By Desiree Cooper

At a Detroit conference in March, 20-year-old Marvin Ligon had the status of a rock star. Why? Because he was a troubled kid who got a summer job—and kept it. Shuttled between media interviews and flocks of young people seeking his advice, Ligon paused to participate in a panel entitled “Employing Youth in Detroit: Prospects and Challenges.”

“A lot of us are being left behind,” said Ligon, whose tangles with the law left him without hope of being gainfully employed. “At the end of the day, we want to be successful. There are a lot of dreamers out there.”

Ligon’s dreams were answered last summer by President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, which pumped extra dollars into urban youth employment programs nationwide. New York City received $29 million and employed more than 17,000 youth in 2009. Chicago received $17 million to put youth to work last summer.

Detroit’s annual summer youth employment program, which generally employs about 2,500 young people, received an extra $7 million. As a result, a record-setting 7,000 young people between the ages of 14 and 24 got jobs last year. Ligon was placed in a downtown law firm, where he found not only work and respect, but a mentor. Ligon is now in college and still holding down a job at the firm. He was so grateful, he penned a thank you letter to President Obama.

A summer Job and a Leg Up

It’s never been easy for young people to compete with adults in the job market, and in this economy, it’s downright brutal. Unemployment rates for young people ages 16 -19 hover around 25 percent. Among black youth in Detroit, its well above 60 percent, compared to 27.6 nationally.

Chronic youth employment has serious long-term effects. Studies show that when workers do not enter the job market as teenagers, it often takes decades for them to catch up. They are not only deprived of that critical “previous experience” that employers demand, but they also miss out on the “invisible curriculum” that comes with learning how to report to work on time, how to respect a supervisor and how to work as part of a team, according to Kristen Lopez Eastlick, senior economic analyst of the Employment Policies Institute.

A recent study from the Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies, The Lost Decade For Teen and Young Adult Employment in Illinois: The Current Depression in the Labor Market For 16-24 Year Olds in the Nation and State (PDF), reports that “Each major demographic and educational group of teens … in the nation experienced very large drops in their employment rates between 2000 and 2009. Teen males were more adversely affected than their female counterparts, with a 20 percentage point decline in the male teen employment rate over this nine-year period.”

That’s why the Detroit Youth Employment Consortium held a summit on March 1 to urge employers to continue to support youth employment, even if help doesn’t come from Washington this year.

“The fact is that we have to not only address cyclical unemployment in Detroit, but also generational unemployment as well,” said Dr. Geneva J. Williams, CEO of City Connect Detroit, the agency that coordinated the youth employment summit. “We’re talking about the workforce of the future.”

A Check is a Chance

Susan Curnan of Brandeis University also participated in the March 1 summit. A professor of Social Policy and Management at the Heller School, she has been retained by the Department of Labor to evaluate last summer’s youth employment programs that received stimulus money, including Chicago and Detroit.

“Last summer, Detroit faced a number of challenges, including an overwhelming number of youth, very little planning time, huge expectations and a huge payroll to manage,” said Curnan. “But in Detroit we found highly dedicated people. They realized that for youth, this was not just another job.”

The stakes are indeed high. More than one-third of the Detroit youth who got summer jobs last year said that all or a portion of their earnings went to support their families, and 92 percent would not have been working but for the summer program, according to the University of Michigan.

It is not clear whether additional federal funds will be available to boost youth employment this summer. But Ligon hopes that others will get the chance that he had.

“I thought I was lost, but someone found me,” said Ligon, who is considering a law career. “All we want is a chance.”

Desiree Cooper is a contributing author to the anthology Other People’s Skin: Four Novellas. A former columnist with the Detroit Free Press and co-host of public radio’s Weekend America, she is now a freelance writer, BBC correspondent and novelist. You can find her at www.descooper.com.