Know Your Strengths

TJH Speaks with Yael Wedeck and Rivka Ariel of Work At It

By SuSan Schwamm

Yael, Rivka, you founded Work At It a few years ago. Can you give us a bit of background?

Yael: Sure! We primarily try to help teenagers and young adults who have been derailed from the traditional school system, because of ADHD, trauma or learning issues. They’re either out of school completely or are high school kids and post-high school kids who, for whatever reason, haven’t been able to get to the next step in their lives. What we try to do is help them figure out, “Who am I? What are my strengths? What am I good at, and how do I take that forward?” We want to help them with a short-term plan and a long-term plan for the future and work with them practically to make that happen.

When did you launch Work At It?

Yael: We launched in 2018 when the OU Impact Accelerator started. The OU put out a call for social ventures that were addressing a significant unmet need in the Orthodox community and their aim was to help by providing some seed funding and education about nonprofit management. We applied and we won the grant to help us launch.

Five years ago. That’s substantial. How did you two join together to form Work At It?

Yael: We actually knew each other personally for many years. I work as a psychotherapist, and Rivka has a background in marketing strategy for the pharmaceutical industry. We had often discussed this particular issue of kids being out of school, having nowhere to go, nothing to do, and feeling devalued because they didn’t fit into the system. We recognized that there are so many kids in our community who are so talented in so many different ways that just don’t happen to lend themselves to success in a social or academic situation, but there’s so much that they can do. We wanted to help those individuals.

Rivka: Yael had this idea of creating a practical program to help at-risk youth by giving them a reason to get up each morning. While there are many drop-in centers and programs that help at-risk kids, there was nothing that exclusively worked on practical plans for their future, whether that includes work, school or vocational training. For a while, we lamented that this wasn’t being done, and then it became “if no one is doing it, maybe we need to.”

How do you get clients?

Rivka: We are now the go-to organization for teens who find themselves out of school. Before we launched, we went to all the organizations that work with at-risk youth and told them of our idea and asked them whether they were doing this. The answers we got were no – no organization was exclusively focused on this area. Once we launched, Amudim, MASK, Ohel and others began sending us clients in addition to therapists and rabbis. By now, many of our clients come from other clients, people refer their friends.

When you deal with struggling youth, is it on a one-on-one basis? Can you walk us through your process?

Rivka: Yes, when we deal with struggling youth, it’s one-on-one intense sessions. We have a very holistic, team-based approach. We look at the whole person. Each professional who meets with the teen looks at the teen from a different angle. We then meet often as a team to discuss each case so we can combine all the information we have gathered and develop a sound plan.

First, we do an intake. We find out what’s going on and why they reached out to us. Next, they meet with Yael, who is our social worker and career consultant. At that meeting, they have the option of taking various aptitude tests. Yael has spent several years building up her inventory of tests and training on new ones. If clients want help with a job, they work with our job coach They then move on to work with our resume coach/job search strategy coach. Those that do not have a high school diploma meet with our educational advocate. He works with them to get their diplomas or equivalency. His work with them may include alternative schooling ideas, internships that count towards school, and other high-school or college-level suggestions. He has done amazing work with kids out of school who were literally in bed all day for months or even years. By working closely with them and uncovering their interests, he has gotten them off their devices and into internships or alternative schooling where they are learning new skills and working towards produc tive goals.

Some kids that come to us only come for one or two sessions. They want to know what their strengths are, and then they could go out there and find their own jobs. But if they want help finding a job, they meet with me for job coaching. We discuss job etiquette and do mock interview practice. I work with a tool that we created that helps crystallize in their minds what their strengths are and then how to be comfortable communicating their strengths in an interview and in their lives.

We also help with job matching and support. We try to find community jobs for them, encouraging employers to be open to working with kids that may have different trajectories than what they’re used to and to troubleshoot if any issues arise. We help these kids line up and prepare for interviews at these jobs, too.

Clients can meet as many times and for as many hours as they need with each of our different professionals. We have clients that have met with some of our staff for two hours and others for over 200 hours, depending on the need. They are moving along at their own pace and need their own space, with our support, to move forward.

It sounds very gratifying to be able to offer direction to someone who is floundering and not sure of what their next step will be.

Rivka: It really is amazing. Everybody comes to a different place, and each person makes a lot of progress in his or her own way. And it is beautiful to see that.

We had one kid who was isolated for months and suicidal after being asked to leave school who, baruch Hashem, is now finishing up college. We have others who were in unhealthy living situations and were able to move along due to their newfound financial independence. Others languished in bed all day and are now getting up each day to go to a job.

Aside from working with struggling youth, you also go into mainstream high schools and help those teens realize and gain insight into their personality and their strengths.

Yael: Yes, we do. When we started our program, approached by parents who told us that even children who went through school successfully often have no idea what they might be good at and struggle with launching their futures.

Rivka: We realized that there is a significant opportunity to catch these kids earl y on and help people feel good about themselves and their unique skills. The schools have amazing curricula, but often there isn’t time to build in lessons that specifically teach students self-awareness and self-confidence.

Working with teen educators and mental health professionals, we designed a highly interactive and fun workshop that helps teens recognize their strengths and understand how others perceive them. The workshop really helps them start saying to themselves, “Well, I can bring this to the table.” And sometimes they realize that something that they may have thought was a negative is actually a positive. In one workshop, one kid said that he was always called the class clown and he saw it as a cally wanted us to design and implement workshops for Long Island schools. By now, we’ve worked with several hundred students in our workshops. negative trait. But the moderator told him that in corporate America, when people are working 15-hour days, sometimes they need someone there who can lighten the mood and be the “class clown” at times. And the boy said, “Wow, no one ever told me that that trait could be a good thing.”

We recently added a workshop on “Being a Light Unto the Nations.” We realize that there’s, unfortunately, a lot of antisemitism in America right now and being able to interact with non-Jews and handle various situations is very important. As students graduate high school and move into higher education and the professional world, they may find themselves in the position of being the unofficial spokesperson for all Orthodox Jews, whether they want to be or not. We wanted to give students exposure to Orthodox people who have achieved success in the corporate world so they can hear from them how they handle common issues that may arise in business settings, related to being Orthodox Jews. This workshop has been extremely well received both by the administration and the students.

We have done our Strength Discovery workshop in many schools already.

When you’re speaking to the high schoolers, how do you help them to bring out that awareness of their talents or certain character traits that they have?

Yael: There are so many different ways. Some people are more able to verbalize when you ask them, “What do you think you’re good at?” or “What do you do well?” or “What do you love to do?” Other kids have no clue. We designed a fun game where they get to identify their own characteristics and those of their friends’ and then they check in with each other: “Do you agree with that? Do you think I’m like that?” They end up having a whole conversation about it, and it gets them thinking and talking about it in a small group.

What are certain traits that you’ve been seeing, and which careers do you suggest for people to try out with those traits?

It’s eye-opening because school is a little bit different than work, and some of the traits that don’t work in school could work amazingly well in a work setting. If the kids really learn who they are, they get more comfortable talking about what their traits are, which is what’s needed when they go out into the world.

How many students have you worked with in this way?

Rivka: We got a grant from the Community Chest of South Shore, and they specifi-

Yael: We don’t suggest career tracks in the workshops, because the sessions are short – only 45 minutes or an hour or two. The workshop is really about saying, “Wow, I never realized I was good at this.” But they’re not long enough to say, “I should enter this field or this is the career for me.”

For ca - reer decisions, it’s really a longer process of discovery. Identifying what your characteristics are, thinking about what you do well, and about what you actually love to do and what work environment makes you comfortable. There are so many elements that need to come together to form an individual’s future career path. Most people want a simple answer and don’t want to work hard to get it. Teens often say, “Well, you just tell me what I should do.” But it’s almost like saying, “You tell me who I should marry. Just give me a guy.” Right? It’s really so personal to every individ- ual, and it’s about understanding yourself.

With some kids, one has to be very hands-on and quick with them when it comes to career decisions. Other kids want to really do a deep dive and enjoy the self-discovery process.

Can you describe the process you use In the workshops for high school students? How do you help them see that they have so much to share with the world?

Rivka: We break them into small groups, and we put friends together, so there’s a comfort level as they know quite a bit about each other. We have various tools and worksheets that the students work on in their small groups, with our coaching. Because we have a high staff-to-student ratio, we can really work with each small group to get the most out of the program.

Yael: It ’s so important to get feedback from other people, who can say, “I think you really are great at that.” And then the kid will say, “Really? Why?” And they’ll say, “Well, you know what? Remember that time you did this and that and that really made me feel good?” Sometimes, they’re telling each other that they’re good listeners or they’re caring or they’re very organized or they’re poised – any number of things that they have seen over the course of their time together in school. They use each other to help themselves figure out where they shine.

Rivka: They may feel that they have a certain trait, but how do others know it’s true? We work with them to come up with concrete examples that show how or where they displayed that trait. That helps crystallize it for them. Toward the end of the workshop, we bring groups up to the front of the room and they take turns talking about their strengths. We ask them, “How does it feel when you tell someone that she’s a caring person or poised or giving?” And the kids actually say to us, “That felt so good. I would either hire this person or I would want to be friends with her. It sounded like she’s an amazing person.” It’s good for them to hear that –that talking about their traits didn’t sound boastful, it sounded professional.

Have you ever gotten feedback from any of those teachers in the room who’ve come to you after the workshop and said, “You know what? I really loved your workshop and I’d like to incorporate some of what you’re doing in my classroom throughout the year?”

Rivka: We definitely did hear it. Sometimes teachers call in their peers, not to help out, but rather to be part of this wonderful experience. At one school in the Five Towns, the teachers came over to us and said, “How can we book you to run this for our teachers and guidance staff? We want it in our school for our teachers because it would make us stronger teachers and would be great for everybody.”

In the sessions, you use attributes that the teens can choose from. What are some of the attributes on the list?

Yael: It’s a whole “game” that we organize for the kids to do and there are probably around 55 attributes that we have. Some examples would be creative, funny, idealistic, sen sitive, affable, honest, thought ful, calm, diligent…and the list goes on.

Rivka: Some of the attributes are nuanced. And the beauty of that is when they come up with a concrete example of that attribute, I think they really start to understand that nuances are what make up different personalities. One thing we tell them is, “When you are all coming out of the same school and you’re wearing a uniform or have a dress code and everybody looks the same, you need to remember that you’re not the same. Everybody has unique character traits that make up who they are and gives them the ability to contribute to this world in their own unique way.”

That’s the point of the workshop – to recognize that next year our educational advocate run some of the strength discovery workshops in the boys’ schools.

I can imagine that when you speak to boys and girls, it’s a different type of workshop with a different type of self-awareness and different types of character traits that are highlighted.

Yael: The boys’ workshops are run slightly differently than the girls’ ones, but they all get to essentially the same idea of what are your strengths.

When we were designing the workshops, we were told by some people, “You can’t do as much one-on-one talk with the boys’ sessions. It has to be faster. They don’t have patience for all this analysis and conversation.” But I feel like it really depends on the individual. Some do have more patience, and some don’t. But we did try to keep it more fast-paced with the boys based on that advice. When it comes to attributes, though, what they value, it’s pretty similar between the boys and girls.

What is your vision for the future of Work At It?

we’re different and have different things to offer this world and to learn what makes us unique and how to showcase it.

In how many schools in the Five Towns have you presented so far?

Rivka: So far, we’ve presented seven workshops at two different schools in the Five Towns.

A lot of times, these workshops are geared toward girls’ schools. Are there workshops that are made for the boys’ schools as well?

Rivka: There are other workshops that are run by our other staff members. We have an excellent, hands-on resume and job search strategy workshop, where the students come out with the beginnings or sometimes even the end of a very tight resume. This is run by our resume coach who is a male.

In addition, we run sessions where we bring in experts in a specific field to talk about how they achieved success and the vulnerability that comes at each step. We anticipate that

Rivka: We’re a not-for-profit. We do this because there’s a huge need in the community. The problem of struggling youth and kids that have fallen out of the system is tremendous and it’s tragic. We see it across different socioeconomic levels, different religious levels – it really affects the whole community. I’m sure everybody knows someone, either a relative or a neighbor, who has a child or friend who is struggling. What we’re doing is trying to change that trajectory one kid at a time, through a lot of intense work.

Yael: Our goal is really to be a place that lifts people up and helps them believe in themselves when so many places in the community did not believe in them, or for whatever reason, they were not able to function well within the structures that exist. We believe that there’s a place for everyone in the community, both among regular kids who can’t figure themselves out and among kids who have a lot that they’re fighting against. We want to try and find some place in some way where everybody can shine and be a superstar – and believe that they can succeed. I’d like to bring more of that sort of thinking to our community – that even if you’re out of the box and even if you don’t do exactly what everybody else does, there’s a place for you. There are people who are there and who believe in you.

Rivka: We have a fantastic product and are ready to scale up. With appropriate funding, we would be able to serve many more kids and increase the support we can provide to the kids we are currently seeing. We are hopeful that community members will see the value of our mission and what we do and will help support our initiatives.

By Mindi Werblowsky, LCSW