City lends hand in summer job search
Agencies rev up efforts to connect youth, employers
Talia Hall and Eri-ife Adepoju, 16-year-old classmates, think they have their lives pretty well figured out. Hall plans to attend Baylor University and then medical school to become a doctor, while Adepoju is aiming for the University of Pennsylvania and a career in business.
But first, they need summer jobs. Ideally, ones that advance their professional goals.
“I have requirements,” Hall says, waiting to be interviewed at a hiring event on Saturday. “It needs to pertain to my future.”
This year, the city and local workforce development groups are making a much stronger push than usual to help high schoolers like Hall and Adepoju — as well as young people with less certainty about their futures — find paying work, which research has shown can give kids a leg up in future job searches and keep them out of trouble while school is out for the summer.
In all, officials are shooting to line up 5,000 posi-
tions for young people 1624. That’s a big jump from the 450 jobs offered two years ago, but a fraction of program’s size in years past.
Mike Temple directs Gulf Coast Workforce Solutions, a state-funded organization that helps local residents find employment. He says that decades ago, the federal government sent Houston on the order of $10 million per year to subsidize 10,000 summer jobs.
“And then they didn’t,” Temple recalls. The stimulus bill in 2009 was the last large chunk of money to come from Washington for summer youth employment programs. After that, youth labor force participation shrank dramatically, as the Obama administration focused on engaging the private sector to help cities keep programs going. “Everyone has had to figure out how to try to do it differently,” Temple says.
Job fairs, listings
For many cities, that’s meant backfilling the funding with state and local budgets in order to continue employment programs. New York City, for example, spent $79 million in 2015 to subsidize wages for summer work.
Houston hasn’t devoted that level of resources and has lately struggled to connect young people to summer opportunities. Last year, according to the city’s director of education Juliet Stipeche, only 350 young people were placed out of a total of 700 available positions. “There was a disconnect,” Stipeche says. “There’s no place for kids to find summer jobs.”
To rectify the problem, this year the city appropriated $2.1 million to run several job fairs and stand up an online platform, Hirehoustonyouth.org, where employers can list jobs and internships available to young people. Large local employers like Kroger and HEB have pledged to offer hundreds of jobs through the program with no subsidies from the government, and the city also funds a few hundred positions within local agencies, some of which are reserved for disabled youth.
For employers, participation isn’t charity. Liane LaCour, the regional human resources manager for Waffle House, says she can use the help finding grill cooks and servers, short term or not. “For hourly employees, it actually has been a little bit difficult,” she said, at a kickoff event for the program at Gulf Coast Workforce Solutions’ southeast office.
Participating employers include Domino’s Pizza, Walgreen’s, McDonalds, TXU Energy, the Houston Zoo, and Houston Museum of Science, among others.
Those who got there early caught a speech by Mayor Sylvester Turner, who delivered a lesson in the importance of work, whether you like it or not. His first job was as an electrician’s apprentice, and the first day didn’t go well. “I told my mama, ‘That’s it, I’m not going back,’ ” Turner recalled. “She said, ‘Oh yes you are.’ ”
Positions offered
Turner, who grew up poor in Acres Homes, also alluded to how young people can turn to less legitimate means of making money if decent jobs aren’t available. “I know what it’s like for someone to say, ‘I know how you can make a quick buck,’” he said.
By the end of the event, 54 young people had locked down their jobs. Among the first was Isaac Vidales, a junior at Eastwood Academy, who was offered a position by a local public relations firm. He thinks he’ll be able to use skills he’s developed in film and photography, but he wasn’t picky.
“A job is a job,” he says.