26 Philly students are tour guides pointing visitors around town this summer

Philadelphia students are among the friendly faces welcoming the expected more than 1 million visitors to the city this summer.

Youth from Ss. Neumann Goretti High School and Girard Academic Music Program are official staff greeting tourists and giving directions and Philly recommendations over six weeks.

Planning for the huge undertaking of celebrating America’s 250th birthday in its birthplace began years ago, and Kathryn Ott Lovell, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Visitor Center Corporation, knew that she needed reinforcements.

“It was going to be hard to scale our mission and reach as an organization, short of building a visitor center on every corner,” said Lovell.

Enter the Phambassadors, a corps of 10,000 Philadelphians who volunteer to be a welcome wagon of sorts for the tourists arriving in town, some of whom were trained via a Philly-themed boot camp. Lovell, who “was born with this irrational love for Philly,” she said, arbitrarily picked the number 10,000, she said, hoping to attract that number of volunteers by the end of the year. Visit Philly got there months ahead of schedule.

And when Lovell heard that Neumann Goretti had launched a hospitality program, creating the Youth Phambassador corps felt like a natural extension, both as a way to expand the welcome wagon and a means to help develop the next generation of tourism and hospitality professionals.

Lovell, Philadelphia’s former Parks and Recreation Commissioner, wanted to make it a paid opportunity, a city summer program with training and a stipend for participating students. Twenty Neumann Goretti students signed on, plus six students from GAMP, the South Philadelphia magnet school.

Training was held this month for the 26 Youth Phambassadors to learn both soft skills and hard skills — customer service, visitor engagement, and even citizen diplomacy via the World Affairs Council.

The Youth Phambassadors, who are working with an adult supervisor, are stationed both inside the Visitor Center at Sixth and Market Streets and around the historic district.

The hope is to have the students show off the city, but also “that it’s a portal into the hospitality and tourism world for the kids as they have a really wonderful experience,” Lovell said.