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Posts Tagged ‘young adult’

New Idea in Grad Student Housing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 16, 2019| 2 Comments »

Photo: Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Dean Kaplan and Sarah Heintz chatted in the apartment they share in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Empty nesters are faced with a challenge: they hate to leave their home, but maybe it would be practical to get a smaller, cheaper place with more people around and less snow shoveling in winter. Meanwhile, grad students have a different conundrum: their university may be in a high-rent area, but they don’t have much money.

Idea!

Dugan Arnett at the Boston Globe describes one creative solution that is working out for both empty-nesters and young adults.

“After living with more than a dozen different roommates in his young life, most of them strangers, Dean Kaplan is well-versed in the particulars of those first meetings — the short introductions, the perfunctory pleasantries, and then the quick getting on with life. …

“In late August, though, as he stood on the front porch of a sizable multistory house in Cambridge ready to meet his newest roommate, he found himself uncharacteristically nervous and eager to make a good first impression.

“Of all the roommates he’d had in the previous few years, Sarah Heintz would be the first septuagenarian. In fact, Kaplan, a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and Heintz, a 77-year-old whose grown daughter now lives across town, are part of an experiment in connecting young people in need of cheap rent with older residents who wouldn’t mind a little extra companionship and an occasional hand around the house.

“The notion is driven by the Boston area’s housing crisis, which has propelled rents through the stratosphere [while] some 90,000 spare bedrooms are going unused in the homes of aging empty-nesters.

“That got a pair of MIT urban-planning graduate students thinking: Those rooms might be valuable to young people, especially students. And they might also provide a way for older people, who increasingly are living alone, to stay in their homes as they age.

“ ‘They get helped around the house, doing everyday sorts of things — walking the dogs, going grocery shopping, technology tutoring, and feeling that they can help a young person get started in their life,’ said one of the students, Noelle Marcus.

“To match these odd couples, Marcus and classmate Rachel Goor last year launched a startup called Nesterly, which works roughly on the principles of a dating app, with searchable online profiles and features that help work out details of a lease. …

“That day in August when Kaplan showed up on Heintz’s porch, he came with his mother and some luggage stuffed with clothes. Heintz invited them in and gave them a tour.

“At first glance, they would seem an unlikely pairing. … But as Heintz led Kaplan and his mother through the house, his nerves started to ease.

“ ‘The walls are covered in books,’ Kaplan said later. ‘And that made me feel at home immediately.’ …

“Under the terms of their lease agreement, rent is $800 a month (about half the cost of apartments Kaplan had been looking at before the arrangement with Heintz), knocked down to $700 if he devotes eight hours each month to helping Heintz with a range of chores.

“But even without that incentive, they said, they’ve discovered they like doing favors for one another. He helps in the garden and gives her a hand logging into her e-mail account; she offers him rides to Market Basket and recently taught him the proper way to gut a fish.” Read more here.

I love this idea, but I just have to say one thing. There are plenty of septuagenarians who don’t need help logging on to their email accounts. It’s a lazy journalistic assumption that is really starting to grate.

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Year Up’s Job Program Really Works

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 16, 2018| 5 Comments »

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Photo: Year Up
Ana Vargas took part in the Year Up program, which helps many young adults from low-income backgrounds earn college credit, gain skills, and land jobs after serious internships with partner companies.

This was a great idea when it started in 2000, and it’s a great and successful idea now that it has spread to many US cities. It’s all about helping motivated young adults who can’t afford college to get a decent foothold in the job world.

Allison Hagan writes for the Boston Globe, “When Gerald Chertavian started Year Up in 2000, the nonprofit set out to help 22 young adults from low-income Boston neighborhoods earn a decent wage.

“The organization has come a long way from that modest beginning. A new study has found that 4,100 Year Up participants from 21 cities across the country are benefiting from the largest earnings gain associated with any workforce program in US history.

“The research was part of the Pathways for Advancing Careers and Education project sponsored by the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families. It reported that Year Up group members earn 53 percent more than economically disadvantaged young adults who did not participate in the program. The findings said Year Up increased total hours worked by three to four per week and graduates earned nearly $4 more per hour than members of a control group that were part of the study.

“Under Year Up, young adults from low-income backgrounds — ranging in age from 18 to 24 — with a GED or high school diploma can earn college credit while gaining skills in areas such as information technology, quality assurance, and testing applications to assess functionality. Upon completing the yearlong program, graduates earn on average $17.41 an hour, which amounts to $34,000 per year and triumphs over the state’s $11 minimum wage.

“Researchers analyzed Year Up alongside eight other workplace development programs. … It ‘absolutely shows that we can enable people to lift themselves out of a situation of poverty and into a good job, and therefore should be investing in people and seeing them as assets instead of social liabilities,’ [Chertavian] said.

“Year Up students spend six months learning an array of skills such as time management, networking, and leadership. The next six months are devoted to an internship with one of Year Up’s corporate partners, which include 40 Boston-based companies every year. The money that affiliated corporations pay to get interns covers 59 percent of the program’s operating costs, according to Year Up. Combined with sponsorships and private donations, that leaves only 2 percent of the national program’s $150 million budget to public funding. …

“Bank of America Corp. has hired 690 Year Up interns, while State Street Corporation has hired 700, according to Chertavian. State Street reports that it converts 60 percent of Year Up interns into full-time employees.

“ ‘Year Up has opened a new talent pipeline for us that we’ve been able to take advantage of with terrific results,’ said Mike Scannell, senior vice president and president of the financial firm’s philanthropic arm the State Street Foundation.”

More here.

Some years ago I interviewed Year Up founder Gerald Chertavian for a government magazine that hadn’t yet learned to post its articles in html. Here is a pdf. The thing that struck me most about this man is that he was so grateful for being mentored in the urban high school he attended that he volunteered for Big Brother throughout his own college years and then, after selling a successful company at a fairly young age, sought a way to take mentoring to scale.

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