Adams’ Expansion to SYEP: A Long Awaited Victory
In 2003, a 14 year old Annie Tan took her first ever job in the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP). Living with her mom and dad in a Chinatown walk up, Tan was nervous but eager and ready to finally contribute to her family’s income.
“We didn’t have a lot of money, we were really scraping by,” Tan says.
It was by Battery Park, at the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA). There, she learned how to file paperwork, scan documents, make copies and take phone calls. She was excited to make minimum wage–$5.15 at the time.
4 years later, she participated in SYEP again, this time at Hester Street Collective where she was able to do more creative and collaborative work.
There, she helped build a playground in her neighborhood and got to work with kids. “I did my first silkscreen shirt. I did my first Powerpoint with the organization,” Tan says.
She also learned how to handle her money.
“The very first debit card ever I had was through the program. I had a whole workshop around how to get cashback and how to not get charged for things. And honestly, that was one of the most useful things, just ever in my education, to know how to use the credit card,” Tan says of the most valuable lessons she took away from SYEP.
Tan is now a teacher in New York at a K-8 school in Queens. She says she hasn’t been very involved in SYEP since her last job there, but was a proud advocate for #SaveSYEP, a movement in protest of DeBlasio’s cancellation of the program in 2020 during the coronavirus outbreak.
This year, Mayor Eric Adams included $79 million to go towards SYEP in the preliminary budget for the 2022 fiscal year and added an impressive 90,000 slots.
“I made a commitment to New Yorkers to spend taxpayer dollars more wisely while making the upstream investments necessary to ensure a robust recovery and this administration’s first preliminary budget achieves exactly that,” says Adams.
Adams included that the initiative to increase youth career development is part of his ‘Get Stuff Done’ campaign as well as his ‘Blueprint to End Gun Violence.’
Lazar Treschan, Vice President of Policy and Impact at Here to Here, an organization aimed at career development in underprivileged youth of New York, says what’s most exciting is not just that the money was put in, but that the money was put in early.
“It means that it’s not going to go down to the wire,” he says. “It’s not going to be a result of just negotiations between interested city council members going back and forth.”
Here to Here is not an SYEP partner, instead they support community based organizations that have SYEP to make sure that they’re crafting the right type of experiences. Here to Here was also a huge supporter of #SaveSYEP in 2020, like Tan.
Treschan says that the voices of the youth are what we need to listen to most, something instilled in him from his advocacy with #SaveSYEP, a movement he worked on closely.
Does Adams’ expansion to summer youth employment feel like a victory for the movement? Definitely. It also stands as a victory for long-time advocates like Treschan.
“A lot of us have been working on this for years,” he says.
“In 2014, I put out a proposal for universal summer jobs. And that sort of started the push towards this movement,” he says. “For like five or six years we worked really hard on getting from just annual increases to a much larger expansion. It’s really exciting that the administration was the first to really make it happen.”
The question, though, of whether expansion will help to end gun violence, and gun related deaths specifically in NYC’s youth, is a tricky one.
In 2021, between January 1 and September 26, there were 89 shooting victims ages 17 and younger–up from 84 in 2020 and 45 in 2019 according to Pix11 analysis of NYPD reports. Adams hopes that expanding youth employment will keep young New Yorkers from falling down the precarious path of crime to simply survive.
“The research on SYEP does show it decreases youth mortality,” says Treschan.” “So young people who participate in SYEP are less likely to be involved in any violent crime.”
Treschan agrees that expanding youth employment can be a great preventative tool, but he sees its application a bit differently. “We want to see these types of programs as less about stopping negative things from happening, and instead creating something positive,” he says.
He continues, “I think we really want the focus to be less on preventing bad outcomes, and really, on supporting positive outcomes, helping young people explore careers, develop their own skills and interests, connecting to adults, creating a social network outside of their family and their school, and really contributing to building back into the New York City economy.”
The forward looking attitude that Treschan emphasizes in his and his colleagues’ work gives young New Yorkers a place to develop interests in a comfortable environment.
In the case of Mahim Arib, 21 from the Bronx, the program had a significant impact. Like Tan did almost 10 years ago at NYANA, he got his first job with SYEP when he was 17 at a summer camp in 2019.
“I guess the only gripe I had was the fact that they had an orientation event to let you pick where you want to work in but it looked like everyone was just assigned to work at a summer camp at multiple locations,” he says.
When Mahim got to his job placement, he worked with an instructor to help run a STEM class for elementary school students grades K-2. While most others in the program were assigned to follow class groups and go to different rooms with them, he was assigned to different groups throughout the day but in the same classroom–which he greatly appreciated.
“I had that as a safety net because I didn’t land any internships during that summer, and I was still able to earn some cash,” Arib says. “It gave me experience to put on my resume that let me have 2 more jobs where I got to work with kids, which were also STEM related.”
Mahim now studies at Stony Brook University and plans to graduate this May with a degree in Mathematics.
