THE MICHELLE WONG

The Mayor's Youth Employment and Education Program's offers three program wide event of the year. The first, MYEEP in San Francisco, partners with local businesses to offer participants a glimpse into the working world. A city-wide career day - if you will. We gathered all the youth at a centralized meeting venue - to kick off the event with a program-wide feel and a "look at the magnitude of this event" type show. Then youth went off in small groups, accompanied by a chaperone and youth leader to an assigned host site based on their preference as indicated on a survey.

Now I must preface this story with the warning that the boss gave me the insane goal of reaching out to and securing 80,000 work places in San Francisco to host our kids for a two hour career talk about their work - the number was later reduced to a still ambitious 80! I can attribute the only failure of this event to my literal interpretation of achieving this goal.

Getting people to take a small group of kids into their office to talk about their job for two hours, all on the same day - it just sounds like an impossible task. I mean, what are the chances that people would want to host a career day on our terms? If one wanted to offer a career day at his/her work, he/she would plan their own so they could have it on their terms. So, it's a good thing we started early - three months early. I started with the 30 host sites we had the previous year. I received surprising phone calls of confirmation from companies I'd least expect. I sent out more recruitment materials than I can count and emails from me @jcyc.org unfortunately goes into people's spam boxes now - if not from last summer's worksite effort.

As I began receiving surveys from the participant attendee of their career field of interest, we began to target our host site outreach. Surprisingly, the top choices were Sports and Veterinarians - which left me in a rut with no sports related or veterinary related sites to offer. Since we were very clear that youth who submit their permission slips early would receive their top choices, I did not want to disappoint. I wrote to every local sports team: our beloved World Champion Giants charged us a whopping $250 for a tour and chat with AT&T Park front office staff, the 49'ers are in Santa Clara, and the Warriors never responded... After emailing Cal's entire Athletics Department, they came to our rescue with sports medicine and physical therapists of the golden bear athletes. I searched desperately for a veterinarian which fell into my lap when I discovered from my old high school principal, Dr. H, (who stopped by JCYC after running into my parent's at a function and discovering that I worked there,) that my neighborhood veterinary hospital was family-owned by a JCYC family!

In the end, we secured 60 worksites but a new problem arose of not enough participant attendees. My boss would assure me that this is actually a great problem to have - but it did have its frustrations. First, we began allowing late permission slips so that we could fill the groups from 3-4 to our goal of 6-8 which contradicted our life lesson of respecting deadlines. Second, I was torn by forceful hand of placing youth in their lowest choices - not because their top choice was full, but because we needed to fill the host sites of their lower choices. At the last minute, we partnered with more youth groups to offer the opportunity to the youth served by Mission Graduates and JCYC's Japanese Youth Leaders. The list remained non-finalize-able to the very day before the event, and worksites kept demanding to know who and how many to expect - I was a hot mess!

The final hiccup of the entire event, with the expected exception of flakey youth, was the venue. We reserved the Elks Lodge at the Kensington Park Hotel with the belief that the room would be set up as requested - the Elks did no such thing. We scrambled to set up turning stacked chairs in a locked closet into 30 small + 2 large circles with a balloon to indicate the group number - 100 youth, 300 sandwiches, and 2 reporters from the SF Chronicle to arrive within the next 30 minutes! Fortunately, we have some amazing participants - those arriving early were eager to help and later rewarded for their moxy.

Ultimately, some groups were dispersed on account of a high ratio of no-shows - but each group left for a rousing visit to a worksite. Below, please enjoy the press release I wrote and now stole from the www.myeep.org blog!

Hundreds of youth spent their day off from school supplementing their education gaining insight about the careers that interest them. Over fifty local businesses generously opened their doors to provide a glimpse of their work setting and allowed youth to dig their hands and minds into work representative of those careers.

Over 50 local businesses voluntarily filled the San Francisco Unified School District schedule/budget gap with career guidance, industry insights and a small sample of real-world job tasks and training.

The career day is an annual event put together by the Mayor’s Youth Employment and Education Program and serves the youth from several of the Japanese Community Youth Council’s programs, all focused on providing high school youth with resources for college and career success.

Following a series of projects that asked program participants to consider their career and education goals, each student completed a survey that indicates which industries they want to learn more about.

On February 4, 2011, they gathered at the Elks Lodge to discover what business would host them for a career day visit and departed in smaller groups.

Many local businesses have toyed with the idea of having some sort of career day, but they just did not know where to start. As the largest employer of youth in San Francisco, MYEEP in SF not only gives young people a chance to learn more about careers that aligned with their interests, but also allows local businesses to create their own event for a group that has already expressed interested in that industry.

Additionally, the event’s success is largely attributed to the team of volunteer chaperones. MYEEP’s partnership with several community-based organizations recruits volunteer chaperones that have a background in youth development and can assist with discussion facilitation and reflection.

Here are the organizations that participated in 2011:

Here are some quotes, poems and drawings taken from the youth reflection activity winners:

– Kaythari Phon on Bi-Rite Market & Creamery, MYEEP Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center

– Sean FitzHoward on Arguello Pet Hospital, MYEEP Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center

“What I liked most about this site was that it had many extraordinary things that you don’t see in everyday life such as different sharks, fishes, mammals, and other kinds of animals. Learning about biology will someday make me successful in this type of career.”
- Ivan Yu on Aquarium of the Bay, SF YouthWorks

“Me gusto acariciar a los gatitos. Tambien me asombre bastante cuando mire operando a un gatito me di cuenta de algo que me hizo reflexionar bastante fue: Que ha estas personas realmente les ofrecen carino y si en el futuro me gustaria ayudarlos ya que ellos no recibien ayuda del gobierno. Gracias a MYEEP pude conocer cosas asombrosas.”

English Translation: I liked petting the kittens. I was also was really amazed when I watched them operating on a kitten. I realized something that made me think a lot: these are people who really care. Yes, in the future I would like to help them, since they don’t get help from the government. Thank you MYEEP for allowing me to encounter these marvelous things.

- Zindy Rodas on SPCA San Francisco, MYEEP Jewish Vocational Services

“When I first learned I was going to Salesforce I wasn’t exactly pumped. But when I got into the office I was amazed at how beautiful and lively the office was that alone got me interested. The presenters were AWESOME. They took seemingly boring jobs and broke them down into easily understandable language and made the jobs sound more meaningful.”
- Helen Totterdell on Salesforce, SFYouthWorks

“I got to see how heavy the equipment actually was. I also learned that the total weight of the equipment is like 100+ pounds. Also, the truck carries 750 gallons of water and it costs like $750,000 – $1 million. I liked how the vibe was and that the firefighters were really nice and friendly.”
- Wendy Wong on SF Fire Department, MYEEP Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center

Science for A Day

A day at a science field I feel great

Sitting on a bench writing my reflection

Science is great, wide and broad

So explore the doors that open to you

Science is no limit

You could be sitting in lab writing your research

Or check the cool behavior of mice

You could do this or the things you like

Because the science is in you.

- Soknay Lim on UCSF, MYEEP Vietnamese Youth Development Center

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Read more about the event in the San Francisco Chronicle here.

The summer of 2009, the Chiu family embarked on a 7-day Royal Caribbean cruise – destinations: Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and Cabo San Lucas. They came back with tales of sliding down waterfalls, dancing with dolphins, and cuddling with lion cubs. I, on the other hand, could not afford to take a week off work if I wanted to pay my rent. I remember my grandmother’s pride and joy puppy, Tara, was in my care for three days when my boss sent my on a 15-hour work day journey around Los Angeles county, bring 700 DVDs here, pick up 1400 DVDs here, drop off 2000 DVDs here, and pick up 200 DVDs here – only to be chewed out the following day because the traffic that prolonged the tasks made it cheaper to have just had all these transactions carried out by mail. It was then I decided: I hated my job, hated being a dependent upon it to make rent, and it was time to move home.

A year later, my other side of the family celebrated our triumphant battle against cancer with the same cruise during the cheapest time of year to sail – January 2011. Despite the plethora of challenges to getting the Wong gang together, we set sail on a mission to experience all the stories we heard, first hand.

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Of course, the excursions offered by the ship were ridiculously over priced and legitimate zip lining services cost arms and legs figuratively. We risked our arms and legs literally by negotiating with shady tour dealers on port securing the lowest bidder. Thus our day of gliding across canyons began on the set of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s film, Predator, supposedly.

We also saw a baby porcupine!

Mazatlan, Mexico

In Mazatlan, most of the family stuck together, sharing a tour van and seeking a cheap massage. For $18 an hour, I single-handedly ruined everyone’s tranquility with my AK-47 full of questions. I needed to learn more about my masseuse - twenty three and beautiful, how different our lives could be… She was actually born in Mazatlan but raised and attended public education in Texas, attained her diploma. Our lives diverge a bit at 18 when she gets married, divorced, then forced to move back home with her parents massaging tourist for $50 USD a week. Who am I to judge, living at home with my parents – I can only wonder why the United States public education system couldn’t prevent her from returning to a “cheap labor” life from which she was born into. She seemed happy though. I left a big(ger) tip, ate a street tamale at the flea market and boy did my stomach pay for it later.

Cabo San Lucas

I love to ride the waves aboard the ship’s tender, especially when entering such a beautifully developed port as Cabo San Lucas! I almost decided on a major career change when I cuddled up against the most adorable creature I’ve ever hugged. I would like to make a point, at some point in my adult life, to spend a week volunteering with baby lion cubs in Africa. This thought also follows a documentary I watched while aboard the ship of a team who cared for a rare species of tigers.

This final day of the cruise most successfully kept our group together. We, then, harassed some dolphins in the marine aquatic center, tapping hastily at the glass for their attention. Uncle Toby got a great shot, see below. The town was clean with tiled roads and clear street signs. We spent most of the day at Happy Endings Bar (great place!) before hunting up and down the main road for the cheapest massage.

Other notes

Before departure, I took some time to chat with our room attendant that I casually and politely said “Hi” and “Bye” to each day. I knew that this international business’s recruitment of crew and staff depends on the desperation of people from third world countries that would be happy to work below the United States standards for minimum wage – I just didn’t know exactly how it worked. I fired question after question to discover this Filipino man from the northern part of the country (like Edward’s family) spends 10 months out of the year at sea and away from his family, working 12 hour days for roughly a thousand dollars a month. They do venture onto land, every so often, but dine several decks below the rest of us because, apparently, some cruise-go-ers would be appalled to dine with the staff that serves them.

Another thing I kept noticing during this trip, the people expected tourist to give them money for every little task person helped us with - tasks that Americans would consider general courteousness or simply expect from most polite passersby. When our taxi pulled up at the Walmart (I know, who goes to Walmart while on vacation?) two young boys hurried to our door to open them, followed by open palms anxiously awaiting a tip. You couldn't so much as take a photo of something without being hounded for a tip: sand castles, rock divers, etc. The one that surprised me most was a man who owned a pet iguana, walking around with it on his shoulder in his shop, who then allowed us to take photographs with it. He said, "no charge, just tip!" This wasn't this man's livelihood, he had a shop selling knick-knacks, it was just an opportunity for him to see if we would give him money. Worst of all, we did.

Here's my dad's photo. It'll cost ya a tip to look at it.

THE MICHELLE WONG

Friday, February 4, 2011

Career Day

Monday, January 24, 2011

Family Cruise along the Mexican Riviera