A Food Truck Run by Former Inmates Charts a New Course

Since 2014 the New York City–based Drive Change has been operating a food truck, called Snowday, as a way of reducing recidivism rates among young people. The organization hires and mentors formerly jailed young adults between the ages of 18 and 25. And so far, it has ushered more than 20 of them through its paid fellowship program, which provides both specific training in the culinary arts as well as broader professional-development skills. Graduates of the program have gone on to work as line cooks in upscale restaurants and catering companies.
Now Drive Change is ready to scale its operations for greater impact as other cities, including Baltimore and Pittsburgh, have expressed interest in launching similar programs. With a commissary set to open in 2018, Drive Change hopes to increase the number of fellows from roughly eight a year to 40.
Also on the menu for the nonprofit: a re-branding and a new look. Beginning in July, the award-winning Snowday will be called Drive Change, though it will still feature a seasonal menu with locally sourced food. In addition, the company is adopting an affiliate model where other food trucks that hire young adults coming home from prison can get Drive Change–Certified.
Founded by 31-year-old Jordyn Lexton, Snowday was originally conceived as the first in a fleet of food trucks. But the re-branding was necessary, Lexton says, because marketing different trucks while still promoting the organization’s social-impact mission proved too resource-intensive.
“We were constantly trying to figure out how to put our resources behind one brand versus the other,” says Lexton. “We recognized it caused more confusion than we had originally envisioned.” There was also a concern that Drive Change could be perceived as exploiting the very group of people it aims to help, adds Lexton. “We’ve been able to have young people we work with take ownership of our mission and what we stand for, and that’ll be forefront in our [new] brand identity.”
As Drive Change transitions, it is only accepting event bookings from organizations working directly in the field of social or racial justice, including re-entry from the criminal justice system. Says Lexton, “We’re really trying to raise awareness around those issues so change can happen.”
Homepage photo via Drive Change.
Continue reading “A Food Truck Run by Former Inmates Charts a New Course”

This Is How You End the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline

Moments of stability were rare during Pamela Bolnick’s childhood. She repeatedly witnessed her father beat her mother, a Venezuelan immigrant diagnosed with schizophrenia. Bolnick’s mom eventually left her abusive spouse, fleeing to the Bay Area with her two kids. When she stopped taking her medication, the county child welfare department stepped in and placed six-year-old Bolnick and her younger brother in foster care. Her mother resumed treatment for her mental illness, and for two short years, retained custody of her children. After another relapse, Bolnick and her sibling were permanently removed from their home.

Bolnick was placed with her godparents in Richmond, Calif., an East Bay city then known for its notoriously high murder rates. Toughened by her childhood, she excelled at El Cerrito High School, impressing teachers in her Advanced Placement classes and filling her schedule with softball games and dance rehearsals. By senior year, however, she felt her foster family was pressuring her to move on. “All this time, I looked at them as being my own family. I did everything that you’d expect of a child, going to school, not getting into trouble, applying to college,” Bolnick says. “I came to see it as a business transaction: them being paid [by the government] for taking care of me, and me getting the benefit of being a child in their custody.” Disgusted, she left and spent the summer living at friend’s house. Shortly afterwards, she enrolled at Holy Names University in nearby Oakland Hills.

Alone for the first time, juggling 19 credits of core classes and a full-time job overwhelmed Bolnick. Short on time and seared by her past relationships, she distanced herself from others. “I almost grew to believe that I could be this Superwoman figure,” she recalls. “It burned me out completely. I didn’t have time to enjoy my first year of college, a time that’s supposed to be so liberating. I had finally reached the only thing my mother wanted me to do, and it made me so sad knowing I wasn’t happy.” Bolnick dropped out. Her foster parents refused to take her back, and without a permanent place to go, she couch-surfed at friends’ dorms.

The foster care system is one of America’s most troublesome institutions: chronically underfunded and largely uninformed and unsuccessful at raising children much better than the parents from whom they were removed. Its primary recipients — children under the age of 18 — have no political leverage, so policy decisions are often driven by scandals. In New York City, for example, after a mother killed her daughter in 1995, thousands of kids were forcefully removed from their homes, but when troubles beset the administration in 2005, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. While the system as a whole has experienced some reforms (motivated by Victorian sensationalism, as Jill Lepore documents in The New Yorker), a subset of its population gets little attention: those who “age out” of the system.

Each year in California, several thousand youth exit foster care immediately upon turning 21 years old. (Previously emancipated at 18, youth care was extended by a 2012 state law.) Longitudinal studies by researchers from University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall Center for Children found that 24 percent of youth were homeless after exiting the system and nearly half had been incarcerated within two years. Perhaps most shockingly, 77 percent of the young women reported a pregnancy, risking another generation reentering the system.

While other children can mature gradually, relying on their parents for emotional advice or a bit of extra cash, these youth are entirely on their own. Amy Lemley, a former case manager at a group home for foster youth in Boston, remembers teenagers celebrating their 18th birthdays by stuffing their few belongings into a backpack and saying goodbye. “We kind of looked the other way and pretended that it was going to work out, but we knew that it wasn’t,” she says. Recognizing that these kids needed help transitioning into adulthood, Lemley enrolled in a public policy graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley, and with her classmate and “kindred spirit” Deanne Pearn, the women founded an organization in 1999 to provide that support.

Headquartered in Oakland, Calif., First Place for Youth provides emancipated youth in five Bay Area counties and Los Angeles with their very first apartment, covering both the security deposit and the monthly rental fees. Last year, 464 youth moved into these residences. Most stay in the program for around 18 months; some kids drop in for 30 days, while others stay for three years, current First Place for Youth CEO Sam Cobbs says. Before exiting, the organization assists the young adults meet four main goals: find stable employment, locate housing that matches their income, complete two semesters of community college or a certificate program and, finally, achieve “healthy living,” which means avoiding arrests, unintended pregnancies and substance abuse.

First Place for Youth CEO Sam Cobb.

The program’s scope wasn’t always so large. The way Lemley originally envisioned it, housing would be enough. But after realizing that some First Place participants couldn’t read, she quickly pivoted, including educational and career services as well. Targeting a group that’s significantly behind their peers, First Place’s goals are modest. “I can tell you, we don’t have anybody at Goldman Sachs,” Claudia Miller, the group’s spokeswoman says. Instead, it aims for participants to land jobs that provide a livable wage, like a paralegal, nurse or solar panel installer. A full 86 percent obtain employment, and 91 percent attend college. (The program did not provide numbers on how many complete their education.)

“This program is not a handout; it is a hand up,” Cobbs says. “What we’re doing is trying to help you understand and make choices so that you can provide for yourself. You have to meet us, if not halfway, at least 30 percent, and invest in your own future. Which I think is one of the reasons it’s such a big success: it depends on them.”

Bolnick heard about First Place for Youth through a college counselor, who advised her that the program could provide her with the financial and emotional support she needed. Feeling like she was “working to live each day,” Bolnick initially signed up for just classes. But after dropping out of Holy Names University, experiencing a brief period of homelessness and crashing with friends for a bit, she moved into housing provided by First Place.

The transition wasn’t always easy. Like in her dorm room, she shared the space (a two-bedroom apartment in San Leandro, Calif.) with another teenager, this time a foster youth who’d faced her own hardships. At first, the pair bonded, but soon Bolnick felt that her roommate began to shirk responsibilities, hanging around at home and smoking pot and cigarettes, even after she found out she was pregnant. “It literally put a flash of light in front of me, knowing there are kids out there who don’t even want to make a difference in their life,” she says. The environment became so tense that Bolnick couldn’t take it anymore and had to move to another apartment. There, Bolnick found another First Place participant who became like “a little sister to me.”

It’s a result that can’t be quantified, but Bolnick says First Place provided a community that understood her. After losing both parents (her father left the picture when the family moved to California, and her mother committed suicide) and then feeling betrayed by her foster family, Bolnick learned to distance herself from those closest to her. Before getting to First Place, she didn’t express any emotions related to her upbringing. She couldn’t tell her little brother how scared she was for fear of traumatizing him, and she kept her biological parents a secret through high school so that her friends wouldn’t pity her. Getting to know other emancipated youth at First Place helped her, Bolnick says, not because they necessarily knew the specifics of her story, but because each of them had a similar experience to share. Up until her early 20s, she says she never knew what it was like to cry. When asked what the rush of emotions feels like now, Bolnick says simply, “I appreciate it.”

Foster youth “have completely normal behavior,” Cobbs says, “and what I mean by that is, if you are moved nine times, then you probably wouldn’t establish relationships really quickly. It is normal behavior to protect yourself from building intimate relationships, because every time you get attached, you get hurt. It’s abnormal not to do that.”

Pamela Bolnick in her current apartment.

Today, Bolnick pays for her own apartment near Oakland, where she bikes and reads by Lake Merritt. She’s working full-time as an assistant manager for a high-end fashion company, and she’s saved enough money to take a two-week trip to Venezuela to meet her mother’s family. Within the next year, she plans to complete her last semester of community college and apply to U.C. Berkeley, where she’s planning to major in biophysics (the next step towards her goal of practicing pediatric neurosurgery) and minor in sociology (a way to understand where she’s been and what she’s faced). She spoke to NationSwell, she confessed, partially because she wanted to hear more about the neighborhood around New York University in downtown Manhattan where she plans to go to medical school. But she also mentioned she wanted to talk because she feels she has an important story to share — one that has a brighter ending than her mother’s.

Why was Bolnick able to beat the odds? Some of the latest scientific research on trauma might call it grit or resilience — an inborn ability to overcome. In her words, “I think it has to do with seeing the light behind all the blockages that get in the way. It takes a lot mentally,” she explains. “If I keep telling myself I am a foster kid, I am a Latina woman, I live in Richmond and all of my friends are doing the same things that people expect me to do, I should just as easily do that. But I never once had that thought at all. I just wanted to make the best of what I had.” Bolnick also credits First Place for Youth for providing her with the network she needed to halt a situation that was spiraling out of control. She says the nonprofit gave her “stability, stability, stability.”

With results like that, Cobbs wants to see the model expand across the country, whether it’s run by his organization or a partner. He acknowledges specific benefits — support for transitional housing in Sacramento and a top-notch community college system statewide — that make the model work in California, but he also points to challenges, including the Golden State’s high cost of living and the fact that it is the largest foster care system in the country (largely because it hasn’t been as aggressive in returning kids to their homes, even if conditions improve, and because a flood of orphaned immigrant children keep adding to the total, he says). If replicated in just 10 more cities nationwide, Cobbs says that about 70 percent of America’s foster youth could have another option available to them.

Before Lemley founded First Place for Youth, the safety net for America’s foster youth abruptly disappeared at age 18, abandoning these vulnerable children at the most critical moment. First Place for Youth lengthens and stabilizes that transition to adulthood. Homelessness and jail-time are no longer mandatory chapters in stories about foster care. With the organization’s work, emancipated youth finally have a home to call their own.

Homepage photo courtesy of First Place for Youth

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Ask the Experts: How Can We Solve the Young Adult Unemployment Crisis?

For young adults who entered the workforce between the start of the Great Recession in 2009 to the present, days spent searching for jobs — any jobs at all — have stretched into weeks, months and even years. This endless disappointment seems to be the new normal for a generation of young people who were once assured that if they graduated from high school, attended college and studied hard, they would enjoy gainful employment in the field of their choosing.
Instead, these millennials have become a generation-in-waiting — waiting to find a job that will pay more than minimum wage, waiting to be given a chance to earn the experience that employers seek in an employee, waiting to take the next steps into independent adulthood. This generation is in the midst of an unemployment crisis.
So how can we fix it? NationSwell convened a panel of experts to explain the severity of the young adult unemployment crisis, why it matters and what we can do to get this generation working again. Read on for their thoughts, and then join the conversation by leaving your own ideas in the comments box below.

How bad is the problem, really?

Young adult unemployment is a serious economic issue — and it’s not improving. According to Catherine Ruetschlin, policy analyst at Demos, a public policy organization dedicated to creating a more equal America, it’s not uncommon for young adults to have higher unemployment rates than the rest of the population. But it is unusual for these rates to persist as long as they have.
“Young people under 35 still hadn’t recovered from the recession in 2001 when the next recession began in December 2007,” Ruetschlin says. “So it’s been a long process for young people to finally catch up, even if the economy is moving forward.”
Millennials ages 18 to 34 have experienced double-digit unemployment rates for more than 70 months — or almost six years — according to a recent report called In This Together: The Hidden Costs of Young Adult Unemployment by the youth advocacy group Young Invincibles. Young people of color and those without college degrees are especially hardhit by the unemployment crisis. One in four black youths between the ages of 16 and 25 are unemployed. Young adults without a college education face an unemployment rate of 12.2 percent — double the national average. While young adult college grads have an overall unemployment rate of 3.8 percent,the statistics are higher for black college graduates. A recent report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that 12.4 percent of young black grads are unemployed.
MORE: Ask the Experts: How Can We Keep From Drowning in College Debt?
“Research shows that people who graduate from college during recessions — with the exact same skills and credentials as someone who graduates during a boom in the economy — take a financial hit over the course of their lifetimes,” Ruetschlin says. Even those lucky enough to get jobs don’t go through life unscathed. “They start at a lower salary, which means that for the rest of their career, they’re still earning less than someone who graduated during an economic peak.”

Why should American care about our unemployed youths?

Let’s face it: When one section of the labor market is struggling, the rest of society is dragged down with it. “In a time of tight budgets, everyone should be paying attention to the youth unemployment situation, because it’s directly costing us money right now,” says Tom Allison, policy and research manager at Young Invincibles.
In the group’s In This Together report, researchers estimate that unemployment for this age group costs state and federal governments around $8.9 billion per year in foregone tax revenue and social safety net benefits. Broken down by age group, an unemployed 18- to 24-year-old costs the government more than $4,100 annually. For an unemployed 25- to 34-year-old, that number rises to $9,900 annually.
“Another way to think of it is that, if that $8.9 billion [was passed directly to the taxpayer], it would add about $50 per year on top of each taxpayer’s federal tax bill,” Allison says.
Financial implications aside, there are other reasons that Americans should be concerned about young adult unemployment. “The immediate reason is that we’ve already made an investment in the skills training of our young people,” Ruetschlin says. “The longer those young people are shut out of the labor market, the more that investment deteriorates — we actually get less return on it — because skills deteriorate over time.”
WATCH: Why Millennials Are Taking Big Pay Cuts to Work at Small Companies
Young Americans between the ages of 20 and 24 will lose about $21.4 billion in earnings over the next 10 years, according to Young Invincibles. That’s roughly $22,000 per person — money that’s not being reinvested in the economy through the purchase of goods and services. As this demographic struggles to become financially stable, they are putting many of the traditional markers of adulthood — moving out, getting married, buying cars and homes, having children — on pause. “It ripples into so many different areas that it’s hard to ignore that young people’s economic situation is intricately tied into the success of the economy,” Ruetschlin says.

Why should companies invest in young adult workers?

It’s hard to ignore headlines that claim millennials are “lazy,”“narcissistic” or “entitled.” But this generation’s economic struggles make them different, in a positive way. This group is resilient and motivated, despite what one might read.
“These young people have been beaten down by the labor market,” Ruetschlin says. “It’s hard to look for a job. It’s especially hard to look for a job in an economy that thinks you don’t have the skills that it takes to be productive, or you’re only wanted in a job that has a low payoff. It’s demoralizing and frustrating.”
Ruetschlin says that employers should consider hiring young adults as an investment in the future of the nation’s economy. “What we see is that firms are very willing to invest in human capital at the top ends of the income spectrum, but not at the entry level,” she says. “That’s because the perception is that people change jobs so frequently that taking time to train someone won’t pay off. Well, in this labor market, there’s nowhere else to go. It’s actually a great time to invest in a person.”
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Tom Allison of Young Invincibles says millennials bring unique skillsets to the workplace, which can be of benefit to employers. “We already know that our generation is quick to adopt new technologies, and that’s going to increase their importance in the workforce,” he says. “Our generation is instilled with a collaborative approach. We work well together. We’re also pretty creative. Lastly, we’re adaptable. We graduated high school and college right when the recession hit, and we’ve been able to demonstrate our flexibility and adaptability, and that’s exactly what companies are going to need in a changing global economy.”

So what are some ways to get young adults working?

We should examine both short-term and long-term solutions to the young adult unemployment crisis, according to Martha Ross, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. She says that “we need to do more to bridge the worlds of education and employment, and create stronger on-ramps into the labor market for young people.”
There are a number of ways to do this. We can encourage partnerships between high schools and private industries, which is the premise behind Alamo Academies in San Antonio, Texas. Here, students receive specialized job training in high-demand fields such as aerospace, manufacturing, information technology or health care, all while working toward a high school degree and earning college credits. “One long-term solution would be to take the Alamo Academies model and apply it across the country,” Ross says.
We can also create more registered apprenticeship programs, which give students hands-on training in a marketable skill, combined with classroom instruction, all the while getting paid. “There are 4 million job openings in the U.S. that require certain skills,” Allison says. “Apprenticeships can help develop those skills, while also giving young people their first work experiences.”
Young Invincibles is pushing to increase funding for AmeriCorps, an intensive national-service program that employs Americans to work at nonprofits, schools, public agencies and community groups across the country. According to Allison, more than a half million Americans apply for the 80,000 spots that the program offers every year. “AmeriCorps gives young people experience in serving our country and serving their communities. It’s often their first experience in the workforce,” Allison says. He points to studies that found that the economic multiplier effect of AmeriCorps is about $2.50 for every dollar invested.
And Ross says that we need to change the way that we think about education and work, focusing more on applied learning. “Today the model is, at age 18, after taking college-prep courses, you wave bye to Mom and Dad and go to school,” she says. “You study fulltime for four years, and then you graduate, and at that point you start looking for your first full-time job. That works relatively well for a subset of the population. But it doesn’t work at all for lots of people.”
According to Ross, schools should shift their focus from test scores and graduation rates to increasing project-based learning, placing students in valuable internships and supporting them as they look for jobs in the workforce. “It’s a cultural and institutional change that could make a big difference,” she says.
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