Students find a ‘sense of belonging’ at Year Up

Three Johnston youths are among those whose lives have been changed by Year Up, a special learning experience for young adults who have grown up without the skills necessary to succeed in today’s job market.

It’s a program that is turning young people, who might otherwise be unemployed, into productive citizens eagerly sought after by businesses.

Twenty-four year-old Georgie O’Neill said she was a “lazy kid” and she didn’t see the value of education. She said her mom was really sick of “seeing her on the couch doing nothing every single day.” Her mother heard about Year Up and encouraged her to apply. She figured she’d make it about halfway through and then give up, but after the first week she said to herself, “There’s nowhere I would rather be, and I’ll make it to the graduation no matter what.”

Meanwhile, Johnston resident Malany Khamsyvoravong, 25, said she was in the third year of nursing school at Rhode Island College when she decided “this wasn’t for me” and her grades began to slack. She applied to Year Up, and now she’s back on the track to success.

And Ray Min, 22, also of Johnston, grew up in Providence and said he was around a “bad crowd and made it through the ninth grade before dropping out of school.” Eventually he got his GED and did a year at CCRI, but “it wasn’t really working out, so I stopped and decided to just work.” A friend of his told him about Year Up. He said he “kind of didn’t want to” participate at first, but he finally applied. He was accepted and now says it’s “probably the most life-changing thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

Year Up is a workforce development program founded by Wall Street veteran Gerald Chertavian. He was working on Wall Street when he became a Big Brother to a young man from a bad part of New York City. He soon realized there was a huge difference in opportunity between the two, even though they were geographically very close. So he founded Year Up to help close that gap by providing more opportunities to the disadvantaged. Today there are nine sites located throughout the country, including one on Fountain Street in downtown Providence.

Shelly Nicholas, a business communications instructor, says this is a one-year program designed to grow and develop the talent of young people who lack both the technical and professional skills necessary to build a career in today’s economy.

Year Up provides job skills, college credits, corporate internships and even a way for students to make some cash.

Not only are the college courses free, but students get paid while they go, earning $600 a month for the first six months, then $900 a month for the following six. This money and their tuition payment all comes from private fundraising and corporate partners.

As part of this, students sign a contract when they start, agreeing to such things as showing up on time and turning in their assignments when they are due. Should they slip up on any of these things, their pay is docked anywhere between $15 and $50 for each infraction. They quickly learn to do what would be expected of them in a corporate environment.

The courses they take are in partnership with CCRI, but here they meet four times a week for 21 weeks.

“That’s almost three times more classroom hours than they would get elsewhere,” said Nicholas, “so we really have the opportunity of going above and beyond with the students, walking them through certain concepts” so they know the material.

He said students here learn “emotional intelligence and self-awareness” – something that many don’t have when they arrive.

“That means they learn to deal with their emotions by reacting in positive ways to difficult conversations or circumstances,” Nicholas said. “We teach that here because we recognize that a lot of our students didn’t have the chance to learn those skills growing up or going to high school. And that’s really important to be successful in a professional environment. We teach them to be ‘cool as a cucumber’ under pressure and also to be able to read other people and interact with people in a communication style they feel comfortable with.”

Students also learn to work in a team environment as yet another way to help them succeed in the corporate world. To that end, they are sent out on the corporate internships for companies like Hasbro, CVS, GTech, Citizens Bank, Blue Cross and Blue Shield and others. And while interning, the students meet once a week, first in a large group then in a smaller one, to discuss what they learned and to share that knowledge with the others.

But the most important difference seems to be the very personalized attention the students receive.

Nicholas explained that in college you’re expected to “just show up and do the work,” but some students need more of a one-on-one learning environment.

And that is what Year Up provides through a network of advisors and mentors, all helping students succeed.

It’s that personal attention and sense of belonging that seems to make the difference and is turning so many young people around, giving them the skills and tools they need to build a career.

Georgie said that when you go to college, “you’re basically a number, but when you come here I’ll guarantee you any staff member that you meet will know my name and what I want to do with my life. But if you talked with my old professors, I guarantee you they would not know who I was.”

Malany agreed, saying the difference is “the major support we get here. It’s like a family relationship. When I was in college, it was basically, strive for yourself, if you want to do it, do it; if not, you don’t. So we didn’t have the motivation.”

And Ray said he thinks personal attention is the biggest part, explaining that as a kid, “We all grew up wanting to be part of something. Where I grew up, you wanted to feel there is somebody who wants to help you, someone who is going to have your back. Here at Year Up this is the community that we have, and can say we built and are part of. Here there is that sense of belonging.”

All three students are on track to graduate in July, and a report on CBS News said that even in these times of high unemployment, there are hundreds of thousands of good jobs waiting to be filled by trained individuals just like Georgie, Malany and Ray.