Community Advisory Board Interview: Jeremy Kazanjian-Amory

The Community Advisory Board (CAB) is an active and thoughtful group of dedicated community members tasked with advising the work of the Office of City and Community Engagement. The CAB discusses and provides input about community engagement, the impact of CCE’s work on local neighborhoods, and the university’s development ideas and initiatives. The group includes a mix of residents, staff from nonprofit organizations, and members of Northeastern’s Institutional Master Plan advisory group and Task Force representing Roxbury, Fenway, Mission Hill, and the South End. As part of a series of CAB member profiles, City and Community Engagement’s Program and Operations Assistant Co-op, Ben Whitaker, spoke to the City of Boston’s Manager of Youth Engagement and Outreach, Jeremy Kazanjian-Amory, about the Department of Youth Engagement and Employment, the importance of youth voice, and more. Read on for the full interview. 

You're working as the Manager of Engagement & Outreach with the Department of Youth Engagement and Employment. For those who aren’t familiar with this City department, would you give us an overview of some of the projects and responsibilities this office takes on?

The Department of Youth Engagement and Employment is one of the key City departments that is youth facing. It's about being responsive and supporting, providing resources for youth, young adults, families and partners. The mission of our department is to employ, develop, and engage Boston’s youth while amplifying youth voice and bridging opportunities for personal and professional growth. We do this through three main buckets. 

One of them, which is one of the most well known programs, is the SuccessLink employment program, and that is a program that employs close to 4,000 and 5,000 young people every year. The majority of that happens during the summer but it also happens during the school year. We do that through partnering with 160 to 200 community-based non-profits and city agencies, helping to employ young people and place them at sites around the city. 

We also have our career and workforce development arm, where we are helping partners think about the jobs they are providing, and encouraging young people to think about how they can be prepared for the jobs they are in now as well as their long-term success. 

And then we have Engagement and Outreach, which I oversee, which has 4 or 5 different buckets in it. The Mayor’s Youth Council is one of the programs that we offer, which comprises 85 young people who are charged with representing young people all over Boston. The Youth Lead the Change participatory budgeting process allocates 1 million dollars in capital funding every year for young people ages 12-22 to vote on how to spend that money. The MBTA Youth Pass Program is a subsidized program for 12 to 25 year olds. All of the engagement and outreach efforts make sure young people know about these programs through marketing, communications, and constituent services. So all of that falls under engagement and outreach. Our growing hope is to make sure that all young people, young adults, families, and partners just know about the full breadth of resources in the city and are able to take advantage of them. 

Looking at your history with St. Stephen’s Youth Programs and now working with the Department of Youth Engagement and Employment, you seem to be deeply invested in working with youth. What led you to this passion? Was it always something you knew you wanted to do?

That's a good question. I did not originally think that I was going to be in the youth work world. I thought I was going to be a lawyer. About eight years ago, I ended up doing two years of Americorps through the Massachusetts Promise Fellowship which is housed at Northeastern, with the hope of exploring what youth work would be. I was really passionate about college access and specifically thinking about all the barriers and obstacles that exist for young people in navigating that process, so that was my role during my Americorps years at St. Stephen's. 

Then I just fell in love with the work, with the community, and I really became passionate about working directly with young people, and helping to ensure that young people's voice is informing the work and is ultimately driving the work forward. That was my work. For seven and a half years, I was working with high school, and then post high school students, to think through how they can pursue their own passions or pathways they might be interested in and building partnerships to help do that work. Then transitioning to the City, again in the pursuit of amplifying youth voice especially within the civic engagement world, and how we can work with partners to make sure there are more opportunities to do that.

In our last CAB meeting, you suggested that we integrate some youth representation on the board. I thought this was interesting, because in my opinion youth issues are often overlooked in society: To you, why are issues of youth civic engagement, empowerment, and employment such important topics in our society today?

There is the classic phrase: “youth are the future”. For me, what I’ve realized is that young people are just incredibly innovative and they're incredibly passionate about their work - whether it's related to climate justice or educational acces or community engagement and community programming. They are leading so many conversations right now. They have stepped into a space where they are participating and leading these conversations to help transform communities to be more accessible and more equitable, and to create more opportunities for young people. 

For me, what has been fascinating to watch has been young people changing the narrative from “young people are the future” to “we need to talk about this now”. Youth issues, community issues, and societal issues are so intertwined. Educational issues impact all of us and access to a good education impacts not only the present, but the future. Not only is it incredibly imperative to prioritize the issues facing young people now - because it will impact how we exist in the future -it's also incredibly important that young people continue to have seats at the table and opportunities to bring such unique, innovative ideas and their passion to the work.

I think it's sometimes easy to forget the nuance of things, for example, we talk a lot in the City about how meeting times have a big implication on access. Considering when young people, community members, residents or families have access is something that is really important to me. I've just been very lucky to be in spaces with incredible young people that have led the conversations. That's really what's driven my passion for it - being able to bear witness to it and to participate in these spaces. 

Could you give a brief history of your relationship with Northeastern, either through working partnerships or through just personal experience? 

My relationship with Northeastern dates back to when I started as a Mass Promise Fellow. During those two years I was able to spend a lot of time on campus and connect to CCE in a lot of ways and start to understand Northeastern goals for the community in the ways they partnered with the community. I had a very unique experiential relationship with Northeastern during those two years. 

Then during my time at St. Stephen’s Youth Programs we partnered with Northeastern in basically every possible way.  I was collaborating with Service-Learning classes, we had husky volunteers, we had Mass Promise Fellows every year that I was there, we hosted service days—just basically every possible way we were able to partner with Northeastern, we did. In that sense, I was very connected to Northeastern. 

I’ve been on the Community Advisory Board for four or five years and I've been on the Massachusetts Promise Fellowship board since my second year, so for about 7 years. Then transitioning to this new role, Northeastern has been a supporter of the Mayor's Youth Council for a long time now, so I work with Dave Isberg and Carl Barrows to continue financial support of the Mayor’s Youth Council. Northeastern has been great at supporting our events here at the department, as well as specifically supporting the Mayor’s Youth Council programming and resources for those ambassadors to succeed.

I'm able to continue engaging with Northeastern through our programming and by thinking creatively about how we can work with Northeastern to amplify opportunities in Boston. I continuously work on how my office can help ensure that Northeastern’s resources are reaching young people and families all over the city. 

Northeastern also created an opportunity for community leaders to teach for the Honors Discovery program, and this fall I have been teaching one of the classes for freshman students. Teaching has been a cool way for community members to partner with the university, which in many ways provides more opportunities for students to explore how to be involved and engaged in the community during their time at the university. 

Why do you think the relationship between community and university is so important?

The reality is that Northeastern is a community member. It exists in the community in a lot of ways: it houses thousands of students - who all live in the city, work in the city, travel around the city, and many are from the city so there are community members coming in and out of Northeastern. In addition, it has a tremendous footprint in the community so that relationship with the community is imperative as the university continues to navigate what it means to be in the community, needing more space in the community, things of that nature. It’s really important to be working in collaboration with the community on those bigger picture issues. 

Also, there is a component where Northeastern feels, and talks about, the importance of being community stakeholders and giving back to the community. I saw during the renovation of Carter Field and Playground. I also coach for South End Soccer and South End Baseball, both of which have access to Carter field and other Northeastern resources, for example the students who volunteer as coaches. I think that it is imperative that the community and Northeastern are not separate as they are so intertwined and integrated. Northeastern is a part of our community and has the responsibility, like we all do, to be community members and stewards of the community. 

It can be challenging when any university, business, or organization sees itself as disconnected from its local community. It can create a lot of problems and tensions when institutions don’t feel like they need to be community stakeholders, whereas Northeastern has understood this and continues to work on how it can be a better community stakeholder and conveyancer using the resources they have. 

What was the reason you wanted to join the Community Advisory Board? 

It started with my experience at St. Stephens. As a community partner, we had six or seven different points of entry in terms of partnership with Northeastern. As a partner that was community-based, we had a lot of residents and young people who were directly impacted by the changes happening in the community. We had a responsibility to advocate for our young people, for our partners, and provide insight for how we think Northeastern students can successfully engage with the community - in part because we had past instances where student engagement could have been more informed and impactful.  

Thousands of students are going out into the community and engaging with the community in different ways, so it is imperative that community partners and stakeholders inform how to equip students to be successful in this work in tandem with Northeastern. 

Now, with the City, it continues to be important to be in the room and contribute in ways that I can, while also hearing from others and advocating for space for more young people to be involved. 

I think this has been one of the ways I see my role continuing to evolve in life: my role is to be a convener and to help advocate for others to be in the room and be in that space, versus needing to be the one providing that input or context. Helping to ensure that people from all different perspectives and experiences are there to help do that.

Could you share a time that you felt serving on the Community Advisory Board made a real impact on your work with the City or St. Stephen’s Youth Programs? 

At St. Stephen’s, there were a couple of ways. One is we helped inform ways in which students were prepared to volunteer in the community. So for me, being in that space and helping contribute to those conversations felt like there were some clear outcomes out of that. We have also advocated for different types of grants that community partners can access and other things like that that have come to fruition. 

I have definitely seen how the CCE team and Northeastern in general have been directly responsive to the feedback that the Board has given and then taken next steps to actually roll out these types of ideas and initiatives. Through my participation in the Community Engagement and Partnership working group, I have definitely seen specific things that have come into play from those conversations, including the ways students are thinking about engagement overall. 

What perspective are you hoping to share with the Board? What are you hoping to learn from the experience? 

I am really interested in thinking about how the youth voice and young adult voice is brought into the conversation around current programming, opportunities, and future plans. Similarly, I am hoping to continue learning about all of the different opportunities available both at Northeastern and in the community, and how those experiences can be shared  more easily. I think being in a role here helps to do that dissemination, conveying, and facilitation of space and opportunities. I am hoping to be able to use that platform to help community partners, students, young people, organizations, and Northeastern communicate those opportunities to more and more young people so that young people continue to take advantage of opportunities and resources available to them.