In Focus: Pathways to Reconnection
Jan 04, 2013 | Permalink »
Philanthropic Effort Advances Youth Jobs
At a convening in December held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., Patrick McCarthy, President and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, asked a national audience of policymakers to reflect on their first job - their first pay check -- and to remember the confidence and pride those early work experiences instilled; the lessons learned on surviving in the real world; and the job and social skills, values, and expectations that were imparted. He asserted that these are values that last for a lifetime and are passed on to our own children. He reminded the audience that today, with youth employment rates at the lowest level in 60 years, so many youth, particularly youth of color, don't have access to jobs and early work experience during the important period from age 18 to 24 - exactly when they should be building the foundation for lifelong economic success.
Today, there are 6.5 million youth who are neither in school nor working and who face the prospect of chronic unemployment or underemployment throughout their adult life. With the December launch of its 2013 KIDS COUNT Report, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has joined several other major foundations in drawing attention to this youth employment challenge. The Foundation has released the report "Youth and Work: Restoring Teen and Young Adult Connections to Opportunity," which documents the dimensions of the challenge, provides state-by-state data on youth unemployment, and calls for the development of a national youth employment strategy that expands jobs and work opportunities and creates multiple pathways to reconnect these youth to employment. The Foundation has also released the video Opening Doors: Connecting America's Youth to Opportunity to feature young people sharing their own stories. The Annie E. Casey Foundation is adding their considerable influence to the growing number of foundations and national efforts to expand opportunity for our young people. Other important initiatives include the Robert Wood Johnson Forward Promise Initiative, OSF Campaign for Black Male Achievement, Campaign for Youth, Opportunity Nation, and the White House Council for Community Solutions.
The Casey report advances several recommendations that reinforce those from these and other groups involved in the national movement to support community-based strategies that align public, private, philanthropic, and community resources to implement comprehensive programming to address the education and labor market needs of youth outside the labor market mainstream. Hopefully, this heightened attention and advocacy will generate the public support needed to sufficiently fund strategies for addressing youth disconnection at scale.
Oct 01, 2012 | Permalink »
Transportation Policy: An Opportunity to Put More Black Men into Good Jobs
By Kisha Bird
"We need transformational policy reform in the transportation field in order to support good community jobs, access to jobs, and quality of life" - Anita M. Hairston, Senior Associate for Transportation Policy, PolicyLink
Transportation in America -- it represents our highways and our roads, our trains and our railroads, buses and trucks. Transportation -- it's how we get from point A to point B - to work, school, doctors' appointments and weekend baseball and football games. Transportation in America is public transit, too - it's SEPTA in Philadelphia, BART in the San Francisco Bay Area, MTA in New York City and WMATA in Washington, DC. It is as American as apple pie and essential to the connectivity of communities and the nation. I am reminded of this everyday as I commute to and from work on the X2 bus in Washington, DC. On the X2, which travels across the District from Ward 7 to Ward 1 from Minnesota Avenue to the White House, I see a diverse intersection of residents and riders. I am also struck by the number of non-white bus operators that greet me daily and transport me safely to my destination. And while I've never really considered why this was the case, my limited and anecdotal observations were reinforced at a recent congressional briefing hosted by the Economic Policy Institute on September 26, 2012, Transporting Black Men to Good Jobs: Transportation Infrastructure, Transportation Jobs, and Public Transit.
The briefing addressed both a timely and relevant topic aligned with CLASP's Youth Policy agenda - What is the potential of the transportation sector to deliver young men to futures of economic promise? How can industry sectors provide good jobs, good wages, and opportunity for advancement? What is the role that community must play in assembling the systems, funding, and resources to create pathways for young men? And what is the federal role in building community capacity? The briefing featured CLASP's Director of Youth Policy, Linda Harris, as moderator and several other experts in the field:
- Algernon Austin, Director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy at Economic Policy Institute
- Jeff Brooks, Administrative Vice President and Director of the Transit Division at Transport Workers Union of America
- Anita M. Hairston, Senior Associate for Transportation Policy at PolicyLink
- Michelle Holder, Senior Labor Market Analyst at Community Service Society of New York
- Brian Turner, Executive Director at Transportation Learning Center
Aug 03, 2012 | Permalink »
Raising the Visibility: Advancing Strategies to Improve Outcomes for Disconnected Youth
By Kisha Bird
In American communities - large, small, urban, rural, and suburban -- millions of young people are isolated from opportunities to realize their potential and participate fully in our society. An astounding 6.7 million youth ages 16 to 24 are disconnected from education, the labor market, and opportunity. America's youth are experiencing depression-era levels of unemployment, and we are losing significant ground with segments of our minority youth population. In particular, low-income young men of color are disproportionately affected by the current labor market, with fewer than one in five African-American and Latino young men having a job last month.
The Obama Administration has shown considerable leadership in this arena through the White House Council for Community Solutions and the Interagency Work Group on Disconnected Youth. The Department of Education's recent Request for Information on Strategies for Improving Outcomes for Disconnected Youth is also timely and necessary. In response to the request for information, CLASP submitted a set of comprehensive recommendations that we hope will lead to:
- continued visibility to the situation of this often forgotten segment of the youth population,
- advanced policies that support dropout recovery and the reengagement of youth in high-risk situations, and
- multiple federal funding streams that can create robust interventions to put youth on track to education, career, and life success.
It is important that these recent efforts are not one-time activities, but are launching points that will influence a broader vision of how federal policy can and should undergird local policy and program approaches for youth.