This session track focuses on best practices for engaging young adults, youth-serving professionals, employers, and other stakeholders to create and sustain equitable work environments for youth. Attendees will be able to gain tangible tactics they can use in their local areas to engage their elected officials, employers, and advocates to improve local youth employment issues.  

With shifts toward remote learning and work-from-home, this session track will focus on the future of work as it pertains to the virtual environment. Attendees will gain knowledge about closing the digital skills gap, creating effective virtual work environments, and forming new virtual employer partnerships.   

This session track will focus on best practices to address the pervasive youth mental health crisis. The mental health crisis has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and requires bold innovative solutions to adequately address it. Attendees will be able to implement a wealth of mental health tools, activities, and metrics in their communities from the sessions in this track.  

This session track will highlight topics on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility within the employment space. Attendees will take away best practices to adequately integrate DEIA practices into their organizations, ensure equitable opportunities for youth, address hidden biases, and implement effective evaluation methods for their DEIA goals.  

This session track will showcase innovative practices in data collection, use, and analysis. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about new ways to assess youth, utilize virtual options to reach youth, and capture new data that can enable personalized offerings for youth. Communities are also using data to prioritize populations, understand if they are making a difference, and track their progress in serving disconnected young people. Attendees will be able to problem-solve ways in which we can use data to improve and modify service delivery systems.  

The session track will channel creative means to change the narrative around young adults who are disconnected from school and work. Too frequently, young adults are framed as offenders of violence, deserving of low-wage work, and/or lacking work ethic as compared to previous generations. Young people seeking attachment to work are seeking to use their assets to better their lives and the community around them. Attendees will leave equipped with updated data, stories, and narrative angles to combat the disparaging misconceptions surrounding Opportunity Youth.   

Community-based organizations, local workforce development boards, intermediary organizations, and local elected officials are working to create cohesive ecosystems that provide high-quality services and are easy for young people to navigate. Sessions in this track will address initiatives led by local elected officials, collective-impact or functional-zero approaches, youth-led leadership and advisory bodies, and data-sharing efforts.  

This session track will tackle the intersection of a quickly-changing job market, burgeoning new career paths such as green jobs, cybersecurity, and infrastructure, and how we can create effective employer partnerships to boost career prospects of Opportunity youth in these new fields.