Mayor Johnson slowly builds on a campaign pledge to hire more young people for city’s summer jobs program

When 20-year-old James Robinson stands on 63rd Street to hand out food to people in need, or leads a so-called ‘peace circle’ for his peers, he thinks of his mom, who spent her life helping people.

“It’s all she did,” Robinson said. His mom died from heart failure five years ago. Now, Robinson struggles to describe the sensation he gets doing good deeds in her honor.

“It’s just a feeling that I get — it just makes me take life more serious and understand it more,” Robinson said.

Robinson is one of thousands of young people taking part in the summer jobs program known as One Summer Chicago. And he’s part of a new aspect of the program this year called “peacekeeping,” where 100 young people are paid to learn conflict resolution and relationship building.

Overall, the summer jobs program for kids that’s pegged as a violence prevention tool in Chicago is seeing yet another year of incremental growth as officials work to bounce back from a COVID-19 induced dip and as Mayor Brandon Johnson prioritizes its growth.

Roughly 27,140 young people are working in the One Summer Chicago program this year, according to figures provided by the Department of Family and Support Services.

That falls short of Johnson’s goal to hire 28,000 young people (though the number may still grow this summer) and far below his campaign promise to double the program in size.

But under Johnson, One Summer Chicago has grown significantly, by 32%, compared to the summer before his first year in office. In 2022, just 20,544 kids got jobs — less than half the number of applications received. By comparison, the program hired upward of 30,000 young people before the pandemic.

“I think what you're seeing us do is really try to make sure that we are looking at every resource and opportunity that's available for us to enact,” said Commissioner Brandie Knazze, who ran DFSS under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot and now Johnson.

Officials credit a streamlined application process and more extensive outreach for the slow but steady increase.

Johnson, who campaigned on holistic, non-police alternatives to violence prevention, has made opportunities for youth a cornerstone of his crime reduction plan. And he frequently references it at news conferences on the city’s intransigent gun violence.

“If you know that there are wayward youth who have lost their way, snatch them up. We have opportunities for them. I'm so sick and tired of losing Black boys to violence in this city,” a defiant Johnson said Monday as Chicago reeled from a holiday weekend where more than 100 people were shot and 20 were killed.

There is evidence that summer jobs programs can help curb crime, though the city’s program has been criticized for failing to reach people who need it most. The city has tried to address that in recent years by prioritizing applications from kids who are out of school, kids enrolled in a lower quality CPS school, people with disabilities, or non-English learners.

Heeding the call for ‘peacekeepers’

And youth organizers on the ground say the city took a step in the right direction by heeding their call for so-called “peacekeepers” and allowing the organization that fought for the positions to run the 100-person program.

On a recent Friday afternoon, one of those “peacekeepers,” Robinson, is leading a peace circle at the Chicago Torture Justice Center in Woodlawn. It’s an exercise where kids gather in a safe space to talk through anxiety, fear, hope and whatever else comes up.

Robinson asks his peers to rate how they’re feeling on a scale of 1-10, with kids “feeling like a 10” to a “decent 7,” to a “1” without explanation. They talked about their dreams for their futures. The circle consisted of aspiring lawyers, engineers, carpenters, professional athletes and a future bed and breakfast owner.

They also spoke about what might stand in the way of their dreams, many agreeing with one boy’s assertion that “the only thing that can stop you at anything is yourself.” But they also brainstormed how a lack of resources in their community could stunt their future.

“The real question is what don’t we lack? I feel like schools, for real, for real — it starts there,” one young man said.

Everyone in the circle is getting paid to be there as a so-called “peacekeeper.” But one of the group’s lead coordinators, Assata Lewis, acknowledges that’s not technically what the kids are being trained to do.

‘Peacekeeping’ as a way to prevent retaliatory violence

Formal peacekeeping is an established, high-risk violence intervention tool in Chicago where former and current gang members, or people with strong ties to them, are paid to intervene in and diffuse conflict to prevent retaliatory violence. Lewis said this program is a “very, very, very small fraction” of that type of work.

“Really the six weeks is focused on a lot of discussion, art, and guest teachers coming in to speak about the community, about advocacy, about restorative justice, about transformative justice,” Lewis, a restorative justice trainer, said.

On another day, kids gathered at a church in West Englewood and could choose between an art, culinary, or podcasting session.

“It sounds like community violence intervention,” said Steve Perkins, the director of field instruction for Metropolitan Family Services, which serves as an umbrella organization for formalized peacekeeping work in Chicago.

“It’s still included, it’s a part of it, it’s needed. I don’t want to appear as if I’m discrediting what they’re doing because it’s needed as well … but it shouldn't be considered peacekeeping because people can really confuse the two and it's something that's completely different from peacekeepers,” Perkins said.

Perkins said the goal of peacekeeping work is to engage the “very small percentage of people” — roughly 3%, he said — who are actively and currently driving violence in a community. Those are the people who are qualified to be peacekeepers, Perkins said.

“Like for me, no matter how much training you give me, I can't do peacekeeping work,” Perkins said. “I've trained peacekeepers, but I can't do peacekeeping work because I don't have the relationships with that target population to say, ‘Hey, you know, we're not going to do this.’”

Perkins said he himself would also like to see funding for formal peacekeepers as part of the One Summer Chicago program. He has had recent conversations with Johnson’s Deputy Mayor for Community Safety, Garien Gatewood, about how to “leverage some of those One Summer Chicago jobs for peacekeeper work.”

“And I take my hat off to the mayor for making that commitment,” Perkins said.

Robinson, who has worked with Good Kids Mad City for a few years now, said regardless of the formal title, he hopes the program becomes as pivotal for his peers as it has been for him.

“At first I was doing it for the money, just because I needed a job, but as you get to doing the work, it kind of builds you into a different type of person,” he said. “When my mom died, in that situation, it’s either the streets, or the money. I just feel like God has sent this opportunity to me.”

Mariah Woelfel covers Chicago city government for WBEZ.