“I don’t look at this as just a summer job and some extra spending money, but rather as a step toward independence and adulthood,” said 17-year-old Mark, one of more than 200 students at a COJO Flatbush/NSHDS enrollment and orientation event for New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program, popularly known as Youth Corps.
The enrollment events – held from early April through mid-July – are a striking testament to New York’s unparalleled ethnic and religious mix and to the equally unmatched reach of COJO Flatbush across the city’s numerous distinct communities.
When Mark, an African American, showed up for enrollment/orientation, he acknowledged his surprise at what he called the “sheer variety” of his fellow attendees: identifiably Jewish and Muslim students, others wearing crosses around their necks, still others with attention-grabbing hairstyles and tattoos; white and black and Hispanic and Chinese and Korean and Russian and Pakistani and Indian and Arab and Israeli, each representing a different type of school – public, yeshiva, Catholic, non-sectarian private – and all sitting at the same tables sharing the same hopes and aspirations (and the uncertainties that come with every new venture).
“We take pride in being the city’s largest SYEP provider,” said Mordechai Kruger, COJO’s director of Youth Employment. “Students and parents across the city know that that our strong relationship with so many city and communal agencies and organizations gives us optimal range and flexibility in matching young people with jobs suitable to their individual interests and aptitudes.”
Last year COJO Flatbush/NSHDS placed more than 12,000 students in summer jobs at software companies, camps, hospitals, retail outlets, and dozens of other venues. “One of the things that I think really comes through to participants is our ongoing level of involvement on a personal basis,” said Kruger. “Our interest in our young people hardly ends after their initial job placement.”
He mentioned a young woman who realized she had a problem almost immediately upon starting a job that entailed working outdoors. “She’s a devout Muslim whose religious attire covers her entire body. When I visited her worksite she came over to me and said, ‘Mr. Kruger, it’s just too hot for me to work outside like this.’ She then asked, in a tone that suggested she wasn’t sure we’d be able to help her, whether there was any way we could move her to an indoor job.”
Kruger smiled as he recalled the conversation. “Of course we arranged an indoor job for her, and I’ll never forget her gratitude. As an Orthodox Jew I’m certainly familiar with religious strictures regarding clothing, but we would have done our best to accommodate her under any circumstance.”
The Summer Youth Employment Program is a government-funded (federal, state, and city) endeavor. Dov Oustatcher, COJO’s SYEP director, credited COJO Flatbush CEO Louis Welz with “developing and strengthening our relationship with city and state officials and agencies, which has brought us to where we are today in terms of the number of students we place and the number of employers we work with.”
Welz, for his part, expressed gratitude to “the many elected leaders who go out of their way to ensure the success of this huge undertaking,” specifically mentioning New York City Council Members Chaim Deutsch and Mathieu Eugene and State Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein.
Just how important a role SYEP plays in COJO’s vision of a better New York is reflected in the sheer amount of effort and number of hours the organization devotes to the program each year. (COJO Flatbush is also a major participant in the City Council-funded Work, Learn & Grow Youth Employment Program for SYEP participants during the fall and winter months.)
To prepare for SYEP, seasonal workers (many of whom, Kruger notes, have disabilities that are more than compensated for by their capabilities) are hired to supplement regular staff. Phone calls are made and received without letup; paperwork is sorted and filed; computer databases are updated and constantly consulted. All of which contributes to COJO’s remarkably well-run enrollment/orientation days, which function virtually without flaw despite the potential for confusion and commotion inherent in events that feature hundreds of teenagers confined in enclosed areas for several hours.
The enrollment/orientation process is where an outside observer can fully appreciate the sweat and toil involved in the preparation. Students are processed in small groups and moved along with conveyor-belt efficiency as Kruger and Chaim Wielgus, an SYEP adviser, take turns instructing the packed hall on matters ranging from double- and triple-checking their documents to how they’ll be expected to comport themselves as young and mostly inexperienced members of the workforce.
Students whose numbers have yet to be called or who’ve returned from their processing meetings listen to the ongoing presentation, not a few looking over their papers one final time, some conferring quietly with friends or newfound acquaintances, their tables covered with backpacks, shoulder bags, notebooks, and the 64-page Orientation Guides prepared by COJO for each participant.
In a spare moment when he wasn’t addressing the students or helping move the registration process along, Kruger took in the scene with a clear sense of satisfaction. “This is the lifeblood of the city,” he said to a bystander, “the future, the promise that things will turn out fine.”
Indeed, the old cliché of the great melting pot is somewhat out of fashion these days, with much talk of division and acrimony, but COJO Flatbush SYEP enrollment events are a potent rejoinder to needless pessimism, with their vivid portrayal of unity in diversity, of young people with a great deal in common despite their differences, of a hopeful new generation on the cusp of responsibility. These are tomorrow’s professionals and business leaders and government officials – who one day will be entrusted with the task of ensuring that SYEP can do for their children what it did for them.