Brisk day like today is quite the reminder of how quickly we’ve moved into a new season. Students have been back at school at least a month, including students who participated in the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership’s Young Entrepreneur Mentorship Program (YEMP) for Summer 2011! The YEMP program is funded by a generous grant from the JPMorgan Chase Foundation and from operating funds of the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Business Improvement District.

In YEMP, fifteen (15) local teens are placed with Myrtle Avenue businesses for a seven week summer experience which includes 20 work hours per week. MARP conducts youth outreach, schedules interviews with participating merchants, handles all employment paperwork, and pays wages for the summer. Myrtle merchants oversee the teens and serve as supervisors and mentors to the local high school students.

A couple of the teens were hired by local businesses upon completion of the program, and thus will be continuing on in an after-school capacity.

There were a few programmatic additions this year, including a joint closing reception together with teens from MetroTech BID’s youth summer program and a youth financial literacy course led by adult and youth leaders from All About Business (AAB), a dynamic program of Optimum Capital Management (thanks AAB!).

We are grateful to the following students and employers for their commitment to making the fifth year of the program a major success:

Joanne Alvarez (Wallys Square Root Caf