Tag: Camp Fire

Series: Rethinking Out-of-School Time Work for a New Generation

This article highlights the perspectives of young professionals in the OST field, with a focus on purpose and passion. Those who participated include: Cassandra Arechiga (she/they), Organizational Culture & Wellness Manager at Woodcraft Rangers; Toni Gray-Hazlewood (she/her), Director of Human Resources at Global Kids; and Antonio Servin-Gonzalez (he/they/él/elle), Youth Development Site Manager at Camp Fire Columbia.

Hi! We’re Angelica (she/her) and Hannah (she/her), and we’re back with another article in the series “Rethinking Out-of-School Time Work for a New Generation.” We are young professionals who both grew up in the space between “90s kids” and the “internet generation,” so we know a little bit about going to Blockbuster on a Friday night to pick out a movie and about “doom scrolling” on social media. 

In this third article, we chatted with a few Gen Z friends in the field to hear their vision of what a good OST job looks like, how being a Gen Zer influences their work, and the importance of supporting young professionals. 

Let’s dive in. 

How did you start your career in OST? 

Toni Gray-Hazlewood

Out-of-School Time just came my way. It was not something that I planned to enter into,  I planned on pursuing a career in law. However, the Let’s Get Ready, and the CUNY Service Corps programs, introduced me to Global Kids. From there, I became an intern with Global Kids because I felt connected to the organization’s mission and goals. After my internship, I was recruited to work in a school-based program, and that’s where it started. I was 19, a sophomore in college, and this was my first time entering the workforce — I learned so much from that time, and my career blossomed there.

Cassandra Arechiga

Like Toni, I didn’t plan on going into an afterschool program; I started as an intern at Woodcraft Rangers as an AmeriCorps member. After graduating from Chico State with a bachelor’s in psychology and diversity studies, I looked at different organizations, and Woodcraft really stood out to me. I studied their website. I studied their mission, vision, and values. Woodcraft highlighted healing-centered engagement, which, when I was studying psychology, was very much the newest wave of healing work, so the fact that they were even aware and talking about this, I was like — wow, my people!

Antonio Servin-Gonzalez

What does a good OST job look like to you? 

Antonio Servin-Gonzalez 

I value it when organizations empower their staff to do what they do, to build relationships, and to create impactful programming.

Cassandra Arechiga 

I think about the difference between performative and authentic practices. I remember seeing beautiful words on the Woodcraft website that drew me in. Such as  “rooted in healing-centered engagement,” teach and emphasize ” social-emotional learning,” and, lastly, part of the Woodcraft Way is believing that “youth are all innately good.” Coming from a psych background and after working with neurodiverse youth, that really stood out to me! I was very happy to find that it wasn’t just performative; it is what they practice, and it shows up in the people, roles, and spaces within the organization. 

Toni Gray-Hazlewood

You are having growth and development opportunities. Those opportunities ensure people know exactly how their roles influence and impact our students. If we can’t see that, then there’s no clear connection, and at some point, you’re going to wonder why you’re here. Also, having a coach or mentor who will support you and help you get further in your career, whether that’s moving up or moving out, is important. 

How does being Gen Z influence your work?

Antonio Servin-Gonzalez 

One of the things I’m very aware of is adultism. Adultism is hearing, “you’ll understand when you’re older” or “you’re too young to be doing that.” That really takes power from young professionals. I feel that because we are so young, we are seen as not being capable of taking on more challenging work. I’ve been denied opportunities for growth because of how young I was. 

Toni Gray-Hazlewood

With other Gen Zers, we often talk about professionalism or what it means to be a professional. It’s very subjective. I think it would be more effective to communicate our specific expectations and the reasons behind them. For example, we may want an employee to wear sneakers or dress shoes to work, but the rationale for that dress code is not always obvious. Instead of simply saying, “You need to be professional,” explaining the purpose and importance of the behaviors or appearance we expect is important. 

Cassandra Arechiga 

Something I’ve noticed is that many young people aren’t willing to sacrifice their authenticity. We are so rooted in our identities and what that means to us. This can show up in many ways, from how we express ourselves and communicate to how we wear our hair or have tattoos. If it is not accepted or embraced, sometimes that’s the reason why people leave. We ask ourselves, if I can’t be my most authentic self here, what’s the point? 

What is one thing leaders, supervisors, and managers can do right now to support young professionals in the workplace? 

Toni Gray-Hazlewood

Antonio Servin-Gonzalez 

Following that, if you do have additional work that comes out of those suggestions, make sure that you are either providing additional compensation or accommodating staff schedules with employer-sponsored PTO. If a staff member is leading a committee on top of their normal workload, this is how we start heading down the path of burnout. Continue to find ways to thank your staff, even though it’s not monetary.

Cassandra Arechiga

The first thing I thought of was supervisor evaluations and how to do them in a way that allows team members to feel safe expressing their needs and feedback, as well as supports the supervisor in receiving intentional, constructive criticism rather than just being dissected or evaluated. When we avoid these conversations, we are doing both the team and our supervisors a disservice! The best thing any leader can do to strengthen their team and invest in their own growth is to ask, “How can I better support you?” and be open when listening to the feedback to create tangible change.

Why does supporting young professionals in the way we talked about today ultimately matter for the young people we serve?

Toni Gray-Hazlewood

A part of the Global Kids’ mission is to prepare youth for their future. When I think about that, I’m not just thinking about the students at school. I’m thinking about the folks pouring into those students, and those are the youth working and doing internships with us. If we take care of them, we have succeeded in our mission. So, supporting them matters because they are going to be our future. Young professionals uphold the other side of whatever it looks like when we’re done here in the workplace. 

Angelica: This was a very validating and insightful conversation, and we’re fortunate to have such emerging leaders from outstanding organizations represented here. 

Hannah: You can look forward to our final article where we will wrap up the series…at least for now! If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider reposting it with your own thoughts, stories, and experiences. Keep the conversation going online with the hashtag #youngprofessionals #OSTleadership

Take it easy y’all.

Series: Rethinking Out-of-School Time Work for a New Generation

Shawna Rosenzweig’s career has evolved organically through relationships, mentors, and seizing opportunities as they arose, leading to her becoming President of Camp Fire National Headquarters before the age of 40. As a millennial leader, she values collaboration, relationships, inclusion, and authenticity in the workplace. Shawna believes supporting young professionals is crucial for developing the field as a profession, and it fosters a healthy set of diverse perspectives.

Hi! We’re Angelica (she/her) and Hannah (she/her) and we’re back with another article in the series “Rethinking Out-of-School Time Work for a New Generation”. We are young professionals who both grew up in the space between “90s kids” and the “internet generation”, so we know a little bit about going to Blockbuster on a Friday night to pick out a movie and about “doom scrolling” on social media. 

We are what you call “cuspers” or Zillenials. 

We are also young professionals who are looking to our field for answers about making a career in OST. But for those in the out-of-school time field, being our age and in OST is a problem. If you haven’t heard, we’re in a staffing crisis, and young professionals are in a pivotal moment, do we stay or do we go?¹

What started as just a conversation between two friends catching up on life turned into a deep reflection on the out-of-school field. You can check out our first article here! Following that first conversation, we sought to talk to a current OST leader about their experience coming up as a young professional in the field and their reflections on how we can better support young professionals going forward. 

In this second article, we sat down with millennial leader, Shawna Rosenzweig, President of Camp Fire National Headquarters. We wanted to ask her how being a millennial has shaped her leadership, and why supporting young professionals matters for serving youth, but also wanted to hear her story on forging a career path in OST and becoming president of Camp Fire all before the age of 40. 

Let’s dive in. 

Question: Shawna, give us insight into your career path in OST.

I did leave Global Kids to start grad school at Wisconsin, to study curriculum and instruction. Although it was a program primarily for teachers in a formal education setting, my advisor let me build my own, so I took some classes in public affairs to learn about non-profit management. During this time, I returned to Global Kids, to work for them as a curriculum specialist. As I was finishing my master’s thesis and doing my research in New York, I was encouraged to apply for a program officer position at a family foundation in the Bay Area. 

So at age 26, I moved to the Bay Area to work in philanthropy. Following that experience, I moved back to New York, to get married and started working at the Posse Foundation as a training specialist. Not too long after, I started working for Camp Fire National, to lead the program quality and evaluation efforts. It has been 11 years and my role has shifted and evolved from being on the Program Team, to becoming Chief Strategy Officer for a number of years, and to now serving as President of Camp Fire.  

Question: How did you initiate conversations about your career with other leaders? 

Shawna: I’m a naturally curious person and I enjoy people a lot. I’ve noticed a lot of how I do my work is through relationship building. There have been times when I’ve asked CEOs or EDs out for coffee when I know I’ll be in town for work. And they’re like, “Oh my gosh, like I’m so honored you reached out. No one ever reaches out just to build connection.” You never know where it might go from there.

Question: Could you talk a little bit more about what that supervisor role looked like in your career, did you ever have supervisors that really helped or looked out for you? 

Question: How do you think being a millennial influences your leadership? 

Shawna: Of the traits of a millennial leader, there are a few that resonate with me most. These include adopting a collaborative, team-oriented, way of working and decision-making. 

I’ve noticed I take a relationship-oriented approach. It might be building relationships internally within the organization, or externally across organizations. That piece shifts depending on the job function. 

The other piece is around inclusion. I think a lot about how they show up in my work. I even think back to early on in my career, I questioned — “Do I show up fully as who I am? Do people know that I’m married to a woman?” I think in some ways being a millennial and seeing this transition of workplace culture as I was coming up through it presented me with the opportunity to decide how open and out I was going to be and with that came a calculated decision on what the risks were.

In terms of deciding how I want to lead and show up as a leader, I choose to lead authentically. And again, I think that’s due to being a millennial and wanting workplaces to be inclusive and valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Question: How does supporting young professionals support the work that you want to do as President of Camp Fire?

Thank you for reading this article. If you are a leader in the OST field, we would love to hear from you. How are you supporting young professionals? How does supporting young professionals support your work with young people? Stay tuned for more conversations around #workforce, #OSTprograms, and #youngprofessionals. 

If you enjoyed this, please consider posting it with your own thoughts, stories, and experiences. Keep the conversation going online with the hashtag #youngprofessionals #OSTleadership

Take it easy y’all. 

1. Shortage of Workers in Afterschool Programs ↩︎

Series: Rethinking Out-of-School Time Work for a New Generation

Hi! We’re Angelica (she/her) and Hannah (she/her)! We are young professionals. We both grew up in the space between “90s kids” and the “internet generation”, so we know a little bit about going to Blockbuster on a Friday night to pick out a movie and about “doom scrolling” on social media. 

We hope that others can connect with our story. This will be the first of many conversations with real people in the field. We invite young professionals to share stories as well, in the comments or in your own post (tag us so we can see!). Community problems can only be solved with community solutions.

Ok, let’s dive in. 

Balancing Mission and Means

Hannah: Ok, so just candidly Angelica, why do you think young professionals are leaving the field?

Angelica: Millennials are gone! Where are they? I think that they are looking for, quite frankly, more money, career development, a positive work environment, and a good work-life balance. They’re like, “How can I enjoy my personal life outside of work?”

Hannah: Agreed. I think that is outlined very well in the book that we’re reading together, The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, when it talks about how the younger generation cannot keep up with inflation, or the cost of education, or the cost of rent or childcare. It’s a transitional moment of accepting where we’re at just in terms of survival and looking to “work to live” instead of “living to work”.

Angelica: You see it on TikTok, whenever people are like “this is my five to nine after my nine to five”, people are really showing that there is a life outside of work. But when we talk about youth development, people in this work care so much about it. You know, you do go home thinking about the kids that you’re serving, the families that you’re working with. 

Hannah: Is that something that you’ve experienced personally?

Angelica: So, when I was the Director of Advocacy at Dallas Afterschool, I got a text message one day from a community member and it was a picture of two kids outside a beer and wine convenience store. And they wrote, “We need to get these kids off the streets and into programs”. Obviously, they needed a safe place to go, but being in an afterschool desert that they were in, it became a challenge and question of how do we get programs here?  But I think about that a lot because we are always and will always be thinking about the youth, those outside of our programs, and those that we serve every day, no matter where we are. 

Hannah: Right. And then that can weigh on you as a person because it’s not just a job where you clock in and clock out and are done. You are thinking about somebody’s life.

Angelica: Exactly. It definitely weighs heavily. We have to be providing after-school professionals with the support and resources they need to just be able to handle that on top of their own things in life. Back to that survival piece…everyone’s just trying to survive, and it gets difficult. 

Hannah: Yes, everyone’s just trying to make ends meet.

Angelica: I don’t even remember what I was making at the after-school program I worked at, but I know it was not a lot because my mom would always tell me, you cannot live off of this. But I really enjoyed my job, and I made it work. I think that’s the tough part, we’re making it work, but you could only make it work for so long before people were like, I literally need to do something else, and I will.

Hannah: That’s where all the Millennial and Gen Z folks go… to careers that allow them to have adequate housing, support their family, and meet basic needs.

The Importance of the Supervisor Role in Career Development

Angelica: When I was graduating college, I was working an after-school program, and I had sat down with my supervisor one day. I was like, “so I really enjoy working here. I love what I do. I love working in afterschool. What do I do after I graduate?” And she said: “Well I’m sure you made great grades, you’ll have your degree, whatever you do next you’ll do great.”

And I was like, “okay”. I didn’t know what to do from there. Of course, thinking back, I’m like, “Oh, I should have said this, could have asked for this,” but I didn’t. I didn’t know how to have those conversations before. The coaching piece and the career development piece could have been there, but it wasn’t. Luckily, I was able to transfer to a program in Dallas and was able to continue this work, but I mean, that could have easily been, “Oh, I don’t see a future here”.

Hannah: Yeah, that makes sense. So, when I was in college, I interned for Camp Fire National. My supervisor did a really good job of staying in touch with me after the internship. Eventually, my senior year was ending, and she was like, “okay, we’re going to make this work as a job for you. It’s going to be a little bit ad hoc at first because we’re trying to find the funding”. You know, nonprofits are always trying to find the funding. 

I had other career options, but I loved the mission of Camp Fire. I came on as a contractor my first year, and I didn’t get any benefits right away. I was young enough that I could be on my mom’s insurance, which let’s be honest not everyone has that. But I feel like the piece that we’re talking about is that my supervisor kept up the relationship and was communicative. She had a plan, not just in the beginning, but over time. And it made me want to stay because I knew what was coming. I eventually came on full-time staff and have stayed for 4 plus years.

Tapping into Intrinsic Motivation

Angelica: When we look at NAA’s job design framework, the core piece of that is compensation, benefits, internal policies, and that is so critically important. Everyone should have those things. However, because we’re a nonprofit, there’s limited funding to provide the other elements of job quality. Providing career development opportunities for staff is really important. There are also components that don’t take funding, but time and effort, such as creating a positive work culture, coaching, asking for employee input, and prioritizing employee voice. I think more people are willing to stay when they have other pieces. 

Going back to TikTok, the “soft life” is having its moment. People are actively on TikTok saying “I’m not trying to climb a corporate ladder”. So, in youth development, how can we use this to our advantage, people wanting to fuel their passion and find meaning in their work? 

Hannah: I personally chose to work in a nonprofit because I feel like it gives me some small amount of agency to start addressing the crises of our time. So much is going on, it would be very difficult for me to clock into a nine to five and focus solely on the “grind”, blocking out 90% of the national issues I feel pressing in on us. Whereas working in a nonprofit gives me that opportunity to say, well, I’m at least making a small impact. And I’m trying to work with the next generation of young people so that we can solve some of these things moving forward rather than ignore them.

Leveraging Passion and Awareness for Systemic Change

Angelica: One of the interesting things I worked on as the Director of Advocacy for Dallas Afterschool, was when we were working with the Housing Task Force at the City of Dallas and were able to advocate for new multifamily developments to include childcare on-site. Working in youth development but being able to have an impact in housing is so neat, those are the things that we need to be thinking about when working in nonprofits, you can lend a hand in various issues.

Hannah: That’s a really cool story, and I definitely agree that there can be a broader impact when systems are interconnected.

Angelica: For a long time, our older generations didn’t have to consume all that media, all the social media. And there’s so many avenues that you’re getting information now, Snapchat, TikTok, all of that. But I love what you said about after-school. It’s not a bubble. It’s families, students, and communities. It’s touching so many different aspects of life.

Hannah: Yes, I completely agree. And the OST field could explore how the younger generation could be tapped to solve system problems and address those various aspects of life. Our generation, and those to follow, are the ones living multiple crises in real time, and we are the ones who will have to live with these crises well into the future. We are aware of how issues intersect. We know that one unique problem does not exist in a vacuum. And so, understanding that people coming into the workforce are very aware and knowledgeable, that could guide our work towards more collective solutions. That is going to be the most innovative approach. Because young professionals have that broadened perspective, and we are hungry to be asked “What do you think?”

Angelica: Yeah, I love that. It’s almost like we have an untapped workforce. It’s really untapped. Like we haven’t really figured out how to move away from part-time jobs.

Hannah: And it can be a lot better.

Angelica: Although I will say more organizations are actively making improvements for their after-school employees, paying better wages, providing benefits, and centering equity. So now what about the other elements of job quality?

Hannah: And that is what we will explore in the next article! Next, we’ll be talking about job quality and career growth, including an interview with Shawna Rosenzweig about her journey from direct service with youth to becoming President of a national organization, all before age 40. Stay tuned for more conversations around #workforce, #OSTprograms, and #youngprofessionals. 

If you enjoyed this, please consider posting it with your own thoughts, stories, and experiences. Keep the conversation going online with the hashtag #youngprofessionals.

Take it easy y’all. 

“Shortage of Workers in Afterschool Programs,” 2022. Temescal Associates. Accessed 20 July 2024.