ORANGE — The 16-year-old leaned into his shovel, its point driving into the earth around the perennial. The boy repeated the process around the plant, a pink-blossomed tall phlox, and then he pried it up, grabbed it by its stem, and transferred it to a soil-filled bucket sitting in a shaded wheelbarrow.

Salvaging perennials from a defunct mini-golf course has been one of Joe Erali’s many tasks at Gelinas Companies, which works in landscaping, lawn maintenance, waste and recycling. It’s a summer job — Erali’s first — and it’s also part of a federally-funded program to get area teens working.

Erali, who lives in Orange and Athol, is one of 60 teenagers in Orange, Ware and Turners Falls working paid internships this summer through the Summer Jobs and Beyond program. A collaboration between Community Action and the Franklin Hampshire Regional Employment Board, SJB gives incoming high school juniors and seniors a chance to join the workforce.

“If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be hounding my parents for money,” Erali said. His truck, a 1999 Mazda B4000, needs a couple of repairs, which he wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise. “I’m trying to get my truck on the road. Other than that, I’d be bored out of my mind.”

Holly Kosisky, the assistant director for youth programs at Community Action, said the program prioritizes kids who might experience barriers to successful employment — kids who come from low-income families, or who have disabilities, or who have been in the foster care system.

Three weeks into the program, she said, employers have been excited about the work the teens are doing, and the teens have learned basic, essential workplace skills, like taking initiative and communicating well with bosses and co-workers.

“I think it’s really valuable for them to have that early experience,” she said.

Erali has no interest in going into landscaping as a career, he said — he wants to work with the mechanics of automobiles. Even so, the skills he’s learning at Gelinas, like working a register and interacting with customers, can transfer to a variety of jobs.

For 16-year-old Danelle Gravel, the program has offered a new potential career path. Before starting at the Ware River News, where she writes a column about teenage-dom, takes photos and works with the paper’s archives, she’d published stories on the website fanfiction.net and was only interested in writing fiction.

“At first, I wasn’t sure if I’d be OK with writing about real stuff,” she said. “But now that I’ve been working for a while, I love it.”

Going into her senior year, she now wants to work at a newspaper or magazine someday.

Meanwhile, the employers have been impressed — even pleasantly surprised — by the work ethic of the interns. Eileen Kennedy, the editor of the Ware River News, said she’s been impressed by how eager Gravel has been to immerse herself in the job.

Erali’s supervisor, Shelly St. Cyr, said the teenager’s work ethic — he worked consistently through a week of 90-plus-degree weather, something that would’ve slowed down many more experienced workers — changed how the company’s owner views the youth of today.

“One of the things that Mike Gelinas has said is that it’s a fresh breath of air to have a different idea of what youth are,” St. Cyr said.

Summer Jobs and Beyond is in the first year of a two-year pilot run, Kosisky said. Next year, the directors hope to have more than 100 teens placed at jobs.

Erali said he thinks the program could be valuable to plenty of kids his age. He’s made friends through the program, he’s learned how to work and he’s seen that the people running the program care about his well-being — through getting him the job, and through measures like providing him with work clothes he’ll be able to keep after the internship ends.

“There’s just so much kids my age could learn from this,” he said.