Georgetown Business Leaders Support Summer Youth Employment

A team of nervous students prepare for their first big test: serving a meal to the very executives who orchestrated the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) that trained them as servers and chefs.

The students converted a small classroom at Roosevelt High School into a banquet room and the kitchen was a flurry of activity as sous chefs chopped onions and double-checked recipes.

The event was a culmination of SYEP training supported by Educated Eats and the Community College of the District of Columbia. Between June 27 and August 5, young adults between the ages of 18 and 21 took classes six hours a day, five days a week to learn the ins and outs of the hospitality and food services industries.

There were 16 students in the hospitality program and six more in the culinary course at Roosevelt.

Greg Casten is the president of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington (RAMW), which runs Educated Eats. He is also the Operations Director at , Cabanas and in Georgetown at the Washington Harbour.

Casten said he has been involved with SYEP for four years, since he first started with RAMW, and that other Georgetown business owners have also found a way to get involved in training the future banquet managers and chefs of D.C.

Cohn's Kids is an educational organization created by Paul J. Cohn. Cohn is the co-founder and senior executive officer of Capital Restaurant Concepts, which includes Georgetown restaurants J. Paul's, Paolo's, Old Glory, Neyla's and Third Edition. Cohn's Kids works with a variety of restaurants, chefs, industry leaders, and in collaboration with Educated Eats to help train and inspire District residents who need and want jobs in the restaurant industry.

Ellwood Reid, who previously managed two D.C. Marriotts and is starting his own venture Hospitality Opportunity Pathway to Employment (HOPE), taught the hospitality class how to do the various job roles required in a hotel.

Restaurants and hotels are such a big part of the D.C. job market and there are plenty of people who would like to work in those jobs, but they "don't always have the skills," explained Reid.

Reid said the goal of the program is to give students both "soft skills" that can be applied in any sort of future job role as well as hospitality-related skills.

"The major challenge is confidence...they've never done this before" Reid said as he observed the students at work.

Lachelle Prince, 18, is a D.C. resident who signed up for the SYEP program one day and started in the program at Roosevelt the next. Though she'll be studying psychology at Virginia Union University in the fall, Prince said she hopes that the SYEP program will help her get work- work to help pay for the expensive endeavor that is college.

Editor's Note: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that Cohn's Kids is an independent organization that is not affiliated with Capital Restaurant Concepts.