Career fair showing at-risk kids the jobs they never knew existed

Nick Madonna just might have every seventh grader's dream job, if only they knew such a job existed: He's a video-game designer and founder of the independent studio PHL Collective.

This week, he decided to fill them in, as part of Cool Jobs - an unorthodox career fair meant to introduce at-risk kids in Philadelphia schools to opportunities in the creative economy. Over three days, almost 600 students from 12 schools visited a ballroom in East Falls to meet with a range of not-so-starving artists, designers, and other creative professionals.

The event was conceived by Barbara Chandler Allen, founder of Fresh Artists, the nonprofit known for turning children's artwork into large-format digital prints to raise money for art supplies for low-income schools.

Allen had created a program at the Woodmere Art Museum to introduce second graders to professional artists. Recently, she was toying with the idea of a similar program for high schoolers. But experts and teachers she spoke with cautioned her against it: With a dropout rate of 25 percent, many children leave school after eighth grade. So she targeted middle schoolers.

"This could help provide a reason for creative kids to choose the right high school, stay in school, graduate - in other words, have a purpose, a goal, a dream," she said.

Madonna and others walked kids through their jobs and how they got there, taking internships and college classes.

But the students had more pressing questions.

"If I make a game, how do I make it famous?" one student from Kearny School at Sixth and Fairmount wondered. (Social media can be one way to go.)

"What if you make a game and you finally put it out and no one buys it?" another asked. ("If you put it out and no one likes it, you move on to the next one," Madonna said. "The more you do, the better you get.")

Ahmad Hool, 13, a student at Kearny, was blown away when he learned about technology in his favorite games.

"I'm not really into art like that, but I like the game part," he said. "How you can make it look exactly like the person using 360 cameras, and it takes 300 to 500 people to make a game? I was just amazed. I would be interested in doing this."

The students also met people like architect Michael Spain, whose first career role model was Mike Brady. "You guys ever see The Brady Bunch?" he asked students from Nebinger in South Philadelphia. "No? Wow, that really sets me back."

Still, he pressed on, explaining how he studied drafting at Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School in Philadelphia, and how a supportive teacher helped him go from there to Cornell.

"For me, it's about imagination," he told them, pointing to a photo of one of his projects. "This is a building - that's something I can actually touch - that was an idea I had."

He's trying to give them the same spark of inspiration he had. "If it wasn't for my teacher, I'm not sure I'd have taken that path, and the opportunities might not have been there," he said.

In between presentations, the students picked up brochures for arts programs, high school creative-arts programs, and colleges. Each also received a workbook with resources. Fresh Artists intends to assess the program's impact by tracking some of the kids for the next five years to see where they went to high school and whether they graduated.

Kevin Lyons, a Brooklyn artist who has designed sneakers for Vans and Adidas, told a group about how he gained confidence from friends who supported him and even from the teacher who told him he would never be an artist.

"I think you can use encouragement and discouragement to motivate you," he said. He was there in part because he has kids in the Philadelphia school system. He wants them to know about the range of jobs available.

"As I've been working, I've seen so many creative jobs I was never told about in school," he said. "There's more to creativity than simply making lifelike drawings or being an artist in the traditional sense."

Kathleen Frazier, an art teacher at Kearny, brought all 35 of the school's seventh-grade students.

"So many of them are creative and see it as a hobby and don't think they can make a career out of it," she said. "I thought it was important for them to see that something they love can be something they do."

There were moments of puzzlement, such as when Quincy Ellis explained the process of hand-fabricating furniture cast from porcelain, sand, and cement. A student asked if it's sold at IKEA.

"IKEA's mostly made by overseas factories in a mass-produced way," Ellis said. "But people respect and value people making things by hand. It's part of that old-world craft."

Students were more familiar with murals. But artist Eurhi Jones explained how she conceives, plans, and paints them, including a complex one on a parking garage at the Philadelphia Zoo.

Martin London, 12, a student at Nebinger, was intrigued.

"I liked her job," he said. "It didn't seem that fun until she explained it."

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