CPS celebrates its second summer of empowering teens
As part of the Northeastern University partnership with the City of Boston’s SuccessLink summer jobs program, an initiative funded by the city of Boston to create 7,000 summer jobs for teens as an opportunity to gain work experience in supportive environments, CPS has hosted six interns who have spent the last 6 weeks working with the college. The interns have been under the guidance of employees Mariah Hwedi and Carl Barrows.
The interns, Marwa, Ruby, Benson, Kiandre, Anari and Jalen, produced this newsletter to tell the story of their internship experience; the production of the newsletter that was written, designed and published by them was also a lesson in corporate communications.
History of SuccessLink at CPS
Last year, when Mariah Hwedi received the outreach from Northeastern, she was eager to host interns at CPS and saw this as an opportunity to bring vibrancy and creativity to the college through the brilliant imaginations of the interns. Before working at CPS, Hwedi had a long history of work with youth and at-risk teenagers teaching history to third grade through high school students at the Commonwealth Museum. As an undergraduate at UMass Boston, Hwedi also worked as a global student ambassador and mentor for freshmen, first generation Asian-American students who were facing income disparities, as well as an overnight counselor for at-risk teenagers at Camp Wing in Duxbury.
It was at Camp Wing that she first realized the impact and life-changing results that could come from giving young people hope.
“The founder of Camp Wing decided that the best way to help young people in the city was to take them out of their urban environments and bring them to nature, where they could just get the chance to be a kid. Many of these kids experienced trauma from a young age – two siblings separated by foster care would get to see each other once a year at camp, one child came for the whole summer with only a Ziplock bag with socks to wear, and those were the lighter versions of the traumas these kids were enduring. I remember the first group that got off the bus at the start of camp was so angry and did not want to listen to authority because authority never showed up for them when they needed it most. By the end of the summer, those same kids were crying so hard, saying they didn’t want to leave us, that this experience changed their lives. We worked 24 hours a day with them, almost like their parents, and it was worth every minute. It still gives me chills thinking about it…about how much that summer gave them hope”.
After working at Camp Wing, Mariah promised herself she would continue to seek out any opportunity to help with youth betterment. Even though she had just started at CPS in March 2023, she was confident the SucessLink program would benefit all parties involved and knew she could balance the work.
Now that the program is ending its second year, Mariah has already seen the transformation in her interns: improved writing skills, confidence in public speaking, sharpened interviewing strategies, and data and research driven thinking that would make them all perfect candidates as Northeastern students one day. Mariah hopes that the internship will continue to recur annually.
Learn more about Northeastern Univeristy’s C2C Summer Intern Program.
