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Mayor Zohran Mamdani is trying to channel World Cup excitement into real-world careers: Teens across the five boroughs are designing stadiums of the future and soccer fields through a six-week competition run by New York City’s youth summer jobs program.
And while the city’s schools are still grappling with artificial intelligence, this summer jobs initiative is embracing the technology.
As part of the Summer Youth Employment Program, hundreds of 14- and 15-year-olds are participating in the New York City Sports and Technology Innovation Challenge, where they are using AI and other technologies to expand access to soccer while exploring careers in sport-related industries.
The teens are dreaming up digital platforms to connect young people to sport opportunities across the five boroughs, planning climate-resilient public spaces for athletics that feel more inclusive to New Yorkers from various backgrounds, and designing environmentally-friendly stadiums that can transport 50,000 fans efficiently and sustainably. They are working with officials from the New York City Football Club and faculty from New York University’s School of Professional Studies on their projects.
“The World Cup is inspiring our young people, not just to perfect their stepover but to imagine the next great sports stadium, design soccer fields that combat climate change, build new platforms to connect their friends to matches, and much more,” Mamdani said in a statement.
The program, he added, “will help create the next generation of architects, engineers, and scientists.”
The finalists will present their submissions on Aug. 13 to New York City FC for the initiative, which is expected to become an annual challenge, city officials said.
A record year for NYC’s youth jobs program
The city’s Summer Youth Employment Program, or SYEP — the nation’s largest program of its kind — has continuously evolved over its 63-year history, finding new partners like New York City FC, whose nonprofit foundation, City in the Community, funded and designed the design challenge. The Department of Youth and Community Development, which oversees the jobs program, offered roughly 100,000 paid jobs and career exploration opportunities to the city’s 14- to 24-year olds this year and received more than 200,000 applications, a record, agency officials said.
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Older students in SYEP earn the city’s minimum wage of $17 an hour at one of the program’s various work sites, ranging from tech and human services to finance and culture. The city’s 14- and 15- year-olds earn a $700 stipend doing project-based learning where they build work-related foundational skills, such as team-building, public speaking, and resume-building, said Youth and Community Development Commissioner Sandra Escamilla-Davies.
She was especially proud of the new partnership with New York City FC, saying it grew out of the interests of young people and also builds on the World Cup momentum to get young people interested in learning about opportunities that go beyond being the next star goalie or defender.
“We really knew that hosting a World Cup is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and it brought such vibrancy, such community throughout New York City. But we didn’t want that to be just the only legacy,” Escamilla-Davies said. “We wanted to think about how we use soccer, which so many New Yorkers love, and sports, which young people love, to really inspire young people to see themselves as the next generation of innovators, of engineers, of designers, of entrepreneurs.”
Escamilla-Davies also said that to prepare young people for future careers, incorporating AI was critical.
“We have an ecosystem that needs to accelerate learning, accelerate opportunities, and I don’t know that it’s humanly possible for us to do that without technology,” she said.
Students solve real-world problems with AI
Mohammed Usman, a 15-year-old who lives in Ozone Park, Queens, and attends Brooklyn Tech, decided to tackle the lack of available places to play soccer, looking at how to repurpose existing land and better understand when fields are available.
“Many of the fields that we do have are usually booked by teams or other people who want to play, and it’s hard to get a field,” Mohammed said. “So I was thinking of making an app that would allow you to know when a field is open and to be able to play with people your age.”
He’s been using AI to refine his proposal, for example, by encouraging him to add more information on his app about whether fields have lights or how to pair similarly aged students together.
He already can see how the problem-solving skills he’s learning could help him with his future career goal in engineering.
“What an engineer does is find a problem and then develop a solution for it, and that’s really similar to what we’re doing in the program: finding problems in our communities and then solving them related to soccer,” Mohammed said.
Escamilla-Davies sees SYEP as an important opportunity for young people to explore a range of careers beyond being a doctor or lawyer, and a way to get them connected to mentors and industry professionals, especially for those who don’t have family and social networks they can tap to help.
“For me, it’s the first step of equity,” said Escamilla-Davies, who is hoping to continue building more industry partnerships to expand SYEP.
The program says participation has improved school attendance and reduced students’ odds of getting tangled up in the criminal justice system. SYEP participants’ chances of being arrested fell 17% and 23% for felony arrests, according to a 2021 study.
Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.