More Chicago Summer Jobs Available. Posted on April 30, 2009. A city program will help create thousands of Chicago summer jobs. The Youth Ready Chicago program. More Chicago Summer Jobs Available. Posted on April 30, 2009. A city program will help create thousands of Chicago summer jobs. The Youth Ready Chicago program will. SUMMER JOBS RESOURCES. Here is the One Summer Chicago application for your review. You must complete the application online. Dec 14, 2014 Students from some of Chicago’s most dangerous neighborhoods were given good jobs and mentors to guide them through. The effects continued well beyond.

This research comes as youth employment in the summer months, when teenagers are most likely to work, is near a 60-year low. The challenges facing minority and low-income youth are particularly stark; the 2010 employment rate for low-income black teens in Illinois was less than one-fourth the rate for higher-income white teens: 9 percent vs. Study author Sara Heller, PhD‘13, assistant professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, noted that acts of violence kill almost 150 people daily in the United States, and injure more than 6,000—a level the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call a public health crisis. Jigsaw Puzzle Platinum 2. Individuals ages 10 to 24 are twice as likely as adults to be victims or perpetrators of violence, and the problem is concentrated among disadvantaged minority youth. Joblessness has been identified by experts as one of the major causes of these racial violence disparities.

Finding answers The new study evaluated the impact of Chicago’s, which offers eight weeks of part-time summer employment at Illinois minimum wage ($8.25 per hour) and an adult job mentor to help youth manage barriers to employment. “There are opposing pieces of conventional wisdom on whether a program like this would work,” said Heller, who started the research while a doctoral fellow at the Crime Lab. “On one hand is the popular idea that ‘nothing stops a bullet like a job.’ On the other is a body of research on employment programs suggesting that only intensive and lengthy interventions can improve outcomes among disadvantaged youth—that one summer could never be enough.” To find the answer, the study randomly assigned 1,634 students from 13 high-violence Chicago neighborhoods to one of three groups: summer jobs, summer jobs plus a social-emotional learning component, or a control group that did not participate in the interventions. Slots were limited by the available funding. Youth in the jobs-only group were offered 25 hours per week of paid employment. Youth in the job plus social-emotional learning group were paid for 15 hours of work and 10 hours of social-emotional learning that was based on cognitive behavioral therapy principles.

The goal was to help youth understand and manage thoughts, emotions and behavior that might interfere with employment. Keysha Cole Midi Files. The remaining youth were not offered jobs through One Summer Plus, though they were free to pursue other jobs or summer activities provided by the city or local nonprofits. Study participants were on average 16 years old and almost all were African American. More than 90 percent were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches (indicating a level of family poverty), and the students had about a C average in school. About 20 percent had been arrested, and about 20 percent had been victims of a crime by the start of the study. They lived in neighborhoods with an average unemployment rate of 19 percent and very high violent crime rates.

The youth were assigned a variety of jobs, including camp counselors, community garden workers and office assistants for aldermen. They also were given job mentors—adults who helped them learn how to be successful employees and to navigate barriers to employment. Both the jobs and the jobs plus social-emotional learning were equally effective in reducing violent crime arrests by about 43 percent, compared to the control group.

“The city of Chicago was courageous enough to put its One Summer Plus program to the test, and turns out that just eight weeks of summer programming decreases violent crime arrests by a huge amount for over a year after the job ends,” said Heller. “This is an incredibly encouraging finding.” Heller noted that the decline occurred largely after the eight-week summer job program ended, indicating that the program did not just keep youth busier over the summer: It changed their behavior after the job had ended as well.