(Illustration by Hugo Herrera)
The COVID-19 pandemic hit communities of color in the United States with a disproportionate ferocity that exposed and exploited generations of inequity. For vulnerable youth and young adults residing in these communities—including young adults between the ages of 16 and 24 who were out of school and out of work (a population known as opportunity youth)—the impact of the pandemic was devastating. Despite a decades-long drop in the opportunity youth population, which decreased from 5.8 million to 4.4 million between 2011 and 2021, during the pandemic the number of opportunity youth rose dramatically to more than 6 million. But even before COVID, having more than 4 million youth disconnected from education and the economy was far too many. Unfortunately, without new dedicated pathways into education and careers, opportunity youth will experience reduced life outcomes, including double the chances of living in poverty and a less than 1 percent chance of ever getting a college degree.
The Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions’ Opportunity Youth Forum (OYF) was created to change the life trajectories of our country’s most vulnerable youth and young adults. At OYF, we invest in community-based, cross-system, and cross-sector collaboratives focused on building education and career pathways for opportunity youth. Our national network has grown to include 40 local collaboratives in urban, rural, and tribal communities that are home to more than 3 million young people. Using a collective impact approach and working in partnership with opportunity youth, local collaboratives led by a community-appointed backbone organization work in tandem to knit together the many systems that touch the lives of opportunity youth, including school districts, community colleges, workforce agencies, juvenile justice, and child welfare. Far too often, these systems allow young adults to fall between the cracks in their transition to adulthood. OYF invests in young people and their communities to deepen the infrastructure and capacity of collaboratives to improve outcomes for young people and future generations of low-income children and families.
As OYF approaches a decade of impact, we convened long-time partners from across our network, including young people, community leaders, national partners, philanthropic investors, and others, to reflect on the most salient lessons from the work thus far. These lessons are meant to assist community leaders who are considering a collective impact approach. Funders, policymakers, and system leaders can take our experiences to heart as they work together to improve outcomes for youth and young adults.
1. Driving Impact Requires Both a Local and National Strategy
From its inception, OYF has been deeply committed to both accelerating local progress and driving national impact. Central to this is a shared framework that the OYF network has refined over time, containing seven components:
- Collaborating for impact
- Building effective pathways
- Rigorous measurement and impact
- Developing supportive policies
- Leveraging funding for innovation
- Supporting youth leadership and youth-led change
- Advancing racial equity
Based on their local context, communities across the network design strategies that reconnect opportunity youth to education and careers, while focusing on each part of the framework as a key driver in improving youth outcomes. By being both non-prescriptive in how local communities approach youth reconnection strategies and clear about a framework that guides strategy and learning, communities across a range of geographies are able to leverage unique local assets to meet the needs of youth and young adults, and lessons can be aggregated to the national level.
This framework likewise informs OYF’s national efforts around learning and policy change. For instance, community leaders across the network have noted the transformative power of national content that is deeply resonant and spurs local action. National convenings are designed in collaboration with local partners and OYF staff. Community members of local teams attend convenings and identify the most pertinent lessons to mobilize local action. Communities have organized around a range of issues based on what’s shared at national convenings, including prioritizing postsecondary outcomes for boys and men of color in Boston, partnering with employers to hire undocumented youth in San Francisco, and securing more than $11 million in public funding to meet the needs of opportunity youth in South King County, Seattle. In Boston, a presentation from Tia Martinez and Arnold Chandler on ending the school-to-prison pipeline helped guide the local collaborative to make this issue a focus of their work.
OYF also emphasizes national policy change guided by local advocacy efforts. Given that OYF brings together national advocacy organizations working to unlock federal investments for opportunity youth, local communities are an important voice in identifying key sources of public funding. At the federal level, these efforts have led to reallocations within the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, so that additional funding was set aside and prioritized for opportunity youth. In Maine, local advocacy efforts aimed at improving outcomes for vulnerable youth and young adults led to the passing of LD 1683, legislation that allows foster care youth to continue receiving services through the age of 26, so long as they are enrolled in postsecondary education.
Philanthropy’s commitment of general support and flexible funding has enabled the national and local OYF to respond more effectively to the needs of opportunity youth. For instance, a consortium of philanthropies provided a minimum of four years of initial funding to OYF to support each participating community. These general support grants provided necessary operating funds that were flexible and allowed OYF backbone partners to hire and retain talented OYF “site leads” who could spend time and effort building strong local collaboratives and creating inroads into the many systems affecting the lives of opportunity youth. Flexible philanthropic resources have also allowed for targeted technical assistance to support learning. For example, OYF convenes communities of practice focused on the unique aspects of collective impact in a rural context and data sovereignty amongst tribal partners.
2. Shifting Power Requires Consistently Lifting Up Youth Voice and Leadership
When OYF extended its first invitation to community partners to apply for funding, the initiative required youth engagement and leadership to ensure people proximate to the issues designed solutions. Over time, policy makers, funders, system leaders, and other local and national stakeholders have recognized that young people must also play leadership roles at the system, collaborative, and policy levels—from youth advisory groups to youth testifying in policy forums. For instance, in Hopi, Arizona, the Hopi Community Foundation is deeply committed to ensuring Hopi-Tewa youth are part of every decision-making process of the Hopi Opportunity Youth Initiative (HOYI). The collaborative consistently consults the HOYI Youth Advisory Council, which is comprised of representatives of various youth groups across Hopi and overseen by a full-time youth liaison. When the collaborative was awarded a grant to support their work around innovation, they engaged in a strategic planning process to inventory jobs and employers on Hopi, all led by young people.
In several OYF communities, young people were initially not at the table, or their voices were not central in driving the work. To help build this capacity, OYF pursued several strategies to put youth at the center of collective impact partnerships in more meaningful ways. For example, community leaders demonstrating authentic youth engagement were convened—in partnership with young leaders—to share key lessons on how to move from basic youth engagement, which includes general feedback and youth consultation, to youth influencing program and system change, which is exemplified by youth leading on advocacy, determining funding and resource allocation, to young people informing program design and organizing for better, community-wide outcomes.
To deepen a national commitment to youth-led change, OYF joined national partners in founding Opportunity Youth United (OYU). OYU is a national network of young leaders—created by young people who were former opportunity youth—organized to influence local, state, and national policies that promote better outcomes for current opportunity youth. OYU works to expand public investment in opportunity youth to combat structural barriers, such as the school-to-prison pipeline or policies that marginalize immigrants. Over time, OYU aims to improve conditions for young people to lead on issues that are important to them, such as registering young people to vote or organizing to reform the youth justice system.
Finally, at both the national and local levels, words have power and can influence whether a collaborative is successful at accomplishing its goals. Based on input from young people, collaboratives have made progress on changing two narratives in their communities: 1) creating an asset-based frame of “opportunity youth” and 2) elevating recognition of the systemic, rather than individual, nature of challenges these youth face. Over the years OYF has worked in partnership with young adults to change language and perception of youth away from “disconnected,” “at risk,” “troubled,” and worse, toward “opportunity youth” and the unique assets and attributes these young people bring into the education and workforce sectors. With young people leading from the center of collaborative efforts, communities such as Los Angeles, Hartford, Connecticut, and Greenville, Mississippi, have seen employers use “opportunity youth” language to describe potential employees. In places like Philadelphia and Boston, local leaders running for public office have identified opportunity youth as a priority population and have committed resources to support their outcomes.
3. Racial Equity Is Critical to Improving Outcomes for Opportunity Youth
Across OYF, 88 percent of opportunity youth participating in partner programs are people of color. In other words, in order to meet the specific and unique needs of opportunity youth, it is critical that the network adopt and center a commitment to racial equity. From the first cross-community convening in 2012, OYF introduced a racial equity lens focused on structural racism. Since then, leaders of OYF remain steadfast in their commitment to addressing and dismantling historically racist policies that have created barriers to opportunity for our country’s most vulnerable young people. Collaboratives across the network are advancing racial equity in the following ways:
- Creating a culture of equity that guides local strategy
- Using data to understand disparities and inform priorities
- Setting universal goals and targeting strategies to improve outcomes for priority populations
Creating a culture of equity across and within local collaboratives requires cross-system and cross-sector partners to understand what equity is and what it looks like in practice. Some communities engage in “equity audits” and use other tools that help partners understand the flow of resources and whether resources reach neighborhoods and/or youth-serving partners with the greatest needs. For example, the Southern Maine Youth Transition Network used the Race Matters Institute Assessment to examine how they were advancing racial equity as a team of collaborative partners. The assessment led the network to engage in small, peer-led conversations and trainings examining the impact of a history of racism on their work. Other communities in the OYF national network bring equity into community-wide discussions of opportunity youth (or even broader discussions of youth, employment, or education) with local stakeholders, partners, and employers with a focus on how different sectors can address the most pressing needs of this population.
OYF collaborative partners also use disaggregated data to track the progress of young people entering and completing postsecondary education and achieving work readiness. By disaggregating this data by race, gender, and other indicators, communities can identify inequitable outcomes and suggest where resources and attention are most needed. For example, the Road Map Project has documented steady progress in improving student achievement from cradle through career in South King County, Seattle. However, despite this progress, disaggregated K-12 academic proficiency data demonstrated persistent gaps by race. Recognizing that universal, one-size-fits-all strategies do not work for opportunity youth, the collaborative designed unique and specific culturally based strategies to address the needs of different youth groups and close opportunity gaps. The collaborative’s ensuing “Equity Essentials” indicators included 1) equitable funding; 2) increase culturally relevant school climate and supports; 3) strong family engagement practices and functions; 4) increase access and dismantle barriers to opportunity; and 5) strong civil rights policies to meet the needs of their most vulnerable, underserved youth.
Collaboratives prioritize the education and career needs of youth and young adults based on race, gender, and other indicators to achieve community-wide impact for opportunity youth. This strategy paid off when OYF launched Opportunity Works in partnership with Jobs for the Future. As part of the partnership, seven OYF communities built pathways to postsecondary education and training with a priority focus on young men of color. An evaluation by Urban Institute found that Opportunity Works improved the postsecondary credential completion rate of participants seven times over the comparison group.
What’s Next for OYF?
Looking ahead, OYF will build a more just and inclusive future for our country’s most vulnerable youth and young adults by:
Building more paths forward for the current generation of young leaders while cultivating the next generation. Young leaders who have emerged in the last decade of OYF have begun to move into staff positions in national and local opportunity youth-focused organizations, and others have stepped into entrepreneurial roles and have founded organizations committed to equity and social justice. Overall, however, there has not been enough consistent cultivation of this talent as the next generation of organizational leadership emerges. In the years ahead, OYF will partner with other organizations and philanthropy to invest in these leaders and bring their vision for social justice and racial equity to the fore of the opportunity youth movement.
Infusing culturally affirming identity development throughout pathways and systems for opportunity youth. Across programs and at the systemic level, OYF will focus on shifting exclusionary-based approaches and system policies to be more welcoming to all races, ethnicities, and cultures, most especially Black, Latino, and Indigenous youth. We will lead with culturally affirming approaches aimed at supporting positive racial identity development. Some youth development programs have done this for decades; however, very few systems and major institutions take this approach.
Growing the opportunity youth movement nationally and globally. Building on the learning and momentum of Aspen’s network in the United States, the Global Opportunity Youth Network, which launched in late 2018, now includes nine communities in seven countries (São Paulo, Brazil; Bogotá, Colombia; Mexico City, Mexico; Mombasa, Kenya; eThekwini, South Africa; Thiès, Senegal; Pune, Ramgarh, and Barwani, India). Hundreds of partners and youth leaders have come together in local collaboratives to identify and address historic inequities and systemic barriers that impede the more than 3 million opportunity youth living in these communities from accessing life-sustaining work and career advancement opportunities. Together with our global partners, we will continue to look for ways to lift up youth voice and accelerate a US and global narrative that prioritizes equitable opportunity and catalyzes deep and broad-based systemic change for the next generation.
Building on Collective Wisdom
A long-term partner and investor in the Aspen OYF network, William Bell, president and CEO of Casey Family Programs, noted that “it is not possible to solve generational challenges on a grant-making timeline.” Bell’s call for long-term, multi-year investments that provide communities with general operating support to achieve both system change and metric impact reflects OYF’s theory of investment and strategy for achieving meaningful progress over time.
As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the network, we celebrate the progress communities have made in their efforts to meaningfully connect young adults of color to education and careers. At the same time, we lift up the broad range of geographical diversity, culturally relevant pathways, strategies to address structural racism, and deep commitment to centering the lived experiences, expertise, and wisdom of young people. These are shared values that align many of the communities in the national network.
A great deal of work remains to advance equitable outcomes for youth, especially young people of color. In the years ahead, we will expand and deepen partnerships with young people and communities. OYF will continue to drive narrative change, advance healing practices, promote culturally relevant interventions that center identity affirmation in programs, systems, and policies, and bolster youth organizing and youth-led change. We will build on the collective wisdom of the network to center intergenerational relationships, knowledge, and practices with an aim to achieve better outcomes for young people and communities of color.
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Read more stories by Monique Miles & Lili Allen.