Syracuse, N.Y. — When Princess Kelly got her first paycheck, she bought herself a dress from Macy’s. It was the first nice outfit she had.
She smiles proudly in it from a photo that’s now flecked with age.
The story the photo doesn’t tell: Kelly dropped out of school and was on probation. She had spent years in foster care only to be adopted by people who still often left her to fend for herself. She didn’t have money for food or clothes. But she got into a program called exalt that offered life skills and an internship.
She wore that dress to her job at Urban Word, where she learned to put her love of writing to work.
“My trajectory was one that would probably leave me in prison or probably dead,” said Kelly, now 29.
In this photo from 14 years ago, Princess Kelly wears the new dress she bought with her paycheck from the exalt program. She credits the program with changing her life.provided photo
Exalt changed that path. Kelly went back to school, graduated from college and now has a job in social services. She’s studying for the law school entrance exams.
Kelly is one of more than 4,000 people who have gone through the exalt program in New York City over the past 20 years. Exalt targets kids between 15 and 19 who are already involved in the criminal justice system.
It provides teens with a combination of job training, mentorship, life skills and a paid internship over a period of 21 weeks. The formula and goals are not novel. But the long record of success is rare in the world of programs targeting troubled teens. Fewer than 5 % of exalt’s graduates get arrested again in the two years after the program.
Programs like this are big money and effort in Syracuse: More than $20 million goes to fund similar work by a dozen different organizations here.
And with good reason. Syracuse has long struggled with a teen crime problem. Juveniles fueled the city’s rise to one of the highest car-theft rates in the nation in 2024. Many of those cars were used in other crimes like break-ins to smoke shops and stores. Police and the mayor lamented that it seemed they could do nothing to stop the cycle of teen offenders. Syracuse also has had among the highest rates of juveniles charged in homicides.
The problem is thorny and expensive, while hard data on results is difficult to come by.
The most recent attempt in Syracuse was a $1 million pilot program by the city of Syracuse that employed credible messengers to convince would-be shooters to participate in therapy. It struggled to get people to sign on.
Exalt will be the newest option in Syracuse, starting next month when it will open its first-ever class outside of New York City.
Getting the program here was two years of work and planning. But it was an easy sell to Syracuse: Exalt offers two decades of results and the state is picking up the $1.5 million tab.
But in a sea of efforts aimed at getting troubled kids on the right path that struggle to show results, how does exalt make it work?
By doing less.
‘They don’t try to be everything’
“We don’t want to be an organization that tries to do too many things,” Jason Alleyne, exalt’s chief program officer, told Syracuse Common Councilors during a committee meeting about the program last year. He repeated himself over and over as councilors asked about counseling, mental health and help with homelessness.
Alleyne’s answer every time was exalt will refer a teen to another agency for that help. The help they provide is education, job training and internships. That’s their model, and that’s what works.
Youth crime rises from a sea of problems: poverty, education, family, community and systemic failure. But exalt has found you don’t need to fix all of these things to get a kid to a better place. And trying is a recipe for failure.
That single-mindedness is part of what attracted the leader of the state’s Department of Criminal Justice Services to exalt.
“I think that that exalt is successful because they don’t try to be everything,” said DCJS Commissioner Rosanna Rosado.
When Rosado and exalt CEO Giselle Castro talked about expanding the program across the state, Rosado implored Castro to ensure that the single mission doesn’t get clouded by efforts to meet other community needs.
In an interview with syracuse.com, Castro said exalt will do in Syracuse what it does in New York City. They’ll reach out to other agencies that can help teens with housing or mental health issues. That will not be something exalt takes on.
“It’s a discipline,” Castro said.
Exalt, which began in 2006 as a pilot program for kids involved in the criminal justice system, has grown to a nationally-recognized nonprofit with an $8.3 million budget and 30 employees. After a decade of operation, experts from John Jay College of Criminal Justice awarded the program a gold star. It’s received donations from high-powered philanthropists like Mackenzie Scott.
At the heart of the program is something that Syracuse already said “no” to once: paying program participants. Exalt is built around getting internships for each teen. But the companies that accept the interns don’t pay, and neither do the organizations that contract with exalt for their services. Exalt raises all the money for the internship paychecks.
Exalt has raised $158,000 for Syracuse so it can pay 65 teens $18 an hour for participating in the program. The internships are only eight weeks, but exalt pays the teens for everything but the first two weeks of the program.
The internships aren’t typical places these teens, or any others, would usually find themselves helping out. In New York City, they’re architecture firms, museums and public relations offices. Castro said to expect the same in Syracuse.
The internships open the door to an entirely new world of opportunity, Castro said. Kids who never knew anyone with a white-collar job are suddenly working one, themselves, and getting paid.
‘It helps you see where you’re failing’
James New’s Manhattan company has hosted at least 40 interns from exalt over the past 15 years. DBI, which does project management and real estate, was helping exalt find new space. And then it found itself hosting their interns.
New said they keep signing up for more interns because they see transformation in action.
He recalled a teen who had an internship in 2018. The young man was always late. New called him into his office and asked the teen why he couldn’t get there on time. He found out that the young man was living in a homeless shelter.
“It helps you see where we’re failing, not as a company but as a society,” New said.
The young man ended up going on to college after going through exalt.
New said the company has never had a problem with any exalt interns, even though they all have criminal histories and most have no experience with a workplace like his.
Exalt has also never had trouble in its own offices when the teens come for classes after school, Castro said. They don’t have metal detectors, she said, and they’ve never needed them. No one has brought a gun or knife into their space.
“Many young people, they are in a space of survival,” Castro said. When they come to exalt, they see a path out. They see that someone is making an investment in them and listening to them.
That changes everything, Castro said.
The program in Syracuse will look much like the program in New York City. The teens will be referred from the courts, probation and other agencies. They’ll go through an interview and screening process. Those that are accepted will go through 21-week program that includes several weeks of training and education prior to an eight-week internship. After the first two weeks of the program, all of the kids are paid $18 an hour, Castro said. And in New York City they are also given metro cards to get to and from the program.
The money shows them that someone is invested in them. Castro said that after teens graduate from the program, they often tell her they would have done it without ever getting paid. Exalt also negotiates lower sentences for 75% of the teens who participate.
A long road to Syracuse
Syracuse Mayor Sharon Owens has been talking to Castro for nearly two years about bringing exalt to Syracuse.
Owens, who was the deputy mayor when exalt was talking to the city about coming here, has worked with youth in Syracuse for decades.
When Rosado mentioned exalt and its track record, Owens said she didn’t need to know much more.
“I was sold,” she said. She and others, including family court judges and probation officers, have been meeting with exalt staff for nearly two years.
Owens said one of the things the state liked about bringing exalt to Syracuse was that there was already a pattern of collaboration between the various agencies who are tackling youth violence.
And the city has its own office with the sole mission of reducing gun violence.
Lateef Johnson-Kinsey has led that office for the past three years. Youth violence and overall crime have gone down during that time. But the exact reasons are unclear.
The city’s own anti-violence program, Safer Streets, was a try at something new. Its goal was to use credible messengers to get some of the city’s most violent young men to sign on for therapy.
The program struggled to get people to sign up, and the agency that was supposed to do the therapy dropped out after a year.
Owens said Safer Streets will not continue because it was meant to be a one-time trial. She said her office and Johnson-Kinsey are looking at what worked from that effort, and may fund some parts of it going forward.
Johnson-Kinsey, whose office pays $734,000 to six different anti-violence groups in the city, thinks having another solution on the table can only help.
“I think any help we can get, any other organizations that want to be part of the solution, I think that’s going to be great,” Johnson-Kinsey said. While exalt’s contract is through the city, it will be working independently.
Princess Kelly credits exalt with changing the path of her life 14 years ago. She’s now a child protective worker in New York City and is planning to go to law school.provided photo
Paying the change forward
Kelly, who went through exalt’s New York City program 14 years ago, still goes back. She’s a part of their alumni program, which helps with connections, education and job opportunities for as long as someone wants it.
After exalt, Kelly went back to school and then college, all while raising her daughter. The woman who lived most of her life in the foster care system now works as a child protective investigator in New York City.
She tries to help change lives the way exalt changed hers, she said. She’s even referred kids from some of her cases to exalt.
“My life is … investing in families in the same way that exalt has invested in me,” she said.