Welcome

Welcome to John Hancock's new MLK Summer Scholars website. We hope this site provides you with the information you are looking for and we encourage you to check back often for updates.

Overview

Businesses cannot succeed in the City of Boston unless our community is also positioned for growth and success. That is why John Hancock, in partnership with The Boston Globe, Boston University and Partners HealthCare, created MLK Summer Scholars, a seven-week summer jobs program for Boston youth. With 650 participants in 2009, we believe MLK Summer Scholars is now the largest corporate-based summer jobs program in the nation.

Boston high school students can become great employees, entrepreneurs and professionals. They just need a chance, and we all have a stake in their success. Summer jobs improve lives and strengthen communities. Studies show that people who get early work experience as teens make more money as adults. Actually, early work experience has been shown to raise earnings over a lifetime by 10 to 20 percent.

In conjunction with Mayor Menino's City Summer Jobs program, MLK Summer Scholars puts young people to work over the summer, keeps them off the streets, helps put money back into our economy, and prepares a future generation of workers. Students spend the summer working at our respective organizations or at local non-profit agencies, with funding provided by John Hancock and Partners HealthCare.

Each opportunity offers a teenager with meaningful work experience in a career-oriented job. Along with gaining valuable paid summer work experience, students also attend weekly professional life skills workshops at Boston University on topics including personal finance, written communication, college preparation, leadership and responsibility.

We see in the faces of those we mentor an eagerness to learn, an ambition to succeed and, most importantly, hope. It's inspiring. When they talk with us about life, work and education, we realize we're just as lucky as them to be part of this program.

Won't you join us? Together, we can change lives and communities, one young person at a time. To find out how you can get involved, click on the appropriate link on the left.

For more information about John Hancock Financial Services, please visit www.johnhancock.com