FOR EVERY BOSTON MAYOR over four decades, securing summer jobs for public school students has been a top priority.
Tom Menino called up employers and told them what they needed to do: hire youngsters and keep them off the streets. His successor, Marty Walsh, convened a phone bank, with his cabinet chiefs joining in around the table, to lobby employers to make summer hires. Michelle Wu has met with a network of major Boston employers, which includes hospitals, banks, insurance companies and the biotech firms that power the region’s economy.
Behind the mayors, and largely behind the scenes, there’s been one constant: Neil Sullivan, the executive director of the nonprofit Boston Private Industry Council, often called the PIC. For more than three decades, Sullivan has been a steady force behind the city’s efforts – viewed nationally as among the best of any major city – to connect young people with summer employment.
But there is a change in the works, as Sullivan prepares to step away from the job. A high school history teacher from Detroit who turned to community organizing before heading into City Hall with Mayor Ray Flynn in the 1980s, the 72-year-old Sullivan hesitates to use the “r” word – retirement. But he said he’s ready to hand over responsibility for running the organization while continuing to work on the issues that he has long been passionate about.
“Since the pandemic, the day-to-day job of managing the PIC as a 60-position staff organization has taken an increased amount of my time. That’s meant I haven’t been able to be as active as I’d like to be externally about issues that we care about, issues that I care about,” Sullivan said in an interview, referring to the integration of workforce development with education on a statewide level. “I don’t have a hard stop,” he added about his departure as executive director, but “at some point I’d like to be able to be more of a free agent, able to advance the agenda, school-to-career agenda, as well as workforce development.”
The quasi-public organization’s board of directors is meeting this week to discuss succession plans.
After contending with lots of turnover during the pandemic – a challenge faced by many organizations – Sullivan said the PIC is now fully staffed, made up of 55 percent people of color and 62 percent women, a modeling of the attention to racial and gender equity that employers are often asked to consider.
Given the Boston mayor’s influence over the nonprofit through the appointment of its board members, Wu administration officials will work with the nonprofit to find the next executive director, who will be paid a six-figure salary. According to the most recent public filings from the nonprofit, Sullivan earned nearly $200,000 in 2022.
Wu called Sullivan, who lives in the city’s Dorchester neighborhood, the “definition of a committed Bostonian.” The summer jobs program is a lasting legacy, she said, “and his unwavering support of the city and the Boston Public Schools is deeply appreciated by me and all the mayors who have been lucky enough to work with Neil.”
The summer jobs program isn’t the nonprofit’s only focus, but it’s the one that receives the most attention. This past summer, the nonprofit helped thousands of young people get paid jobs and internships, including 700 students at financial firms, hospitals and tech companies. More than 330 students worked in health care, with several employed at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, while 130 interns worked at Bank of America, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and John Hancock.
“We’re placing students in professional environments that they would never see at 16 or 17 if it were not for the mayor’s summer jobs programs,” Sullivan said.
The Boston PIC, which is the city’s workforce development agency, has an annual operating budget of $7.3 million, and also handles $3.4 million in student wages, as well as grants. The PIC is also the chartering authority for career centers in the city.
Jim Rooney, the head of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and a former Menino aide, said the impetus behind the summer jobs program was keeping young people out of trouble and putting a few dollars in their pockets, while at the same time tying together the business community and schools. “Trying to build meaningful relationships and partnerships between the business community and government from an employment perspective, and a talent perspective – he’s dedicated his life to it,” Rooney said of Sullivan.
Boston Mayor Ray Flynn and his aide, Neil Sullivan, at the US Capitol in 1985. (Photo via City of Boston Archives)
Sullivan said the summer jobs program predates him, going back to Mayor Kevin White’s last term, when employing young people was a priority for the corporate community. Sullivan quipped that when he is in a room with 40-somethings who introduce themselves as entrepreneurs and founders, he describes himself by saying, “I’m not a founder, I’m a sustainer.”
Sullivan, as the chief policy advisor to White’s successor, Ray Flynn, inherited youth jobs as part of his overall portfolio when he started in the new administration in 1984. He came to Massachusetts for college in 1970, and more than a decade later he was helping to put in place Flynn’s neighborhood-focused policy agenda, including a commitment to summer youth jobs.
“From the beginning, I’ve always felt youth employment needed to be a signature mayoral priority, and the PIC could play a key role in that,” Sullivan said. “And fortunately, each successive mayor has embraced the summer jobs campaign as one of his or her top priorities, and Boston has a focus on summer jobs unlike any city in the country, particularly on the private sector side.”
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