Goodwill Celebrates Start of 2015 Summer Youth Program!

This week marks the second full week of Ohio Valley Goodwill’s Summer Youth program. The program is designed to provide students with a variety of team building and vocational exploration experiences designed to help them gather information about the world of work. Today’s activity focused on working together to solve a challenge- building the highest possible structure using only spaghetti and marshmallows. As you can see, this activity encouraged the involvement of every student and the sense of achievement and fun that resulted was an added benefit to the learning experience.

Summer Youth program students building together.

As part of the Summer Youth program, each student has the opportunity to visit four different community worksites during the length of the program with the goal of providing them with hands-on education about job responsibilities for each position. After their community job try-outs, each student reports back to their Goodwill staff mentor about their work experience and their job preferences. Some of the community based experiences are with long-time Greater Cincinnati business leaders such as the Kroger Company, Frisch’s, Big Lots, AMC Theater, Vendors Supply and Matthew 25 Ministries.

” The students are working hard to gather the important information that they will need following graduation from high school and in their future employment search,” said Ranaye Hampton, Community Access Program Supervisor. Goodwill’s Summer Youth program is in its third year and is a collaborative project with Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities (OOD). As part of the organization’s mission of helping people with disabilities, our nation’s veterans and transition youth to receive skill training and employment services in the Greater Cincinnati community, the Summer Youth program is only one of the organization’s comprehensive array of employment service offerings. For more information about Ohio Valley Goodwill’s programs and services, visit www.cincinnatigoodwill.org/services.