Goldman Sachs, the global financial firm headquartered in Battery Park City, has donated $1.5 million to the City’s Summer Youth Employment Program, which seeks to develop job skills in teens by placing them in jobs for seven weeks and also providing them with educational opportunities in a variety of areas.
The fund came by way of the Goldman Sachs Gives program, which allows Goldman partners to contribute a portion of their total compensation to the program and recommend ways in which the money can be used.
According to a press release from the Department for Youth and Community Development, the donation will help add an additional 1,000 spots in S.Y.E.P., which has been the victim of state and local budget cuts. The donation brings the total number of job placement spots in S.Y.E.P. to approximately 35,000.
The program has 6,000 work sites around the city, where participants work for seven weeks for up to 25 hours per week. Ten percent of the time that participants spend in the program is used to educate them on a variety of topics, including financial literacy and health education.
Goldman will host some workshops for youth in the program, while it is undecided exactly what the workshop will involve; a D.Y.C.D. spokesperson said it will touch on “work readiness.”
The D.Y.C.D. spokesperson said that Goldman was looking to devote philanthropic resources to “human services” and that the City was looking for private supporters of the S.Y.E.P. “It was a perfect match,” the spokesperson said in an email.
The S.Y.E.P. has three work sites in Lower Manhattan: two that provide services to residents in Chinatown, the Chinatown Manpower Project and the Chinese-American Planning Council; and another that provides aid to the poor and homeless, the Henry Street Settlement.
— David McCabe
