A Recipe for Sweet Success

Photograph by Nina Berman/Aurora

Several times a week, a group of teenage girls swap their book bags for aprons and bake desserts at the Lower Eastside Girls Club, in New York. The program, Sweet Things, is one of many free after-school and weekend activities the club offers neighborhood girls ages 8 to 18.

Sweet Things produces not only baked goods but budding businesswomen, too. Under supervision, the girls order ingredients from vendors and handle e-mail orders from individuals and local cafes. The teenagers, who come mainly from low-income families, earn either $5 or $6 an hour, depending on how much experience they have. The dessert sales, which totaled $12,000 last year, cover the girls’ wages. Sweet Things participants must open a personal savings account and attend other club activities, including Thursday Night Chat Room, where health issues such as pregnancy prevention are discussed.

But the program’s draw is the fun part: mixing dough and icing cookies, as these girls are doing in preparation for Valentine’s Day next week.

For girls who don’t want to spend time in the kitchen, the club runs a basketball team, percussion class, and weekly poetry-discussion group, and it offers a one-on-one academic-mentor program, among other activities. About 300 girls visit the club each month.

“We see the Girls Club as a parallel family,” says Lyn Pentecost, executive director of the five-year-old organization. “We can offer them a lot of extra things, the kind of things an aunt would offer — an aunt with a lot of time to spend with you.”