Diversity & Inclusion
Education / Guest posts / Hiring / Workplace culture

Help Camden youth get IT jobs; take this Hopeworks survey

If your tech firm were to hire a young person from Camden without a college degree, what skills or certificates would they need to have? Hopeworks ‘N Camden is looking to find out.

From a recent Hopeworks ‘N Camden business field trip. (Photo courtesy of Hopeworks ‘N Camden)
This is a guest post by Cass Bailey, CEO of Slice Communications and a board member of Hopeworks ‘N Camden. The nonprofit offers a range of programs for underprivileged youth in Camden, N.J.

I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the Board of Directors at Hopeworks ‘N Camden for more than two years now.

If you haven’t already heard of Hopeworks, it’s a nonprofit that works with youth that quite often have dropped out of school. During their time there, they get training in website development while simultaneously working with the Hopeworks staff to understand and heal from the trauma they’ve suffered due to growing up surrounded by poverty and violence.

Some youth even go onto get jobs developing WordPress websites, managing Salesforce, or working on GIS projects, all of which Hopeworks is paid to do by other nonprofits and small businesses.

I’m writing this because I need some help from the technology community here in the Philadelphia area.

The Hopeworks team is currently re-thinking its job training curricula to better prepare the youth and align with the needs of the local economy. We need to know from employers, hiring managers and others in this area if you would hire a young person from Camden without a college degree and what skills or certificates you’d like to see. We’re confident our trauma-informed care approach will help our youth become productive members of the workforce — our outcome data demonstrates that.

Hopeworks’ big goal for the past 15 years or so has been to help youth get their GEDs and enroll in college as a path to new possibilities. Based on what I’ve heard from people in the tech community, though, college may not be the only next step. Some people have said that if a person has solid web development, Ruby on Rails, Drupal, SEO, SEM, .Net, Java and/or mobile skills and can excel in a given work environment, a college degree is not a requirement.

This is incredibly exciting for me in the context of Hopeworks.

Right now in Camden, the dropout rate is embarrassing, poverty is overwhelming and there is not a lot of hope. But what if young people there had other options?

Sadly, many of us look around at the ills in our communities and don’t know what to do about them. Well, here is one small thing you can contribute to the chronically poorest and most violent city in the country that happens to be in our backyard:

Please take this survey

Send it to your friends and colleagues. You know how powerful data can be, and our Hopeworks team is poised to take advantage of your feedback. If you’d like to get more involved in crafting the curricula, we’d love to work with you. Just fill out your name and contact information at the bottom of the survey.

I love Philadelphia in part because of the supportive business community here. I also know that, together, we can do things we’ve never imagined to make this a great place to live, work and do business for ourselves and our less fortunate neighbors. Thank you in advance.

Companies: Hopeworks
Series: Camden
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