At least 80 people, many of them high school students, gathered on the steps of San Francisco City Hall Wednesday to protest proposed budget cuts to the YouthWorks paid internship program, which has placed youth in city jobs for nearly 28 years.
Many of them said they had skipped school to be here. A few held signs reading “Jobs for teens over billionaire budgets,” and “Teens shouldn’t have to protest the actions of adults.”
The San Francisco Human Rights Commission, the city department that funds the program, has proposed to cut $2 million from YouthWorks, a considerable portion of the program’s current $2.4 million budget. YouthWorks estimates it will be forced to reduce its internship program from 400 interns each year to just 80.
Evelyn Ramirez, 21, now a student at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, spoke passionately to the crowd about the impact of her high school internship at the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department’s “Greenager Program.”
“Before SF YouthWorks, I was a hopeless girl trying to search for a job amid a global pandemic,” she said. “This program believed in me long before I believed in myself.”
The YouthWorks internship program, which is run by the Japanese Community Youth Council (but is not limited to youth of Japanese origin) places around 400 high school students into paid internships in city departments, like the Department of Public Works, Municipal Transportation Agency, the Public Utilities Commission and the Department of Public Health each year.
Since its inception, at least 10,000 youth have been placed in internships, and Jorge Courtade, the employment coordinator for YouthWorks estimates that around 90 percent of the program’s participants come from households making $50,000 or less.
Many, he added, are “trying to help out at home with the money they make from this job.”
“This is a program that works,” said Jon Osaki, YouthWorks executive director. “There is not a better use of funds than to help young people learn to be competitive for city jobs.”
San Francisco has a difficult budget coming up, he acknowledged, but the city should not be cutting programs for young people.
Osaki said that he met with the mayor, as well as supervisors Connie Chan and Bilal Mahmood, to express his concern over the cuts to this program. Osaki said they encouraged the organization to be “vocal in the budget process.”
Hence today’s rally. Participants said they will continue making their case as the clock ticks down to the first of June, when the mayor releases his version of the budget based on recommendations from each department.
This is another heartbreaking budget cut–there are so many (my top tearjerker is DPH/UCSF pediatric care). I have employed JCYC youth (none were Japanese). It’s an excellent and much-needed program to offer possibilities to and help instill confidence in young people who need a little boost. It concentrates on youths from the many lower income families we have in San Francisco. I hope Mayor Lurie will be able to restore such services when the state and city receive our fair share of federal support.
SF youthworks is such a valuable program! It made me who I am today. It was my first job and from it I earned enough from minimum wage ($4.75 an hour back then) to a car, the work experience and car enabled me to get to better internships college, and then I got a job at the same sf gov department after college. I was printing the first marriage certificates for gay marriages in our country and even met the mayor and reverend Jesse Jackson through the internship! Please save SF YOUTHWORKS!!!
But we can afford free daycare for people making $249k a year? Wake up, my neighbors. The Gilded Age heir is doing exactly what any other billionaire would do.