Despite Decline in Numbers, a Celebration of Summer Job Success

There was an air of accomplishment and pride in on Tuesday afternoon when 10 area youths collected for a celebration to mark the conclusion of their summer internships. The teenagers, who are each from refugee families, enjoyed cake and a ceremony provided by the Career Development Center division of the Jewish Family & Children's Service of Pittsburgh, the organization that had placed them in their summer jobs.

JF&CS is a not-for-profit organization based out of Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Its mission is to help people through life-cycle transitions and crises.

The many services that JF&CS provides to this end include adoption, counseling, critical needs and emergency assistance, elder care, food-pantry distribution, immigration and refugee resettlement, guardianship, scholarship, and special needs.

Career services are accomplished by the organization's Career Development Center division, and as part of its general mission to provide career services to those in need, the division took part in an Allegheny County program geared specifically toward teens from low-income families.

That county program, the Allegheny County Department of Human Services' Summer Youth Employment Program, is designed to help area youths from low-income families to find summer work. The program delegates funding and mandates to organizations, of which JF&CS is one, to administer it.

According to Jeanne Williams, career and employment counselor with JF&CS' Career Development Center, Williams' organization was given a certain amount of jobs to fill according to its own non-economic criteria. Williams said that JF&CS elected to focus its efforts on refugee families, since refugee services is one of JF&CS' pet causes.

Because of the , JF&CS invited applications from any interested students from such families, Williams said.

Once the students were selected to participate in the program, each was assigned to one of six work sites identified by JF&CS: the , the , the Brentwood Library, the Brentwood Borough School District, the Nepali Bazaar restaurant or the Himalayan Grocery.

Williams explained that participants were paid through county-program funds allocated to JF&CS rather than by the aforementioned places of employment. This way, Williams said, the county program benefited the work sites as well as the children.

As an administering organization, JF&CS was mandated to provide job-readiness training for the teens as well as to monitor and assess each participant's progress throughout the duration of his or her employment.

Bishnu Timsina, who works as an interpreter with JF&CS and was highly involved in administering the county program, commented on what it was like monitoring and assessing the teen employees.

“They are wonderful kids,” Timsina said. “A little encouragement and praise helped them get very far this summer and will help them get even further next year.”

Htayaw Taw, 16, was one of the program's participants. Stationed at the Baldwin Library, Htayaw's duties included turning on the computers in the morning and cleaning the computers throughout the day. She said that this was her first job and that she particularly liked how her employment exposed her to a lot of different people from whom she could learn.

Ghana Phuyel, a senior at Baldwin High, also participated in the program. Ghana worked at the Whitehall Library, where he picked up returned books, turned computers on, cleaned up tables and set up coffee.

“I feel lucky to have worked in the library and have learned a lot of new things,” he said with a smile.

This is Ghana's second year benefiting from the program. Last summer, he worked at the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill.

This is JF&CS' second year involved with the program, as well. The organization filled 25 positions through the county program in 2010 compared to 10 this year.

Karen Rock, a retired English-as-a-Second-Language teacher with the  who works with JF&CS, speculated that state-budget cuts and a lack of stimulus money were the likely causes of this year's smaller number of job slots.

Rock and other program administrators joined the 10 teenagers in their celebration on Tuesday. Participants were given certificates of completion and tote bags, and enjoyed a slice of cake.

No word yet on whether the cake was as sweet as their success.