Investing in youth workforce development

When Malik Evans ran for mayor in 2021, a campaign theme was empowering youth and facilitating their entry into the workforce. His platform included the Youth2Work initiative, emphasizing job opportunities and skill development for young people.

“An investment in our youth is an investment in our future. My own job at Genesee Valley Park as a teenager provided me with skills that prepared me for life,” Evans said at the time. 

“As the mayor and my department says so often, young people are our future and we have to do the best to prepare them for life ahead,” says Shirley Green, commissioner of the Department of Recreation and Human Services. “And you can’t just say, ‘The youth are our future,’ and leave it at that; you have to demonstrate it.” 

Research suggests that youth employment can help alleviate poverty in the long term and reduce brushes with law enforcement. According to the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, one out of every two children in the city of Rochester lives in poverty, with African-American and Hispanic families disproportionately affected. Rates of juvenile arrests have increased in recent years. From 2011 to 2022, young people averaged about 5 percent of total arrests by the Rochester Police Department. In 2023, that rate doubled to 10 percent.

“A lot of the youth we get who are out of school, there’s a pretty big hole they have to dig themselves out of,” says David Seeley, executive director of RochesterWorks, the region’s largest workforce development agency.

“Whether it’s a result of their life circumstances, whether it’s a result of them not having success when exiting the educational system, and then compounded with COVID and all the other things that are working against a young adult, particularly in the city of Rochester, we were having to do a lot of work just to get these young adults to a point where they could access the workforce,” he adds.

Although there have been improvements in funding and participation over recent years, perennial issues, like incomplete application forms, are mixed together with new ones. This includes a need for mental health services, refocusing programming on younger ages, and offering work opportunities year-round.

However, the approach remains the same as a decade ago. By connecting youth with opportunity, advocates for youth engagement believe they can make a difference in addressing childhood poverty and violence.

“I’m a product of programs like those. I grew up in Rochester, I had a work study through Xerox,” says Kareem-Ba McCullough, director of Area U: The Ubuntu Project. “I know the power it has because I’ve lived through it.”

The summer opportunity

The Evans administration has stressed that youth require opportunities to keep them out of trouble.

“If you listen to the mayor often enough, you’ve heard him say that if we can keep young people engaged and busy all day, when they get home in the evening, they’re too tired to be mischievous young people,” says Green.

Summer has long been the primary focus for youth workforce development. Both the city’s Summer of Opportunity Program and RochesterWorks’ Summer Youth Employment Program place applicants, ages 14 to 20, in jobs. These young workers find responsibilities in city departments or with partnering businesses over the summer months. Participants must meet several eligibility requirements, including low- or moderate-income levels.

Youth who are placed receive six weeks of subsidized paid work with the opportunity to build their resumes, develop transferable skills, and establish connections for potential future employment.

“For us, increasing the number of kids who are working or have access to money helps (low-income) families,” Green says. “Now, is that going to lift them out of poverty? I can’t tell you it is. But what it is going to do is give them some safety nets for the summer.

“If you have a young person who’s getting $600 over the summer, that’s going to help a mother. Because that’s going to be able to buy a couple outfits for school, some sneakers or shoes. That can be impactful.”

Green also views their workplace experience as building more than just job skills or finances. Training through the program includes working on communication skills, financial literacy, anger management and attendance, which she hopes translate to in-school behavior.

Holistic development

McCullough and Carter Remy, director of The Next Generation and You youth program, agree with focusing on more than just jobs, taking their philosophy even further into holistic development.

“I have to ask sometimes, are we developing them as a worker? Or are we developing them as a person?” says Remy, whose program has been featured as a partnering business through Rochester Ecology Partners.

“At that young age, you need to help them learn how to be themselves. How do you advocate for yourself? How can you communicate your needs?” he continues. “So, I prefer a holistic approach. I dislike this concept of funneling them into systems which see you just as a worker.”

“Community is what grounds us,” adds McCullough. “Especially today, there is a need for creating ethical employees, responsible employees. Because there’s just a need for ethical and responsible people.”

These skills can also help with aiding the mental health of young people, a growing need that has surfaced through observation and participant surveys. However, success in youth workforce development is often measured by unsubsidized job placement, or employers hiring workers after completion of the program.

Seeley says this can be a shortsighted view.

“It’s a lot harder to measure for 11th and 12th graders who have to go back to school or are moving on to college. The investments you make now in their development might not pay off for years,” he explains. “On a long-term sustainable basis, though, we have to make more ‘upstream’ investments—that is, earlier on in their schooling.”

Starting earlier

RochesterWorks and DRHS recently set their focus on middle school-aged youth. Green identifies a gap in services for this age group, particularly at Rochester’s R-Centers, which have programming for young children and older adolescents.

To prepare younger generations for workforce development, DRHS recently began “My Brother’s Keeper Summer Scholars.” The initiative gives a stipend of $150 per week over a five-week period to youth aged 12 or 13 as they participate in work readiness and personal development programs. Last summer, Green says, there were 75 participants in MBK Summer Scholars.

Morgan Barry understands those issues, but due to his position as director of Green Visions, he continues to emphasize employment as the goal. His workforce development program provides certification and experience through gardening and sales of flowers grown in a reclaimed empty city lot. The program’s age range is weighted older than the city’s SOOP and RochesterWorks’ SYEP initiatives, focusing on youth with minimal work experience who have dropped out or aged out of school.

“If they move on (from Green Visions), I consider that a good thing,” Barry says. “I want them to go get a job, or get two part-time jobs, or go back to school. They should keep moving forward is the ultimate goal.”

Funding programs

Rochester city budget documents show that SOOP was created in 2006 with a roughly $300,000 annual budget. That number has steadily risen over the past decade. In the early and mid-2010s, it hovered around $500,000 to $700,000 before reaching $900,000 in the later part of that era.

The 2022-23 budget book, the last one to call SOOP a singular program, shows a $1.4 million budget.

In the fiscal years that followed, 2023-24 and 2024-25, the program became part of the DHRS workforce development effort, labeled Youth Employment Services. It largely uses the same program description from prior years but adds the city’s new focus on younger individuals. (The budgeted amount for those years is listed at $1.7 million and $2.4 million, respectively.)

Green credits much of the recent budgetary growth, particularly over the COVID-19 pandemic, to funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.

“So, as those funds may end in 2026, we have to build the capacity to keep those programs,” she says. “The one thing you don’t want (is to) build a program, and then it disappears.”

RochesterWorks is the largest workforce development program in the region by virtue of its access to federal support through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. While youth employment programming funding from the state has significantly increased (from $1.9 million to $5 million since 2023), Seeley says funding from WIOA has remained flat or even slightly decreased in past years. As a result, the nonprofit has tried to concentrate on its most valuable efforts as well.

Besides shifting focus to a younger generation, this includes supporting other programs in the area. For example, RochesterWorks now has career navigators at Rochester high schools who can guide youth to opportunities they may not otherwise be aware of.

“We’re not necessarily trying to create any new programming; we’re trying to provide a connective tissue to the existing programs,” says Seeley. “It’s not fair to just expect the teen or their families, who could be coming from a background where they’re struggling, to navigate this when a lot of people who work in the workforce system don’t fully know what’s out there.”

Program attrition and placement rates

Two easily trackable measures of success include attrition rates, or the gap in total applications started versus the number completed, and placement rates, or the number of youth placed in jobs compared to the total applications.

When SOOP launched, attrition was high, which resulted in a low placement rate. Green and Seeley say that incomplete applications, “no-shows” to required job training sessions, or dropouts due to other obligations or lack of interest, are common causes of attrition.

In its first year recorded in city records, SOOP reported 788 applicants with 286 receiving placements, meaning 36 percent of the initial applications were matched with a job placement. Over 40 employers participated in the program.

About a decade later, SOOP and SYEP aligned their programs to be even closer and share the 2,000 to 3,000 average applications begun to the summer employment programs. Nowadays, completing an application qualifies an applicant for both SOOP and SYEP. Seeley suspects at this point that most youth are not fully aware of which program is responsible for their employment.

He notes that the city and RochesterWorks have strong ties and work well together in summer workforce development. Green agrees, adding that RochesterWorks’ relationships across the county can help connect youth beyond the city.

“It really was a concept where, if our goal is to get young people employed, why are we competing for the same pool of applicants instead of putting our resources together?” Seeley says.

While campaigning in 2021, Evans called for an expansion of summer youth programs. 

“RochesterWorks, a terrific organization that helps hundreds of kids each year, had almost 2,000 applicants for only 332 spots in the 2020 Summer Youth Employment Program,” his campaign website’s ‘Compact with Youth’ reads. “If we guaranteed a job to every applicant, we could teach thousands of children the skills to be successful in life while putting money in their pockets and helping Rochester’s small businesses.”

That same year, Seeley notes, RochesterWorks had its greatest spike in attrition rates. In 2020 and 2021, 76 percent and 72 percent of applications started were not finished.

Data from RochesterWorks shows that of 1,996 applications started in 2020, only 489 were completed. In addition, RochesterWorks shows 356 work placements, somewhat higher than the figure Evans cited.

The SOOP and SYEP programs have shown signs of recovery since then. This summer, out of the 1,076 eligible job applicants, 779 were given workplace placements through these programs, for a placement rate of 72 percent. SOOP placed 285 youth and 494 through SYEP, which Seeley notes was the most enrolled since before the pandemic.

Attrition rates for SYEP have fallen to 52 percent, meaning that nearly half of all applications begun are actually completed.

“I’ll note that of the 48 percent of those who did not complete the process, the majority are students who elect not to proceed due to waning interest or are not eligible, likely because they exceed the income cap of 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Level,” Seeley says. “We still lose some in the process, but it’s not that entire 48 percent. Again, both our staff and the City’s team do a nice job working to reduce this, and we’ve made progress.”

“I consider myself very bullish based on the progress we’ve already made,” he adds.

The rest of the year

Although the summer is big for youth workforce development, officials note that this type of programming is needed throughout the year.

Outside of SYEP, RochesterWorks’ other services include a youth center and youth navigator program aimed at youth, ages 17 to 24, not enrolled in school.

New this year is “Roc Your Job,” which offers the same opportunities as SYEP but during the school year. Seeley says the program is more than halfway to its goal of offering 340 young people employment by the end of 2024.

A recently renovated house in Green Visions’ lot in the Charles House Area Council neighborhood now offers Barry a permanent location for training and programming year-round. The plan is to offer work opportunities for 11 weeks in the winter, half the length of the summer program.

While Area U will likely see some changes in scheduling, McCullough says, the program already runs concurrently with the school year, bolstering and enriching youth with options for workplace participation. Remy says consistency is important for building any type of skill.

Regardless of how it is being provided, those interviewed for this article strongly believe in helping youth in Rochester develop their skills and realize their potential. Seeley recalls observing some SYEP participants working as camp counselors at the Strong Museum.

“You have these 15-year-olds serving as chaperones for 8- and 9-year-olds, wow, that’s a lot of responsibility, right?” he says. “So, when you have this responsibility and connect that with earning and getting 15 bucks an hour, hopefully, it clicks with the youth to show them, you do have value, you do have potential.

“We tell teens this story and they don’t necessarily believe it. We oversimplify it for them, telling them, ‘Even if you don’t go to college, you can earn $40,000 a year.’ But to them, it’s like, ‘Until I see it, why shouldn’t I be skeptical?’” Seeley adds. “And it’s for good reason since a lot of these youth have had the deck stacked against them for most of their lives.”  

Says Green: “Why do this for young people? Because if we don’t do it, who else will?”

This Community Chronicles article was made possible by a grant from the ESL Charitable Foundation. Up next: What do these workforce programs look like in practice?

Jacob Schermerhorn  is a Beacon contributing writer and data journalist. The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. See “Leave a Reply” below to discuss on this post. Comments of a general nature may be submitted to the Letters page by emailing  [email protected]. 

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