Jobs in Sandy Relief for NYC’s Troubled Youth

17-year-old Daquan Jackson worked for NYC's YouthWRAP program earlier this year, helping Hurricane Sandy victims and getting himself back on track. (Steven Wang/New Tang Dynasty Television)

BROOKLYN—For teenagers who have been convicted of crimes, getting a job can be tough, and it is easy to fall back into a vicious cycle. But the New York City Department of Probation aims to get kids convicted of misdemeanors back on track with the Summer YouthWRAP program—a program that puts kids to work on Hurricane Sandy relief projects.

“YouthWRAP will allow these young people to provide meaningful assistance to families in storm drainage communities while earning money over the summer,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He spoke a press conference on Monday outside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn to announce the program’s launch.

Summer YouthWRAP will employ 450 kids on probation ages 14 to 18. They will work four days a week for seven weeks and earn $1,440 for the summer. 

Most of those kids have been convicted of a misdemeanor—usually involving petty theft or drugs.

The program aims to break the cycle—teaching them job skills and giving them a well-supervised, constructive summer activity.

“It really is a good news story where kids may have fallen off the beaten path but they understand that they’re responsible for their own destiny and they’re trying to get back on the right road,” said Bloomberg.

WRAP—as in Summer YouthWRAP—stands for Workforce Restoration Assistance Program. The summer program is funded by the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City.

Summer YouthWRAP is the summer extension of the regular YouthWRAP program. That program had run on weekends for the past 25 weeks.

Daquan Jackson had worked for YouthWRAP since January, giving out food and clothes at a church in a hard-hit Coney Island neighborhood.

“At first I never thought I would wake up early to come here every day—because I’m young, I like to have fun on the weekends,” said Daquan, a 17-year-old from Brooklyn who will now participate in the summer program. “But after a few weeks of dedication and hard work I actually became closer to my friends and my peers, and we actually helped each other.”

Bloomberg says the city’s investment in this program helps the individual teenagers, helps the communities they provide relief to, and helps all New Yorkers by taking at-risk youth off the streets and putting them into productive jobs.