plans to transfer to a four-year-program.
“Not only has YouthWorks given me a job in a field I love, but it’s also paving the path for me to get even more opportunities within it,” Lighten said. “YouthWorks has provided me a life-changing opportunity and I feel lucky, grateful, and happy every morning I wake up for work.”
Lighten is one of approximately 20 youth whose positions will be funded through November.
Maurice Horton, 15, also said he was grateful for his experience with YouthWorks, specifically for what the founder of the program where he worked, Cultural Healthy Eating Exercise Resource Program (CHEER), taught him about the community and how to help those in need.
CHEER is an afterschool program that provides cultural, healthy eating, exercise, and education resources to youth in the city along with leadership development, mentorship, and community service and engagement.
“I really liked when we would go to different parks and feed the homeless,” Horton said. “It makes you look at your life and how grateful you should be. We are all human and everyone should have access to food.”
Horton has worked with CHEER as part of a YouthWorks cohort for a few summers and said he can be shy, but the program has helped him grow his confidence and leadership skills.
Since being a part of the program, Horton said his career goals are to be active in the community and maybe even creating an afterschool program of his own.
17-year-old Noah Corey was able to get a job with Worcester Public School’s Information Technology Department.
He worked on the department’s Chromebooks and said he learned multitasking, communication, and problem-solving skills in the process.
“I believe it made me more interested in Information Technology,” Corey said. “(YouthWorks) helped me strongly pick what I (want) to do.”
Corey’s career goals now are to work in IT and he said he thinks his experience with YouthWorks will help him get a job.
These are just a few stories representing the hundreds of youth that were employed through this program over the summer and some into the fall.
Next month, I will highlight how the municipality has used ARPA funds to make improvements and additions to our parks.
You write ARPA in the shadow of your City Council Cowardice?