Since 2015, Northeastern University’s Community to Community Impact Accelerator has partnered with the city of Boston to evaluate the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program, finding that—for a six-week experience—the program provides a lot of benefits.
The program is so beneficial that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has guaranteed all Boston Public School students who want a job can get one this upcoming summer. But those involved in the program are not content to rest on its laurels.
“What’s very exciting about that guarantee is we can start thinking about deliberately linking what is happening in the high school curriculum and even in the community college space or in higher ed to those summertime experiences,” says Alicia Modestino, an associate professor in economics in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. Modestino is also research director for the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern and heads up the research into the summer program.
Boston’s Summer Youth Employment Program is a roughly $10 million annual program to provide thousands of youths with summer jobs with hundreds of local employers. The program has two primary goals: to provide young people with the tools and experience necessary to navigate the job market on their own; and to reduce inequality of opportunity across different racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups by increasing access to early employment experiences.
