Across the county 40 businesses, nonprofits and organizations are committed to hiring low-income Hamilton County high school students this summer for an internship through Step-Up Chattanooga.
And the Public Education Foundation hopes more employers will volunteer to get involved.
This is a screenshot of the Step-Up Chattanooga website.
President of Chattanooga’s Public Education Foundation, Dan Challener, talks to reporters at the Chattanooga Times Free Press in 2014.Step-Up Chattanooga was launched earlier this spring by PEF and the Hamilton County Department of Education. The program provides low-income juniors and seniors with paid internships designed to train and connect them with employers.
This program is modeled after Step-Up Minneapolis, which successfully connected 21,000 students with employers over a decade. Ninety six percent of those supervisors reported that their students made valuable contributions to their companies’ workplace.
“Thousands of those students have subsequently been hired by Minneapolis businesses – giving those businesses well-trained, local talent and providing those students with life-changing employment,” PEF President Dan Challener previously told the Times Free Press. “This is exactly what we want to do in our community.”