Have you
ever heard of “Year Up?” Hopefully in
the next couple of years, Year Up will be widely known like City Year and Teach
for America . Like City Year and Teach for America, Year Up
is a program dedicated to filling in the gaps young adults fall through and helping
young adults acquire skills to improve their lives.
Year Up
provides recent high school graduates and graduates with their GED who live in
economically distressed communities an opportunity to participate in a year
long jobs training boot camp. What is
unique about Year Up is that upon successful completion of the program, a
majority of the participants secure full time employment as IT and Financial
support with Fortune 500 companies such as J.P Morgan, American Express and
Facebook[i].
Year up
participants spend six months working on technical projects such as building
and maintaining computers to basic accounting and balance sheets. Participants also work on soft skills and
social skills, the skills needed to build the foundation to a career. The remaining six months, participants work
as interns in Fortune 500 companies as IT support or Financial support.
The founder
of Year Up is Gerald Chertavian. Gerald
worked in Corporate America and in 1988volunteered as a Big Brother. Being a mentor with a young man from an
economically distressed community, Chertavian came to learn his mentee had “all
the potential, but didn’t have the access and the opportunity…having seeing
that for three years close up, I realized this was wrong[ii].”
Using his
own money, Chertavian started Year Up with 22 students with the purpose of
creating a job boot camp that provides a pathway to good careers for young
people who would otherwise never get the chance. Since the inception of Year Up, the program
has grown into 12 sites across the country training 2000 young adults for
financial operations and IT jobs. What
is even more impressive is that after the completion of Year Up, 85% of the
participants go on to attend college or are hired full time with an average
salary of up to $50,000[iii].
The success
of Year Up has garnered the attention of President Obama who is looking to have
Year Up replicated. If Chertavian and
President Obama are able to convince more CEO’s to get agree to embrace the
Year Up model, young adults in economically distressed communities will have
the opportunity to break the generational cycle of poverty.
Year Up is
one of the most promising programs in decades. The program seeks to provide
skills, opportunity and empowerment while challenging the systemic racial and
economic bias in corporate America.
I believe Year Up could do for
young adults living in economically distressed communities what the War on
Poverty could not accomplish; break the cycle of generational poverty.
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