Albany Summer Program Gives 500 Kids Career Goals

Albany's summer youth program helps nearly five hundred kids look into their future career goals. The program has been extremely successful in the past helping with graduation rates and giving students a higher success rate in graduating when they stick with the program according to Spectrum News.

Even though I wasn't a fan of working during the summer, it helped me acquire many life skills. At a young age, I worked at many different jobs all over the Capital Region. From being an ice cream girl at Bubbles in Mechanicville to working as an usher at the Saratoga Race Course, they all taught me skills that helped me throughout my life.

This summer employment program is more of a paid internship where, starting at age fourteen, kids work about twenty hours per week for five weeks. They get to learn different areas through hands-on experience. Plus they are mentored by local professionals in different industries.

The program is large. They expect five hundred youth to participate this summer and the mentoring will be done virtually. But the kids will be able to attend job sites on different occasions.

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Those who run the program say that this is a deterrent to crime in the area and helps build future careers. The Commissioner for Albany's Department of Recreation and Youth Workforce Services, Jonathan Jones says:

We have a lot of young people that want to start their own businesses, so now they’re learning about how to start a business, what it takes to start this business when businesses fail, what issues were caused.