Kevin Porter, one of five interns who worked with 45 area teenagers in a summer environmental jobs program that ended Friday.
Harrisburg’s streets are a little cleaner, and the pockets of some its young people lined with a little hard-earned cash, thanks to a summer environmental program that wrapped up Friday with a lunchtime ceremony on Allison Hill.
The four-week program, administered by the Harrisburg Housing Authority, brought together 45 area teenagers and five college interns with a schedule of green projects, leadership classes and visits with local business owners.
Participants pulled weeds and cleared flower boxes at neighborhood gardens, picked up trash from city streets and the riverfront, and picked and washed vegetables for delivery to a soup kitchen, among other projects.
They also took a leadership class centered on the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens” and went to a series of “learning lunches” at area restaurants, whose owners spoke to them about topics like etiquette and what it’s like to run a business.
The program paid a $1,000 stipend to each student and intern, in checks handed out alongside certificates at a closing ceremony that packed the upper floor of Rookie’s, a Derry Street bar and restaurant and site of one of the program lunches.
It was funded with proceeds of a $1-per-ton charge on waste dumped at the Harrisburg incinerator after members of the city’s environmental advisory council lobbied for City Council President Wanda Williams to include it in this year’s budget.
Bill Cluck, a member of the advisory council, said he’d been initially disappointed to see the jobs program left off the budget proposed by Mayor Eric Papenfuse, given what he saw as the success of a 25-student pilot program last summer.
Council ultimately voted to double the program’s budget to $60,000. The money funded the stipends plus $10,000 to cover administrative costs of the housing authority, which provides affordable housing in its 1,700 apartments citywide.
“I am certainly proud of all of you,” Williams told participants. “I see we have 50 this year. Next year in my budget, we’re asking for 100.”
On Friday, applause and laughter greeted students as they stood one at a time to share stories from the program and pick favorites from a list of habits like “put first things first” and “begin with the end in mind.”
“The one that spoke to me most was ‘sharpen the saw,’” said Airian Chester, a ninth-grader at Dauphin County Technical School. “Because I’d come home and say to my mom, ‘They had us walking everywhere!’ But then, the next day, I’d be refreshed and ready to go.”
“The kids started off real quiet. They didn’t really know each other,” said Kevin Porter, a program intern who will be a senior this year at Millersville University. “You could see the program was actually helping change these kids’ personalities.”
