Summer means ‘getting paid to have fun’ for a Kensington play captain

My Summer Job is a weekly series that explores the jobs of seasonal workers in Philadelphia. Each week, we’ll share stories from a typical day in the life of the people who make summer happen in the region.

Sheila De La Cruz, 18, is saving up for a laptop because they’ll need one for school this fall at the Community College of Philadelphia. Most of their friends are trying to earn money, too, working in customer service or retail jobs for the summer.

But “they don’t have jobs like this,” De La Cruz said, gesturing around as the group of Philadelphia play captains walked back to their home base, a church basement in Kensington. The group had just spent an hour on the playground at McPherson Square leading games and activities for local children.

The play captains initiative, led by community-based organization Fab Youth Philly, sends teenagers to locations in Kensington and West Philadelphia to lead safe and engaging activities for neighborhood children for five weeks of the summer. Most of their stops are on designated “Playstreets” — several hundred streets that are closed to traffic, where the city provides play equipment and lunches for the children who live nearby.

Fab Youth Philly trains play captains to lead activities at these designated spaces. Staff who supervise the teen workers each day watch over them as they walk between stops, carefully planning their routes and notifying neighbors about when the play captains will be around to lead activities.

De La Cruz, who recently graduated from Olney High School, is one of several teens who worked as a play captain last year and came back again this summer. The Inquirer joined De La Cruz for a morning in Kensington.

On a mid-July Wednesday morning, the Kensington play captains started their day in the basement of St. Philip’s United Methodist Church with waffles, followed by their daily professional development lesson: budgeting. These lessons are facilitated by adult staff and included in play captains’ paid hours. “For more than 85% of our teens, this is their first job experience; and we take that very seriously,” the program’s website says.

From there, they moved onto the daily rituals they use to prepare for their work. De La Cruz volunteered to share a motivational quote, from Richard Branson: “If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re too small.” It’s one they chose from a book of flash cards each play captain carries with them, containing game ideas, safety reminders, motivational quotes, and space for notes.

The play captains then broke up into small groups, who travel together each day to different play sites, each with an adult team leader and a cart full of play gear, crafts, and games. Before gathering their supplies, the play captains each share a goal for the day.

For De La Cruz, the day’s goal is “to learn the names of the kids on the streets.” It’s day three of the program, so they’re likely to meet some children who haven’t come out to play earlier in the week. By the end of the summer, all the kids know the play captains by name, they said, and the children appreciate it when the play captains know their names, too.

Once their cart was packed, the play captains in De La Cruz’s group started their longest walk of the day, from the church to McPherson Square.

The play captains arrived to a quiet playground, adjacent to the McPherson Library, where a few adults were checking the grounds and picking up trash.

The park has been known for heavy drug use, but several organizations have teamed up with the aim of making it a safe play area for neighborhood children. The role of play captains on is to kick off the fun each weekday for their five weeks in the job.

After the small crew parked their cart and set up a tent, team leader Johana Rahman reminded the play captains that even if nobody else was around, they should stay active and start up a game so other children arriving might want to join. As they played a game of keep-it-up, scrambling to keep a beach ball off the ground as long as possible, the teens giggled and gasped at each near-miss.

It wasn’t long before a few neighborhood kids joined in. De La Cruz broke off to help a toddler traverse the jungle gym and spent a few minutes on the swing set with a 4-year-old. While the play captains had been assertively inviting the older children on the playground to join their games, De La Cruz took a different approach with the tots, asking if they could join them in their activity and letting the youngsters take the lead.

“With the little kids you have to be softer,” they explained.

For some of the children, De La Cruz became a translator, repeating their fellow play captains’ game instructions from English to Spanish.

“It makes me happy” to speak with them, De La Cruz said. “I want them to understand and be involved.”

As their hour at McPherson was near its end, the play captains used every minute, starting one last game of bag-toss into a bucket. As the game heated up and the two teams kept a tight score, it was clear that De La Cruz and the other play captains were having as much fun as the younger neighbors they had pulled into the game.

“This is my job,” they said. “And it’s fun.”