Bob Herbert: Our nation’s at-risk youth

There are a group of hopeless and uneducated young adults in our nation who are struggling to find even minimum wage jobs.

Working ‘just to get by’ isn’t as possible as it used to be. In fact, for 4 million young adults, a job at all is extremely questionable.

After reading an Op-Ed article — “Out of Sight” — by Bob Herbert in the The New York Times last Tuesday about our nation’s at-risk youth, I found some breathtaking statistics about the lack of job opportunities.

According to Herbert, a disastrous unemployment number was released last Friday, claiming, “The official jobless rate had jumped one-half a percentage point in May to 5.5 percent – the sharpest spike in 22 years.”

The problem is that there is a vast group of young-adults and teenagers, between the ages of 16 to 24 years old, who are not in school and face tough odds in the job market.

According to Herbert, these “youngsters” are trying, but they are losing hope. After searching and searching for a job it is easy to get discouraged.

The summer job market, which has long been an important first step in preparing teenagers for the world of work, is shaping up this year as the weakest in more than half a century, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

My first question is what can we do to open up job opportunities?

And next, are there no second chances for the underprivileged? A basic education is a first step in the right direction, which should be easy for each and every person in our democratic nation.

Everyone has something to offer in this country and it is a shame to see such bright young individuals not given a chance. Job opportunity is just the very first step to making an individual make a difference in this world.

And David Jones, president of the Community Services Society of New York, a Corporate Voices strategic partner, provides some key insight in the context of Herbert’s column.

“These kids are being challenged in ways that my generation was not,” said David Jones, the president of the Community Service Society of New York, which tries to develop ways to connect these young men and women with employment opportunities, or get them back into school.

It is extremely difficult because, for the most part, the jobs are not there and the educational establishment is having a hard enough time teaching the kids who are still in school.

“Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this population back in,” said Mr. Jones. “Once you fall out of the system, you’re basically on no one’s programmatic radar screen.”

By: Amy Simon

Amy is a journalism major at Penn State who is interning this summer with Corporate Voices for Working Families.

Meet our new bloggers

This summer Corporate Voices will have two summer interns who during their time with us will contribute to our blog.

Meet Amy Simon and Allison Keyser:

Amy Simon

Amy is a Senior majoring in Journalism with minors in International Studies and Spanish at Penn State University. She is an identical twin and a competitive cheerleader at Penn State. After undergrad Amy plans to attend law school.

Allison Keyser

Allison is a Senior majoring in Psychology and Women’s Studies at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. While not in class Allison is the Vice President of her sorority PI Beta Phi, works as a tour guide and tutors in the Writing Center at Dickinson.

By Susan Holbrook

Karen Pittman: “Bringing precision to our passion”

Karen Pittman, a member of the Corporate Voices Advisory Board and president of the Forum for Youth Investment, has an extremely interesting and provocative column in the May 2008 Youth Today. Here’s the opening paragraph from the column, titled “Precision Engineering.”

Creating sound bites that are not only memorable but communicate a message is a passion of mine. Every now and then I hit one out of the park. “Problem-free isn’t fully prepared” is still in use after more than 15 years. I think “bringing precision to our passion” may be the next one to stick.

Karen says that passion and precision are sometimes seen as opposites. “The call for passion and precision is a call for us to blend them. Think head/heart. Capacity/motivation. Our actions improve when they are informed by both.”

Then she talks about how this helps to change the odds for young people.

Changing the odds for young people requires us to not only be passionate in our commitment to providing high-quality supports and opportunities to all youth, but precise in measuring how well we and they are doing, so that we can make real-time system adjustments. It’s not enough to care. We have to calculate, compare and count.

But, she says, developing metrics for our programs is not enough.

It is also not enough to simply develop metrics for our own programs. Young people don’t grow up in programs; they grow up in communities. We must develop community-level dashboards whose clear measurements compel community leaders to think differently, so that together they can act differently.

Karen then provides several examples and best-practice success stories. If you would like a copy of the entire column, leave us a comment on this blog (go to the link at the end of the post that says no comments/or comment) with your e-mail address. I’ll be delighted to e-mail you a copy of this informative column by Karen Pittman.

by Rob Jewell