Leaders!
Apply to be a Junior Counselor
Priority candidates will be eligible for interviews and more applications are welcome for any spots that remain (you may be referred from your first choice site to another with an open spot).
Staff Contact Information:
Bryan Zuluaga
bryan@pbha.org
Student Director Contact Information:
leaders@pbha.org
What is ‘Leaders!’?
Geared toward fostering the next generation of civic-minded change agents, Leaders! is a unique program that connects high schoolers with willing college mentors. We empower students in the Greater Boston area through programming that spans leadership development, peer-to-peer fellowship, and college readiness.
The Phillips Brooks House Association’s Leaders! program provides 95 teens from Boston and Cambridge with full-time teaching and mentoring for 10 weeks during the summer and engages 20 of those same teens in intensive college access, mentoring, and leadership development during the school year. Leaders! is wholly committed to empowering these teens by providing more than just workshops. Our program puts into practice these workshops through service-learning and teaching while also applying these skills like facilitation, public speaking, and curriculum design into their workplaces. This commitment of giving the teens the opportunity to take initiative and develop leadership skills nicely complements PBHA's mission of empowering the Greater Boston communities. Since each teen is a member of the community they are serving, Leaders! builds off the knowledge they already have of their communities to increase the capacity of those communities to serve themselves.
During the School Year
Every Fall, up to 20 Leaders are selected for the school-year component of the program, designed to help them become change agents in their communities and prepare them for the future. The program helps them achieve their goals through:
1. year long one-on-one mentoring with a current college student, including homework help, individualized support plans, MCAS and SAT preparation, and college/career advising.
2. leadership development and social justice empowerment curriculum.
3. part-time placement (at least four hours per week) at a community service organization.
4. responsibility for workshop facilitation, curriculum creation, and training for the next summer’s Leaders."
To apply to the Leaders! program, please fill out two forms:
- Fill out the PBHA Afterschool and Mentoring application School Year 2024-2025 in it's entirety, by selecting LEADERS! Term-time and following the instructions.
- Fill out the supplemental LEADERS! application linked on the third page of the link above
During the Summer
Each summer, 90 teens serve as Junior Counselors - full-time teacher’s aides and role models - in one of PBHA’s 10 neighborhood-based Summer Urban Program camps. Each teen is paired with a college student to develop a seven-week curriculum focusing on literacy, math, and community history. Teens co-teach a class of 10 children, supervise field trips and community service projects, and participate in leadership workshops designed by the teens themselves and facilitated by the Leaders! directors.The majority of our Leaders once attended the same camp in which they work, and nearly all have grown up in the neighborhoods served by their camp. For many, the Junior Counselor position is their first job and/or opportunity to cultivate a sense of community responsibility and leadership skills. Our hope is that through our curriculum, the teens will want to take on a greater responsibility during the summer and demonstrate their unique capabilities. Most importantly, Leaders! hopes to bring about a generation of youth willing to speak up for themselves and their communities, take meaningful action towards improving their own lives, and to advocate solutions for issues affecting their communities.In all, teens in Summer Leaders! receive 50 hours of training (including resume writing, interviewing, financial literacy, and college access), more than 200 hours of one-on-one mentoring, and 12 hours of group mentoring from college students.
John Hancock MLK Scholars Program
We are proud to be part of John Hancock’s MLK Scholars Program which, for the past 11 years, has annually funded over 600 summer jobs at nearly 70 local non-profit organizations — the largest program of its kind in the country. Each year, about a dozen junior counselors in PBHA's Summer Urban Program are John Hancock MLK Scholars.