When the main partner for the summer Youth Training Academy, College of the Redwoods, closed due to the pandemic, program planners in Del Norte, California convened meetings with stakeholders to figure out what to offer for the summer program. During those sessions, young people made it clear they didn't want to be on computers all the time because they had already spent the spring with online school, lacked access to reliable internet service, and wanted to be outside. Based on this input, and the context of a sparsely populated rural community with very few COVID-19 cases at that time, program instructors developed a variety of summer options, many of which included little or no online programming.

When New York City announced that SYEP was cancelled due to budget shortfalls, youth advocates at Teens Take Charge launched the #SaveSYEP campaign in collaboration with HERE to HERE, ExpandED Schools and dozens of program providers. A coalition identified five key program components to focus the design of virtual experiences: 1) connection to professionals, 2) career exploration, 3) authentic work experiences, 4) social and emotional supports, and 5) skills-building.

The Chicago Department Family and Support Services created "Save Our Summer" to move most of the City's in-person summer youth employment programming virtual.  Through weekly workshops and counseling sessions,  Save Our Summer helped organizations make the rapid switch to digital program delivery. MHA Labs, a key part of this support, is maintaining Power On Chicago as an ongoing resource hub for year-round innovation focused on  remote learning, positive youth development and social justice. Similarly, Connect Detroit offered a "technology intelligence" seminar for its youth-serving partners to help them learn ways to help young people experience meaningful relationships in an online environment.
On April 1, New York City practitioners including ExpandED, PASE, BEAM Center and others launched an informal community of practice focused on summer learning. After the SYEP budget cut was announced the following week, this group launched Youth Empowerment Summer, or YES 2020,  a rapid response coalition of over 50 CBOs. While advocating for the restoration of funding, YES partners facilitated a co-design series to plan quality experiences that young people could participate in remotely. Many organizations lacked capacity to implement such programs on their own, especially when facing layoffs or hiring freezes of seasonal staff. Leveraging the collaborative to jointly raise nearly $2 million in private funds, ExpandED issued an RFP inviting applicants to apply to share and deliver high quality work-based learning activities to complement whatever publicly funded program might be restored. The YES team, including leaders from Hive NYC Learning Network, played an intensive matchmaking role dedicated to maximizing the number of youth opportunities through unselfish collaboration. This provided practitioners a sense of stability and optimism at an extraordinarily chaotic time. With over $1 million awarded through 36 contractors, almost 100 partnerships emerged from the YES coalition, supporting over 11,000 learning experiences for young people via providers, curriculum partnerships, virtual worksite placements, and career panels.

“The brokerage side was huge. In a rapidly shifting policy landscape, making sure that organizations offering support actually matched specific provider needs was critical.” Rafi Santo, Telos Learning

Program and system leaders in many communities were happily surprised by how community members rallied to provide meaningful summer experiences for young people.  For example, in Seattle, when nearly all employer-hosted internships fell through, the community mobilized and different City departments and community-based organizations, including the City of Seattle, King County, and Port of Seattle, funded and hosted work experiences to support a virtual Earn and Learn job-readiness program.

Maintaining high expectations for program quality was an important part of the #SaveSYEP and YES coalitions in New York described above. HERE to HERE’s Key Distinguishers for Virtual Paid Work Experiences resource and ExpandED’s Elements of Work Based Learning Program Design offer more detail on quality frameworks that complement the City’s compliance requirements and guidelines for baseline program elements.

Choice in program offerings is always helpful in serving young people of different ages and stages with different interests. With the disruption and uncertainty caused by the pandemic and economic downturn, many communities found it especially helpful to offer a range of options. For instance, in Boston, partners collaborated to create a summer jobs ecosystem with four tracks:

1.     Earn and Learn - in which students were paid to take credit-bearing courses at local colleges;

2.     Blue Shirts Program - in which participants worked in-person in outdoor Parks & Recreation maintenance jobs;

3.     Virtual Internship Track - in which participants were paired with community-based organizations or private sector employers for an online project-based experience, with structure and monitoring; and

4.     COVID-19 Public Health Campaign - in which participants developed a public campaign to educate young people about wearing masks and social distancing.

In addition, community-based organizations developed summer programming for young people already affiliated with their programs.  More details on the wide array of programs in Boston can be found here.

Connect Detroit found it simplified things to move to an incentive system with benchmarks that were easier to track and pay than hourly wages. They plan to continue using this system, where appropriate, for compensating participants in summer youth employment programs.

Philadelphia Youth Network developed a tool for all their summer program providers to document and articulate how various portions of their program were tied to incentives. This created a way for providers to think about experiences they were offering, map those to individual task activities, and relate them to compensation.  This process is now universal and can be used consistently across providers.

Most programs surveyed reported moving their registration and enrollment processes to an online or digital format using platforms such as Docusign, Adobe Acrobat, JotForm, Formstack, Formsite, the iPhone Notes app, CamScanner, and Sharefile for signatures and uploading documents. This proved much easier for youth participants who could upload all of their documents once, and partner programs that did not have to chase down copies of the same documents for storage in their own file cabinets. Virtually all communities report they intend to streamline this process and continue it online in the future.

Several programs noted that it was important to retain the option of a paper application for those without access to the technology to apply.  While programs ultimately need to ensure access to technology to participate, offering this accessible option at point of application results in more equitable enrollment while allowing time to seek other resources.

Peers are trusted messengers and stay connected through social media to young people who might otherwise be missed in the absence of school or community-based in-person outreach.

In Flint and Genesee County, Mich., the Chamber of Commerce hosted a virtual Summer Youth Internship Job Fair. Chamber staff worked with agency representatives to prepare them to take part in group and individual interviews with potential interns in Zoom meetings. The fair was much easier for all involved, and the Chamber will likely continue with this streamlined process. 

Numerous programs report including an assessment of applicants' technology access and knowledge as part of the onboarding process. This allowed them to make sure participants were adequately equipped and ready to use the technology needed to access summer youth programming. For programs requiring an interview, this assessment should be done prior to the interview.

With reduced transportation costs, One Summer Chicago was able to allocate those funds to new needs, such as technology purchases.

In many communities, the local school district allowed students to retain computer devices lent to them in the spring for summer youth employment programming. Unfortunately, many reported that by the time summer began these devices had often become too worn to remain of use. In addition, educational devices were often incompatible with remote internships and jobs due to educational firewalls.

Chicago's Department of Family and Support Services (DFSS), the lead for One Summer Chicago, worked with Comp-U-Dopt to purchase refurbished computers for participants. For about $150 per device, Comp-U-Dopt, a Texas-based non-profit, helped DFSS provide over 250 young people in summer programs with refurbished computers (which remained theirs to keep) and two years of tech support.

In Philadelphia, system planners for the WorkReady summer program made a conscious decision to use only platforms fully accessible on a smartphone.

Chicago Public Schools parked school buses with WiFi hotspots next to homeless shelters to provide residents with internet access.

While live help desk resources may be limited, youth in Philadelphia reported satisfaction with access to recorded videos of how to troubleshoot common tech challenges, uploaded by tech support staff as challenges arose.

Bay Area Community Resources (BACR) offered an in-person orientation session for three participants and one staff person at the beginning of its all-online training program. BACR staff found it increased participants' engagement with their peers and program staff.

ExpandED Options brought cohorts together in 2-4 hours of live group time weekly throughout the summer.

In Hartford, Conn., Capital Workforce Partners used Career Labs, a modular version of Year Up's career readiness curriculum offered by Grads of Life, to deliver training in small cohorts to prepare older participants going into in-person job placements. Grads of Life instructors facilitated synchronous virtual workshops focused on soft skills and social and emotional learning. Hartford is considering using a train-the-trainer model to prepare local providers to use this curriculum in the future in online or blended applications, an approach Seattle launched in August 2020.

YouthForce NOLA, BACR, and other programs decreased the ratio between young people and staff coaches or facilitators to allow more time for individualized follow up and group sizes that that were conducive to full participation in online synchronous meetings or lessons.

SYEP leaders in Newark, N.J. hosted five virtual town halls focused on topics including COVID-19 response and networking, with particular engagement in an entrepreneurship forum where participants were able to share social media handles and promote sales for their ventures.  

Many programs indicated that they tried to vary the type of online programming and limit the length of individual sessions.

One of the programs of One Summer Chicago involved cooking kits delivered to teen parents so they could learn to cook basic meals; another involved kits to help participants engage in hydroponic farming in their home or yard.

In New York, ExpandED Options also sent home small fast-plant mini-gardening kits. Rather than cooking together in a culinary training track, participants received funds to purchase food to conduct recipe experiments. In another track focused on technology in partnership with NYU, they sent home Arduino robotics kits for young people to work on independently.

Bay Area Community Resources (BACR) offered simultaneous translation via phone for participants during online sessions. This was not ideal in that  it required ELL participants to have two devices, but it worked. BACR also made a point of placing ELL participants in breakouts with peers who spoke their native language to facilitate their connection and interaction with fellow participants.

In Boston, youth-serving CBOs provided five hours/week of programming to supplement the employer-hosted twenty hours/week. In addition, access to a library of projects to assign to interns eased employers' fears of not being able to go through with hosting during a crisis. More detail on lessons learned from the Boston PIC’s experience can be found here.

The summer youth employment programs in Newark, N.J. partnered with Newark College Institute (NCI) at Rutgers University to supplement employer-hosted virtual internships. NCI provided onboarding, work-readiness training, and ongoing mentoring for interns.

Employer hosts for young people in Boston's Virtual Internship track were supported by Virtual Internship by Practera, a platform assisting supervisors ("coaches") in providing interns with specific project and ongoing, immediate feedback on their work.

The Chamber of Commerce in Flint and Genesee County, Mich. was already using Career Services Manager by Simplicity to supervise young people placed in multiple organizations during the Summer Youth Internship program, so it was ready to supervise participants remotely to ensure they were on-track with their internships.

ImBlaze, used by Big Picture Learning schools, can integrate daily check-in questions to interns and supervisors to help program staff monitor progress alongside timesheets.

The virtual internship platform Symba helps employers design and organize onboarding and orientation materials and structure project and competency-specific feedback. 

When approached by a small tech company about partnering, LRNG agreed to host a cohort of 25 student interns. Interns worked on a specific project advising the online learning platform on improving the first-time-user experience. Using LRNG playlists to scaffold the project, helping interns progress toward a final presentation, and exposing interns to a variety of careers represented among staff, LRNG developed a strong internship program which it is continuing through the school year. Details on the structure of the LRNG internship program are here. 

YouthForce NOLA leveraged the experience of their educators in curriculum design to create playbooks and related resources for employers such as guidelines for how to provide feedback using developmentally appropriate approaches. They apply MHA Labs frameworks for 21^st century skills development.

In Boston, when actual jobs or internships were not available, youth participants developed a concept around a project to carry out with a team for their summer youth employment experience. Teams developed an end-product that aligned with their project to present at the end of the program. Some projects were supervised by employer hosts, some by community-based youth programs.

Some employer hosts in Chicago used the LRNG platform to create projects, divided into pieces that interns could upload as they finished them.

In New Orleans, YouthForce NOLA adjusted its internship program to offer young people the opportunity to work in small groups on a project-based consultancy led by employers.

In Boston, when actual jobs or internships were not available, many youth participants developed a concept around a project to carry out with a team for their summer youth employment experience. Teams developed an end-product that aligned with their project to present at the end of the program.  Some projects were supervised by employer hosts, some by community-based youth programs.

Boston Public Schools piloted college courses focused on social justice topics at community colleges. They used CARES Act funds to support paying young people to take college course with supplementary career exploration programming.

“A lot of kids took a college course this summer who wouldn't have had that opportunity otherwise. This was oversubscribed. We had more kids than we could serve with that track!"

-Rashad Cope, Director of Department of Youth Engagement and Employment, City of Boston

Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation engaged EDSI to adapt their industry-led training track to a virtual setting. Roughly 200 young people participated in occupational training focused on IT, manufacturing, healthcare, construction or customer service.

In New Orleans, interns in a paid tech training track at Operation Spark earned certifications in JavaScript and HTML, while those in construction training at NOTEP earned entry-level NCCER credentials.

Boston partners used the Signal Success curriculum and Career Hub, in addition to programming developed by CBOs, to offer career exploration and readiness workshops to complement other summer youth employment programming.

Capital Workforce Partners' Summer Youth Employment and Learning Program in Hartford, Conn. used CareerEdge to provide younger participants with a self-paced career exploration curriculum.

YouthForce NOLA used Headed2 for industry awareness and career exposure.

While platforms like those above, Naviance (used in Philadelphia) or Hats and Ladders (used in New York City) offer the benefit of scalability, young people caution against overreliance on online learning due to screen fatigue.

Many programs noted it was much easier to schedule speakers from all over the world when operating in a virtual environment. This often meant more opportunities for young people to meet with professionals throughout the summer program. In Boston, "Lunch and Learn" blocks with career panels were a regularly scheduled part of the summer program, when in past years they typically only occurred a few times. In San Francisco, the Japanese Community Youth Council, lead agency for the Mayor’s Youth Employment and Education Program, found it much easier to offer multiple, smaller career exploration events online than past large-scale, in-person career days. This meant participants were able to learn about many more careers beyond their placements.

John Hancock's MLK Scholars program in Boston uses the interactive Everfi financial literacy program.

Summer programs in Chicago and Newark turned to the LRNG platform for open source "playlists" covering career and personal development created by other youth employment and education programs.

The Chamber of Commerce's Summer Youth Internship program in Flint and Genesee County, Mich. typically places about 350 young people in internships with about 22 agencies. Despite COVID-19, in Summer 2020 the Chamber was able to place 240 students in 19 agencies. To ensure the safety of participants, the program's director visited each work site prior to the start of the program and continued with visits throughout the summer. Work sites agreed to have strict COVID-19 safety protocols in place, and fewer students were placed at each worksite.

The countywide Youth Bridges program in Los Angeles, a pipeline for opportunity youth into public sector jobs, safely placed 30 young people into paid work experiences across 16 sites providing emergency food assistance.

Boston’s Blue Shirt program offered an in-person SYEP track where youth ages 15-18 performed beautification and maintenance of parks and other public outdoor spaces.

The Del Norte and Adjacent Tribal Lands Food Council trained Food Forest interns on how to plant, harvest, cook, preserve, and sell healthy food.

John Hancock's MLK Scholars program in Boston uses the interactive Everfi financial literacy program.

Summer programs in Chicago and Newark turned to the LRNG platform for open source "playlists" covering career and personal development created by other youth employment and education programs.

In Detroit, Connect Detroit and its partners consciously resisted focusing narrowly on SYEP goals, looking more broadly to build supports for the trauma, grief, and loss people were experiencing during this time. This included recognition of the effects of the pandemic, the economic downturn, and renewed calls for racial justice in response to the murder of George Floyd.

Summer Youth Employment and Learning Program participants in Hartford, Conn. had access to online telehealth visits so young people could connect with a mental health provider if they were going through mental health struggles during the pandemic or processing trauma. In addition, participants had the opportunity to take part in discussions and workshops on topics such as navigating COVID-19 and social protest.

SYEP leaders in Newark, N.J. repurposed funds to provide gift cards and to-go meals to address food insecurity.

In San Diego, Youth Will created a COVID-19 Action Team comprised of young people ages 15-25 advocating for their needs and the needs of the broader community during the pandemic. This led to the development of a county-sponsored Youth Emergency Resources Ambassadors Program, a youth sector within the County's Live Well San Diego initiative, and a partnership with the County to provide free menstrual products at food distribution sites, and work with the County to ensure incarcerated youth are safe during the pandemic. Based on the impact the initiative had in dispersing needed resources, youth advocated to make the Youth Ambassadors program permanent to ensure young people’s continued access to local government resources.

In May, 22 young people from South King County, Wash. collaborated with adult staff from Road Map Project partner to develop and distribute a Opportunity Youth Impacts of COVID-19 Survey. Over the summer and into the fall, youth engaged in internships to promote the research recommendations and support their implementation.

When San Francisco first went under a stay at home order, staff of Bay Area Community Resources (BACR) were clear that they wanted to respond to COVID-19, not stop doing their work. They engaged Latinx youth in pandemic response internships involving delivery of food and PPE, testing, and outreach. The young people who participated experienced a huge sense of empowerment and responsibility to the community.

As part of the Department of Family and Support Services' One Summer Chicago initiative, the "Everyone Can Create" photography program for visually impaired young people allowed participants to create COVID-19-related public service announcements on wearing masks, social distancing, and what it's like for those with visual impairment to try to social distance.  In addition, the City created the Chicago Youth Service Corps, a group of about 2000 young Chicagoans who engaged in activities to help their community during the pandemic. The Chicago Youth Service Corps was so successful over the summer that City is continuing the program into the fall, supported by funding from the CARES Act.

In Orlando, Fla., SYEP participants served as a "Clean Team” to increase the frequency and depth of cleaning of 17 neighborhood centers to meet strict CDC sanitation guidelines.

When Los Angeles went under a stay at home order, City and County funders of youth employment programming initially assumed summer youth employment programming could not take place. Opportunity Youth Collaborative partners made the case that youth employment programming could and should happen over the summer. Then they worked collectively to think differently and provide meaningful program options.

“A narrative out there in New York City in April was that there is no way we can do SYEP remotely, so let’s cut it. The YES coalition focused on strong virtual program design to prove that we could create a high quality remote youth experience. That was a critical point of the advocacy.” – Lucy Herz, Student Success Network.

The ability of stakeholders to coordinate quick adaptation to a crisis does not emerge in a vacuum. Preconditions of effective rapid response grounded in community voice are collaborative infrastructure and long-term relationships among local systems leaders, providers and youth advocates.

The coalition of youth activists at Teens Take Charge and adult advocates representing the SYEP provider community in New York City used social media and traditional formats like TV spots and press engagement to advocate for funding restoration. 

Advocates in Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere argued that it was imperative to make sure that young people had the opportunity not only to gain work experience, but to earn money. “Prioritize financial security and basic needs so youth and families can navigate the economic impacts of the pandemic,” was the second recommendation from the youth-led survey on COVID-19 response in King County, Wash.  SYEP income was especially important since young people have been disproportionately impacted by pandemic-related job loss, and 10 million 17-24 year olds claimed as dependents were not eligible for CARES Act direct relief.[5]

ALL IN!, a postsecondary success coalition in Hartford, Conn. worked with systems leaders and providers through the Hartford Opportunity Youth Collaborative to coordinate services targeting 2020 graduates while planning how to adapt summer programs. They mapped students into six groups based on post-secondary plans and connection to existing college transition programs and focused on enhancing services for students planning to enroll in community college and ensuring FAFSA completion.

Approximately 500 young people earned stipends for participating in remote courses at Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, Bunker Hill Community College, Roxbury Community College, or Urban College of Boston through the Learn and Earn track of Boston’s SYEP, typically accruing 3-6 credits and developing familiarity with the college academic and procedural setting.

Programs where the summer work experience is one component of a series of progressive training elements that extend throughout the year are often able to embed more robust and individualized postsecondary planning. Such programs are often, but not always, connected to schools. Many boutique programs have a sectoral focus and supplemental private funding. Connecting SYEP to opportunities and curriculum throughout the year and across multiple summers can allow more deliberate sequencing of career exposure, exploration and readiness activities that inform interest-driven postsecondary plans and targeted transition support for recent graduates.

The City of Boston has partnered with Northeastern University professor Alicia Modestino for years to study the effectiveness of their SYEP and improve program quality. This longstanding relationship, sustained with philanthropic support, meant that the research team could be play an active, hands-on role in prioritizing SYEP as part of the city’s overall COVID response. This included creating employer surveys to better understand the roiling labor market, using focused data points to generate timely policy memos and presentations to build policymaker buy-in, and working with systems leaders and practitioners on program redesign.

Student Success Network and Telos Learning lead research and documentation for NYC’s Youth Empowerment Summer (YES) initiative, working to capture emerging program designs for remote and blended online settings as well as lessons for organizational learning and coordination from this initiative for the city’s SYEP and wider youth-serving ecosystem.

The Northeastern researchers working with Boston use surveys to measure work readiness skills, social and emotional learning and academic aspiration.

Similarly, Career Labs by Grads of Life, used in Hartford Conn., measures social-emotional attributes like confidence and growth mindset, communication, and professional skills like time management.

YouthForceNOLA used eSkill to assess skills such as digital literacy.

Analyzing disaggregated data is essential to identifying equity gaps. Most programs track detailed demographic information and many are analyzing disparities in outcomes to develop strategies to tailor support to specific subpopulations and close these divides.