Thanks to a $1 million gift, this Kensington nonprofit is giving more young people training and work experience in tech
Hopeworks is a nonprofit that offers training and work experience in tech for young adults. They plan to expand their Kensington office and double the amount of training slots they currently offer.
Over the past few years, a media-boosted narrative about young people has emerged — they are lazy. None of them want to work, and they feel more entitled than older generations did to a successful life and career.
But Dan Rhoton says if you believe that, you haven’t been actually spending time with young people.
“If you ever have someone who says young adults don’t want to work, have them come to Kensington,” he said. “We’ll introduce you to some folks who want to work.”
Rhoton is the CEO of Hopeworks, a nonprofit that provides tech-focused job training and work experience to young people. Created in 1999 and operating offices in Camden and Kensington, Hopeworks currently works with roughly 170 young adults ages 17 to 27, aiming to ultimately disrupt cycles of poverty and violence.
Now, their work in Kensington is growing. On Wednesday, Hopeworks announced a 4,000-square-foot expansion of its Kensington office, funded by a $1 million gift from an anonymous donor.
The expansion will create space for an additional 32 training slots (double its current capacity), as well as additional internship slots, staff, seating, and computers. It is expected to be completed by September.
Hopeworks participants typically begin the program with six to eight weeks of self-paced technology training modules. Once they’ve been trained, they work a six-month paid internship with Hopeworks that produces work for organizations like Comcast, the City of Philadelphia, and American Water in web design, geographic information systems (GIS), trauma trainings, and later this year, medical billing and coding. Along the way, they receive professional development, and once their internship is finished, Hopeworks careers coaches help them find full-time jobs.
“The thing that is always overlooked is what strong community is here.”
Rhoton expects the new slots to fill up quickly; he said that the waiting list for Hopeworks is nearly 150 people between the two locations. He estimates that the expansion will help Hopeworks’ Kensington office, which first opened in 2022, place 100 more young people a year in full-time positions. Currently, 85% of Hopeworks participants in Camden and Kensington land full-time jobs, with an average annual starting wage of $42k, and a 93% one-year retention rate.
“We’re the bottleneck. If we can get more folks through, then we can get more folks in transformational jobs,” Rhoton said.
A different narrative
Corey Brown, 20, came to Hopeworks without knowing the kind of career he wanted. He’s from Kensington, and had never worked in or studied tech before.
“I come from a whole different scenery. Everything — computer technology, everything is new to me,” he said.
But he was sure of the kind of life he wanted. That meant a well-paying, stable job that would help him take care of his family.
“I know where I want to be in life. So if this is one of the opportunities and first steps I got to take to go ahead ... that’s what I’m going to do.”
Brown is finishing up the training part of the program, and is itching to get started on his internship. He’s been amazed by the support he’s gotten from Hopeworks staff along the way; it’s been something he was not used to receiving growing up in Kensington.
“You really don’t get support. ... When you hear Kensington, being from Philadelphia, it’s like, Kensington — oh no. When I came in here, it was like, dang, it’s really different,” he said.
Kenneth Burris, 18, is from Germantown, but said he’s had a similar experience at Hopeworks.
“The support here is just amazing. It’s just amazing. ... This environment is very different from what a lot of people [from] urban areas are used to. You’re not even used to being around somebody that’ll tell you, ‘good job’, that’ll tell you, ‘keep going’ or ‘keep working at that,’” he said.
“It feels great to be able to leave my neighborhood and leave my home and feel welcomed and like I’m a part of something and like I’m building something for myself.”
Burris had always wanted to work with technology. His dream as a kid was to make his own video game one day, and was deciding whether or not it he should go to college when he found Hopeworks. He’s aware of the narrative that young adults like him don’t aspire to meaningful work, and it frustrates him.
“It’s not just everybody out here just wanting to find some shortcut to making it, find some shortcut to financial freedom, fast money. ... The narrative, it’s annoying when you can be attached to it just based off how you might look, how you might dress, what kind of hair you might have,” he said, locs in his hair.
“It is a lot of young people that [are] really looking for jobs and resources. And some people just don’t know that the resources are out there.”
As Kensington begins a significant period of change at the direction of the Parker administration, Hopeworks believes that their expansion is evidence that Kensington is a neighborhood worth caring for and investing in, even with its problems.
“The thing that is always overlooked is what strong community is here. There’s a million really great community organizations that work together as puzzle pieces to uplift all of the people in our community. And I wish that there was more of a story around those pieces,” said Grace Manning, Hopeworks’ Kensington site director, who also lives in East Kensington.
“I think we will have a ripple effect [on] how we start to look at this community differently and how we start to look at younger generations in the city differently,” she said.