Spotlight on Celeste Lavin
This 17-year-old is connecting teens with the job world.

At a time when many of her peers are worrying about the SATs and getting their driver’s licenses, Celeste Lavin, a 17-year-old junior at Lower Merion High School, is starting a company and organizing activists— as well as worrying about her SATs and getting her driver’s license.

Celeste likes to pride herself on being proactive. When she sees a problem, she tries to fix it. When she thinks something should happen, she goes ahead and does it.

When Celeste turned 16, she decided she was ready to move beyond her regular babysitting jobs, and find a job where she could earn a regular paycheck. But as Celeste set out to choose her first official job, she realized she didn’t know where to begin. A wide open job world seemed a bit overwhelming and intimidating.

Instead of giving up, Celeste sought help from her older brothers, who have earned paychecks doing everything from mowing lawns to serving ice cream. Celeste then expanded her job-related networking to approach a broad circle of acquaintances. Through her endeavors, Celeste discovered she was not alone in her lack of knowledge about the job search process. She decided to help her friends by passing on what she learned about first jobs to others through Myfirstpaycheck.com, a company she created with her 23-year-old brother, Austin.

Myfirstpaycheck.com connects employers seeking part-time employees with teens like Celeste who are looking for their first jobs. It’s a one-stop clearing house for potential job and volunteer opportunities for teens. Instead of walking around the mall, or going in and out of restaurants asking if the venues are hiring, teens can now search Celeste’s site to find what companies are hiring in their area, and learn how to apply.

Since the site launched, teens, employers and parents, along with many of Celeste’s friends, classmates and peers, have found jobs through www.myfirstpaycheck.com.

Recently expanded to the New York and Washington, D.C., areas, the site continually boasts new features to help make the job search process easier. Celeste and Austin realized that finding job openings was only a part of the difficulty that teens were facing. Most teens were also unaware how to complete a job application once they found places where they wanted to work. So now, along with job and volunteer opportunities, Myfirstpaycheck.com provides job advice and resources to help young people have a more successful job application process.

One of the most popular tools on the site is the resume builder (www.myfirstpaycheck.com/resume/index.html), which enables young adults to create a basic first resume quickly and easily.

Since the sight went live, organizations as varied as Roxborough YMCA, Michael Nutter’s Philadelphia Mayoral campaign, The Franklin Institute and retailer Five Below have posted job and volunteer opportunities. These listings, along with the job resources and advice on the site, make it increasingly possible for high school and college students to break into the work force, allowing young adults to gain valuable life skills while contributing to the community.

And Celeste does more than connect teens with job opportunities; she is also the national high school coordinator of the Student Global AIDS campaign (SGAC), a high school and college student-run organization that uses advocacy and action to fight AIDS. While involved in the local level, Celeste saw an opportunity to make a difference in the national organization. She now helps organize call-ins, protests, teach-ins and other events for students all over the country.

Celeste uses her blog (Myfirstpaycheck.typepad.com/celeste/) on myfirstpaycheck.com to further allow teenagers to flourish in the working world. For example, Celeste writes: “Sometimes when I mention Myfirstpaycheck.com to adults, they say that kids these days don’t want to work. We always hear about kids being thought of as lazy or apathetic. As a teen, I know this isn’t true. I know so many young people who are involved in politics, have jobs, or write or draw for periodicals. My point is that we have ideas. We have opinions. One way to express this to the adult world is writing letters to the editor. Newspapers offer the opportunity of responding to their articles. And the editors who publish them don’t care if you are 17 or 70. If you have something to say (that is relatively well written and relevant) then send it in!”

As her friends and other peers encounter new issues in the workplace, Celeste has written other blog posts that help these new employees understand a variety of complex concerns.

Celeste hopes to make an impact and inspire her peers through her leadership roles. She wants to show other young adults that they are only bound by their imagination, and can start companies, organize activists or do whatever they dream of to make a difference. Celeste believes that these experiences are just the beginning for her, too. She hopes to learn from her current roles in order to tackle bigger projects in the future, while continuing to grow Myfirstpaycheck.com nationwide and convince more young adults to become politically active.