Globe Foundation to help fund summer jobs program

The Boston Globe Foundation announced a $130,000 grant yesterday to provide summer jobs for 24 young adults in a Dorchester neighborhood that has been plagued by violence. The recipients will work as teaching assistants and community organizers, and some will produce a hip-hop CD that will eschew violence.

The grant is meant to benefit people ages 18 to 21 years, who are too old for Boston's summer jobs program. It is intended to promote collaboration of four youth outreach programs to focus on the Bowdoin-Geneva neighborhood. The 24 workers will meet at least once a week to coordinate their efforts and will organize at least one large event to celebrate the end of the summer.

Steven Ainsley, the Globe's publisher, told the grant recipients on their first day of work yesterday that after years of chronicling street violence each summer, it was time for the newspaper to "do more than report on the problem."

"The mayor has repeatedly for the better part of this year exhorted the business community to provide summer jobs," Ainsley said. "We are finally listening to him."

The grant will pay the workers $10 an hour for up to 25 hours a week and will also fund an adult supervisor at each of the four organizations over eight weeks.

At Project: Think Different, the youth workers will produce the hip-hop CD in an attempt to "shift the personality of the city and make the once-glamorous violence no longer glamorous," said Scherazade King, the program's executive director.

For The Teen Center at St. Peter's, the grant will support English classes for new immigrants, computer courses, and soccer, flag football, basketball, and volleyball games at Ronan Park. "It will keep teenagers off the streets," said Euclides Fontes, 19, who will work as a math teaching assistant. "We are trying to build up the community and make it better."

Grace Ejiwale, 19, will spend her summer working at Social Capital Dorchester, which encourages civic engagement as an alternative to violence through the website scidorchester.org.

For Phil Keete, 18, his job at The Center for Teen Empowerment was his "only shot to get involved," adding, "I would not be able to help out in any other way."