At Hopeworks, a job-training program helps turn young people’s dreams into digital skills | Philly Gives

How can someone even dare to hope?

Where is hope when home is friends’ couches, a different one every week, when depression hangs like a heavy cloud, when dinner is yet another package of ramen noodles, on sale, three for a dollar?

Where is that hope when, for Jamir Banks, 23, life felt like “being in a blender and being torn up, putting myself down and unable to get out of a rut. I felt like I was the scum of the earth.”

When, as with Jessalyn Ngo, 24, tears come while remembering being “in a really dark place. Having hope for the future was something that was hard for me because I was so focused on surviving.”

And yet, at the headquarters of Hopeworks — a job-training program with twin offices in Kensington and Camden — spacious rooms are filled with computers, determination, and sunshine. In these spaces optimism, positivity, and, yes, even hope abound.

It flourishes in Banks, who aspires to work in cybersecurity, en route to owning a military contracting business.

It flourishes in Ngo, who is pointing herself toward a career in textile engineering and is using skills in project management and user design learned at Hopeworks to get there.

And it flourishes in the organization’s CEO, Dan Rhoton, who understands that he must offer young people more than inspirational phrases culled from posters depicting eagles and mountain vistas. Rhoton aims to help the program’s participants take their dreams from hopes to achievable plans based on a reality that combines advanced computer and soft-skill training with trauma-informed care.

And providing youngsters with that care, Rhoton said, is a crucial starting point.

“Just teaching them to code is not going to change their lives,” he said. “You have to help with housing, mental health — we have to deal with it.”

On computers, students learn JavaScript, WordPress, and Pixlr, equipping them for front-end web design, data mapping, and geographic information systems (GIS). Hopeworks pays them a daily $30 stipend as they learn, with $75 and $150 bonuses for reaching milestones.

When the trainees are ready, Hopeworks employs them as $15.13-an-hour interns working on real projects for Hopeworks’ real clients — clients such as the Philadelphia International Airport, American Water Works Co. Inc., Seer Interactive, and the City of Camden.

In September, Hopeworks won a $150,000 contract from the City of Camden, besting several big-name engineering firms for a job data-mapping the city’s streetlights, according to Rhoton.

Working on that project is GIS intern Kamiah Gray, 25, who dreams of finding a job on the cusp of cutting-edge technology in AI prompt engineering. In addition to training, Hopeworks sent her to networking events, introduced her to CEOs of companies posting $10 million-plus in revenues, and paid for her trip to New York City for Climate Week.

Last month, she and her team spent days on the streets of Camden fulfilling Hopeworks’ contract with the city by locating and inspecting streetlights, mapping their capacities and functionality.

“I’ve learned a lot about streetlights,” Gray said with a laugh. “It gives you a much better grasp of how infrastructure works. It’s opening up my spectrum of curiosity.”

Gray had no trouble at all explaining why caring people in our region should support Hopeworks: “It’s really hard to get by, but Hopeworks has given me the opportunity to build up myself to where I can get by — and not only get by, but excel.”

Even so, it’s not just about her, she said.

Donors “will be empowering and upskilling the next generation of workers and thinkers and tapping into talent that would have been squandered otherwise,” Gray said.

With internships and experience on their resumes, students like Gray get help with next steps, from finding a job to finding a college. As they go, there’s assistance for whatever challenges emerge: housing, health insurance, and food.

More than a dozen Hopeworks alums, about 30%, serve as staffers at the organization, and one, Willem Schrieks, 26, just joined the board. Hopeworks, he said, helped him with soft skills to overcome his formerly abrasive personality. The skills and connections made through Hopeworks made it possible for him to land jobs with ever-increasing responsibility and pay.

Now he earns $120,000 a year as a senior user experience designer at Comcast and lives near Rittenhouse Square.

“Hopeworks is an equity builder,” Schrieks said.

“The standard is still excellence. We still expect people to go out in the world and be excellent, but there is space for them to grow, even if they don’t come from a background where they understand the nuances of the [business] world, which a lot of people don’t.

“And, if you fail, you can always try again,” he said.

Hopeworks now has two centers, one in Camden and the other in Kensington. The Kensington center opened in 2022, doubling its space in May.

Before moving to more spacious quarters in Camden’s central business district in 2003, Hopeworks began in 1999, crowding kids and computers into a Camden rowhouse. Three churches sponsored Hopeworks as a mission to provide training to high school dropouts.

Then, about a dozen years in, as Rhoton tells it, the staff and board realized that what they were doing wasn’t working. Young people were completing training and landing jobs but losing them in just a few months.

Hopeworks converted to a trauma-informed approach in 2012 — “That’s when Hopeworks shifted its focus to dealing with the whole person,” Rhoton said — and since then has seen post-training job retention rates rise to well above 90%, with graduates moving into jobs with an average annual salary of nearly $45,000.

Hopeworks is an equity builder.

Rhoton said many of the young people — who are typically ages 17 to 26 — who come to Hopeworks have experienced some trauma, and an important part of Hopeworks’ approach is teaching them how to recognize their own trauma and how to cope with it.

Days begin with a morning huddle — a time when teams gather for a quick emotional check, drawing vocabulary from an “emotion bank” list of 32 feelings: excited, anxious, angry, lonely, joyful, disorganized, proud. If help is needed, there’s always time for conversations with trained staffers.

“This is the only place that has treated me like a person with actual feelings and has given me a chance to talk about those feelings,” Ngo said.

They are asked to look for allies: “Who can you ask for support or encouragement?”

They are also asked to devise a safety plan to manage emotions when a trigger emerges. Rhoton says his plan includes reciting the alphabet backward. In the time it takes him to remember the letters, he will usually be able to calm down.

And, finally, they are asked, “What is your dream?”

Robin Saxon, 19, for example, moved to Philadelphia from North Carolina “because, honestly, they’re not nice to queer folks.” Saxon, a GIS intern, has lots of future dreams, but right now “short-term, I just want stability — more income, being able to pay my bills.”

Nicolas Rangel, 26, now a Hopeworks web developer intern, got help with medical insurance, Pennsylvania identification, and food. “The paycheck has helped me a lot” — enough that he can begin to work toward college and a future in IT support.

Sean Willis, 21, a web team lead intern, wants to become a veterinarian and is taking college courses in health-care administration so he can eventually open his own practice. Hopeworks helped him earn a high school diploma.

Before he started at Hopeworks, he spent time at a shelter. “I finally feel safe at Hopeworks. I finally found myself,” he said, before paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “There is nothing in this world that is not built on hope.”

Jane M. Von Bergen spent more than 25 years as a reporter and editor at The Inquirer. janevonbtheater@gmail.com

This article is part of a series about Philly Gives — a community fund to support nonprofits through end-of-year giving. To learn more about Philly Gives, including how to donate, visit phillygives.org.

By Gabriel Escobar

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Gabriel Escobar is The Inquirer’s editor and senior vice president.