Good TIPS can change your life, teens say

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Susan Paynter

Monday, June 14, 2004

Good TIPS can change your life, teens say

By SUSAN PAYNTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Last June, in Chris Chan's 16th summer, his parents were like so many others, begging their kids to get a job instead of wasting their vacations on junk food and trash TV.

As it is again this year, last summer's job market was squeezed, and many of the grocery bagging and burger-flipping jobs had been snapped up by adults and elders.

So Chris figured a job with TIPS (Teens in Public Service) would at least get him enough cash to buy an MP3 player. Instead, his assignment at FareStart, the non-profit food-training program, earned Chris a lot more than an OK wage. It gave him a whole new perspective on his own comfy life and on people who grew up without his privileges.

In the kitchen at FareStart, Chris found himself slicing oranges beside a young homeless woman who'd spent her own teen time rootless, hungry and alone. As they worked, she chatted with the detached nonchalance of someone discussing the weather or the latest movie, Chris said. "To hear her tragic, wrenching story juxtaposed with her lighthearted demeanor shocked me in a way that no motivational video ever could," Chris recalled. "Her life was so radically different from mine but she was still so much more optimistic, it made me think."

This summer, 50 other King County teens like Chris, Christine Aquino and Nicole White will have their eyes opened while doing jobs that help the city's non-profits stay afloat.

On the recommendations of teachers and counselors, 220 outstanding teens applied in January for paid summer TIPS placements helping kids, the homeless, hungry and ill.

"If we'd had the funding, we could have easily hired over 100 exceptional and badly needed teens this year," said Maureen Brotherton, president and co-founder of the 8-year-old TIPS program, which assigns workers to 40 non-profits around the region.

The cost of hiring the interns is zero to the already strapped non-profits; salaries are paid through TIPS donations and grants. And there's no question of the gratitude felt by the agencies where they work. "We're still missing Chris. He was on time and a hard worker who took to tasks quickly. Any place would be lucky to have him," said a FareStart supervisor named Irene.

But it's what the teens get out of their summer jobs, not their salaries or their contributions, that most of them want to talk about.

Nicole White loved the feeling of being needed and appreciated as an intern at the Atlantic Street Center the summer after her senior year at Seattle Prep. Now a bioethics grad student at the University of Washington, she'll enter med school in the fall knowing more than she ever would have before TIPS about the kind of medicine she hopes to practice.

And, since TIPS, she's been volunteering at the 45th Street Clinic, where she helps out homeless youths between the ages of 14 and 25.

"It's just another step in what I hope to do to help level the playing field out there," she said. "And that definitely came from the TIPS program."

Nicole worked in a quasi summer school with fifth-graders, some of whom were trying to complete work that would allow them to move up to the sixth grade in the fall.

"Those kids opened my eyes to inequities so many people face. And it's important at 18 to feel you're doing something that matters," she said.

When she came back after her first week on the job the kids shouted, "You're here again! You must really like us!" Nicole recalled. "These kids don't have a lot of stability in their lives. People disappear. So one of the best things you can do is to just show up every day."

On her previous job, Nicole had handed out Mariners promotions. That TIPS summer she might have worked at a health club or waited tables. "But, at Red Robin, they can always find 10 other people to bring your burger," she said. It meant more to her and the kids to be in a classroom, even if it was just to tell a child her picture was beautiful.

Christine Aquino felt that, too, interning at Seattle Emergency Housing after her junior year at Ingraham. Now she's at Seattle University, majoring in nursing. And, partly due to TIPS, she says wants to work with kids.

The pay was just a bonus, she said. She would have done the TIPS job for free. In fact, she does just that now, as a Seattle Emergency Housing volunteer.

She didn't quite know what to expect when assigned to work with the kids of "families in transition," Christine recalled. She thought: homeless, tents and desperation.

Instead, the kids weren't so different -- just hungry for role models in their lives.

"Their happiness wasn't based on having matching outfits and material things," Christine said. "And I realized that some things I thought of as important really weren't. I might have been able to get a job working at the mall, learning to count money, but I would never have had the opportunity to feel I was really helping someone."

Or, as Chris Chan put it, "There's not a lot of personal fulfillment you get from serving pizzas or walking dogs."