Happening at NYEC – May 2026 Newsletter

Beyond Hiring — Dallas Regional Chamber and NYEC Connect Employers, Education, and Young Talent

On April 30, NYEC and the Dallas Regional Chamber convened college presidents, employers, training providers, and workforce leaders in Dallas to tackle a shared challenge: how to better connect young adults to meaningful careers while helping employers build sustainable talent pipelines. The conversation was candid and wide-ranging — and the themes that emerged were consistent.

Participants emphasized that the challenge doesn’t end with hiring. Supporting young people in successfully transitioning into and staying in the workplace is equally important, and there is a clear gap between the high-touch support provided in education and training environments and the expectations of the workplace. This disconnect impacts both early success and long-term retention.

Participants also highlighted opportunities to deepen employer engagement in talent development — moving beyond traditional hiring practices to more actively support early-career talent through structured onboarding, mentorship, and transparent career pathways. At the same time, fragmentation across K–12, postsecondary, workforce, and employer systems continues to limit pipeline effectiveness. Early pipeline coordination remains a critical gap.

The roundtable reinforced a message NYEC hears consistently across communities: workforce challenges are local and interconnected, and no single organization can address them alone. Stronger coordination across education, workforce, and industry is essential to building effective and sustainable talent pipelines for young people.

From Insight to Impact — Building Boston’s Youth Housing and Employment Ecosystem Together

Boston has remarkable programs, committed partners, and young people full of potential. What this next phase is about is strengthening the connections between them.

After a rich community listening phase — in which stakeholders across housing, workforce, and education showed up with energy, ideas, and a genuine commitment to building something together — NYEC and partners are moving into the next chapter of the Boston Employment and Housing Stability Project. The listening phase was not a prelude to the real work. It was the foundation of it. The insights gathered from practitioners and community leaders across the city are now shaping every decision about what comes next.

This June, the initiative moves into a structured phase of ecosystem evaluation, asset mapping, and collaborative strategic planning — with implementation to follow. The goal is not to build something new on top of what already exists, but to deepen the coordination between strong organizations that are already doing meaningful work. Together, partners will build a shared understanding of the landscape, identify opportunities to strengthen connections, and co-create a strategic plan grounded in the community’s own priorities.

Boston’s partners came to the table ready. That readiness is the foundation everything else is built on. We are honored to be part of this work alongside them, and we look forward to sharing more as it unfolds.

Building a Statewide Youth Ecosystem — Connecticut

What does it take to build a truly coordinated statewide system for disconnected youth? NYEC is working to find out in Connecticut. The CT Youth Ecosystem initiative emerged from a clear and consistent message heard across NYEC-facilitated roundtable discussions with youth, workforce organizations, and state agencies throughout 2025 — and grounded in research from the Dalio Education and Unspoken Crisis reports: the resources exist, but the connections between them don’t.

Building a statewide ecosystem means more than convening partners around a table. It means creating sustained structures for alignment — spaces where youth voices inform system design, where data flows across organizations rather than sitting in silos, and where workforce, education, and housing partners are working from a shared map of what exists and what’s missing. That work is actively underway in Connecticut, with three upcoming convenings:

Gathering in Montgomery — NYEC at the Aspen Opportunity Youth Forum

Some convenings stay with you long after you leave the room. The Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions’ Spring 2026 gathering in Montgomery, Alabama was one of them.

NYEC Executive Director Mimi Haley and Director of Community Impact Sheridan Nixon joined leaders from across the opportunity youth field at the Legacy Sites — a place where history is not distant, but present. The theme, From Legacy to Liberation: Truth, Transformation, and a Collective Future, set a tone that was both deeply personal and unmistakably urgent.

We were honored to be in the room with Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and Alaina Bloodworth, Executive Director of the Black Public Defender Association, among so many others committed to truth-telling and transformation in the lives of young people.

Montgomery asked something of everyone who came. NYEC left with renewed purpose and deepened relationships, and we are grateful to the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions for creating the space for that kind of reflection.