What Do We Know About…Disconnected Youth?

Over six million Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 are not in school or working. Often known as disconnected or opportunity youth, they are among the upwards of fourteen million young adults who are only marginally or periodically in school or working. At the same time, several million young people have had almost no labor market or educational experience in the past year.

Youth and young adults represent the future of our country — our economy, our communities, our democracy — and it is in our best interest to help ensure that they’re engaged with and connected to school and jobs.

To that end, the Annie E. Casey Foundation asked Foundation Center to create a special collection on IssueLab about the group of young people known as disconnected youth. This new online resource houses nearly one hundred and forty recent reports, case studies, fact sheets, and evaluations focused on the challenges confronting youth today, as well as lessons and insights from the field.

The Casey Foundation's interest in these issues began in 2012, when we published Youth and Work: Restoring Teen and Young Adult Connections to Opportunity, signaling our recognition of the crisis facing young people and the need to create stronger pathways to education and jobs. Our commitment mirrored a national reawakening to the needs and aspirations of youth, including the White House Council for Community Solutions, the Aspen Forum for Community Solutions, and the Obama administration's My Brother's Keeper initiative to improve opportunities for boys and young men of color.

Casey acted on this expanded commitment to opportunity youth by launching two new initiatives — Generation Work and Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential — and by strengthening our longstanding Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative. All three focus on enabling more youth and young adults to succeed in school, secure good jobs and a steady paycheck, and become financially stable. More recently, we have invested in increasing access to summer learning and employment opportunities for young people in our hometown of Baltimore, as well as in research and evaluation aimed at identifying the most effective programs and strategies. In addition, we've supported the youth-focused efforts of our national policy and civic partners.

What has become clear over the past five years is that advocates for opportunity youth need to build on existing evidence, program models, and policies, even as we wrestle with new questions related to young people with firsthand experience of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, not to mention trauma; young parents; the role of social and family ties in the lives of disconnected youth; youth leadership; and the dramatically different outcomes we see among youth by race and ethnicity.

In this spirit of gathering lessons and asking new questions, we hope this collection on IssueLab will help promote the dissemination of promising practices in the field of opportunity youth and, eventually, grow to include more technical evaluation studies that build our overall evidence base.

Youth are our future. And we in the philanthropic, public, private, and nonprofit sectors must help them realize their aspirations by building multiple, effective pathways that enable them to succeed in school and in the labor market.

But this will only happen if we share and synthesize our knowledge in real time to create better investment strategies and choices.

Given its overall interest in building capacity and strengthening the field, philanthropy is well positioned to gather practice and research literature about programs and policies that support opportunity youth. Doing so will help ensure that nonprofits and other stakeholders have access to accurate, up-to-date information about what works for whom and what targets should guide future investment — while paving the way for the application of that knowledge on a broader scale benefiting many more young people.

The Casey Foundation is committed to continuing its youth initiatives and sharing lessons about promising strategies that promote tangible results and progress. We invite others to join us in this endeavor and look forward to contributions from our peers and partners in this work.

Bob Giloth is vice president of the Center for Economic Opportunity at the Annie E. Casey Foundation.