At least 80 people — many of them high school students — gathered Wednesday on the steps of San Francisco City Hall 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 U.C. Berkeley at the Haas School of Business, spoke passionately to the crowd about the impact of her high school internship at Recreation and Parks’ “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 the recommendations from each department.