Youth Employment is:
The National Youth Employment Coalition improves the lives of the more than 4.9 million young people who are out of school and out of work.
Unique in the opportunity-youth space, NYEC represents organizations that serve and study opportunity youth, bringing the wisdom of practitioners to policymakers and the fields of workforce development, education, youth development, and rehabilitation services.
NYEC represents and speaks for organizations that are the leaders in serving opportunity youth – and those that are at earlier stages of the journey.
Practice
NYEC keeps the field up to date on recent innovations in practice and the latest research on service models.
Through briefs, webinars, convenings, and online forums, NYEC creates a practitioner learning community that scales best practices – and improves the systems that serve opportunity youth. Stay updated with the latest from the field via our monthly workshops!
- March 2021: Taking Stock and Seizing the Moment around SYEP (CLASP/NYEC/National League of Cities/Aspen Institute)
- February 2021: Building in Social Capital for Economic Empowerment and Achievement in Youth-Serving Organizations (Social Capital Builders)
- February 2021: Innovating Together for 2021 Summer Internships (DC Prep)
- February 2021: Youth Perspectives on Civic Engagement and Next Steps Across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Center for Teen Empowerment)
- January 2021: Best Practices for Running Remote Internships (Symba)
- November 2020: Election Debrief
- October 2020: Administering SYEP During COVID-19 Panel Discussion (Systems perspective)
- September 2020: Delivering SYEP During COVID-19 Panel Discussion (Providers perspective)
- August 2020: Even During COVID-19, Compass Rose Helps Youth Navigate Past Incarceration (Caitlin Dawkins | Program Manager, FHI 360 National Institute for Work and Learning)
- July 2020: Let's Create a Culture of Empowerment & Success! (Grant Loveless, Youth Leader, Social Media Guru & Digital Storyteller)
- June 2020: The Pandemic Recession and Reopening on Georgia's Young Adult Workers (Alex Camardelle, Senior Policy Analyst at the Georgia Budget & Policy Institute)
- May 2020: Labor Market Implications of COVID-19 on Young Adult Workers (Martha Ross, Fellow at the Brookings Institution)
- April 2020: Virtual Services Workshop (Pathway Consultants)
- March 2020: How to Go From Placement to Engagement with Employers (Larry Robbin and Associates)
- February 2020: Improving Workforce Outcomes & Trauma-Informed Care (Sarah Bocinski Futures Without Violence)
- January 2020: Opioids and Race (Isha Weerasinghe CLASP)
Capacity Building
NYEC builds its members’ capacity on two levels: professional development for youth workers and organizational development for agencies.
NYEC professional development products translate research to advance practitioners’ work.
NYEC’s deep expertise in improving organizations’ quality of service, such as through the PEPNet project, helps organizations implement best practices, expand their reach, and adapt to changing policy contexts.
Advocacy
As an aggregator and curator of proven, emerging, and promising practices, NYEC promotes models supported by members and the research base.
NYEC also serves as a unique line of communication between practitioners and policy makers. NYEC gathers and shares members’ input with policymakers, to infuse policy with the practical wisdom of those on the front lines. NYEC maintains an advocacy presence at the federal level, both advocating for its own policy recommendations as well as advancing policy solutions through cross-sector coalitions that move the youth-development field forward.
Finally, NYEC organizes opportunities for public dialogue between policy makers and the field at forums and in webinars.
Policy
NYEC regularly solicits the views of members on how policy affects their service to youth, which serves as the basis for its policy work.
In partnership with allies, NYEC analyzes policy developments that affect opportunity youth, including in the areas of workforce development, K-12 and higher education, and human services.
These analyses, rooted in the experience of practitioners, inform policy recommendations at the federal, state, and local levels.
Current Projects
Youth Champion Communities: Mayors Challenge
NYEC’s Mayors Challenge seeks to answer the question, “What does a community that best supports its youth and young adults look like?” NYEC will help City Teams, defined by each participating community, to examine their youth/young adult population, with attention to risk and protective factors related to violence prevention. City Teams will include key Mayoral staff, Workforce development agencies and community organizations, and young adults with lived experience of disconnection.
We'll evaluate the ecosystem of programs serving young people, including data capacity, system performance, community challenges, and opportunity gaps. We'll focus on vulnerable youth populations; disconnected youth, justice-impacted youth (including children of incarcerated parents), youth experiencing homelessness, parenting youth, survivors of trafficking, LGBTQ+ youth, and youth with disabilities. NYEC will engage field experts to work with City Teams. Building on the existing evidence base, these teams will define the components of a holistic Youth Champion Framework that uplifts the practices and policies needed for young people to thrive, and the tools needed to help communities achieve the framework
Youth Homelessness
Liberty Mutual has provided NYEC with a grant to develop a Community of Practice (CoP) focused on Youth Homelessness and Employment. The CoP brings together ten cities across the country to share innovative practices related to youth homelessness/employment, and to enhance collaboration between housing and workforce.
In meeting with housing and employment organizations in each of the participating cities, NYEC has repeatedly heard about the challenges in establishing effective collaboration between housing and workforce organizations. Young people experiencing homelessness often need help securing their housing and obtaining employment, making collaboration between these fields critical to their success. This Community of Practice aims to boost collaboration, overcome challenges, and help young people experiencing homelessness get both of these needs met.
Employer Engagement
- Gain perspective from the key takeaways of the focus groups on questions related to data use, employer partnerships, current community advancements, available resources, and ideal future practices.
- Understand the shared successes and challenges facing youth, service providers, and employers.
- Dive into 11 identified themes to advance employer engagement and strengthen partnerships on a community level. These emerging themes include items such as tracking opportunity talent, assessing challenges youth face and adopting best practices to best support them, creating an opportunity talent clearinghouse, and more.
National Alliance of Youth and Young Adult Advocates
For decades, the United States has not had an integrated or comprehensive vision for the transition to adulthood and how youth and young adults pursue their goals, achieve stability, and create the lives that they want. We know what young people need, that proven programs can fill in gaps, and that the American public is anxious about the fate of our youth. Though the COVID-19 pandemic has opened a policy window for considering solutions of comprehensive scale, youth and young adults have not benefited.
NYEC is working to tackle this challenge through work in four areas:
1. Narrative change: With young people, partners, and the media, we will build on existing narrative change efforts to tell a new story about the transition to adulthood.
2. Data and research: Working with researchers, data scientists, and data users, we will identify data and research projects that will change the services and opportunities available to young people – and make the case that policy change is needed.
3. Coalition and field building: Many wonderful and strong coalitions exist to advocate for and on behalf of youth and young adults. We will facilitate connections among these coalitions at the local and national levels, harness new grassroots enthusiasm, and increase the capacity for young people and youth workers to engage in this work.
4. Policy advocacy: With young people, we will pursue shared policy goals, increase the prominence of youth and young adults across policy debates, and create the right configurations to increase receptivity among policymakers.
This framework guides NYEC’s approach to policy and systems change, and impacts many aspects of our work, from Capitol Hill to our convenings.
In March 2023, NYEC helped launch a National Alliance of Youth and Young Adult Advocates (NAYYAA), also organized around making progress in these four areas. Other core NAYYAA partners include:
1. The American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) — in partnership with young people — educates, engages, and informs policymakers, practitioners, and researchers about education, youth, and workforce policies to improve the lives and outcomes of youth marginalized by systemic inequities.
2. The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) works to develop and implement federal, state, and local policies (in legislation, regulation, and on the ground) that reduce poverty, improve the lives of people with low income, and create pathways to economic security for everyone.
3. The National Youth Employment Coalition (NYEC) improves the lives of the more than four million young people who are out of school and out of work (opportunity youth), by building the capacity of young people themselves, youth-serving organizations, and advocates.
4. The Aspen Institute Opportunity Youth Forum (OYF) is a network of over three dozen urban, rural, and tribal communities seeking to scale reconnection pathways that achieve better outcomes in education and employment for opportunity youth. OYF is part of the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions (FCS).
5. Opportunity Youth United (OYU) is a national movement of young leaders who have decided to join forces to increase opportunity and decrease poverty in America.
6. The Corps Network (TCN) advances programs that transform young people’s lives and communities through career development, conservation, and civic engagement.
Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP) Fellowship Program
NYEC, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the School & Main Institute are collaborating to facilitate the national Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP) Youth Fellowship program. Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP)™ is an initiative to increase employment and educational opportunities for young people, ages 14 to 25, who are in foster care or involved in the criminal justice system, or who are homeless.
The LEAP Youth Fellowship program was created to provide leadership development and other opportunities to a select group of LEAP participants. Each year, LEAP participants are invited to apply for the Fellowship and 6-7 youth are selected. Throughout the Fellowship, these young people participate in learning opportunities, conferences, research and evaluation activities, and are invited to design and implement a passion project. NYEC provides administrative support, hosts and provides content for monthly meetings, and connects LEAP Fellows to additional leadership opportunities.
Justice-Impacted Youth
In early 2023, the National Youth Employment Coalition (NYEC) and the Urban Institute (Urban) partnered together to explore cross-system collaboratives that promote workforce development and better provide labor market opportunities for young people impacted by the justice system. The Annie E. Casey Foundation (the Foundation), provided funding for this effort to learn from existing broad-based city and/or county collaborations that seek to expand and improve economic, labor market, and workforce development opportunities for youth who have been involved in the justice system. This work represents an effort to build on recommendations from the June 2022 Workforce Development and Youth Justice Consultative Session, hosted by the Foundation and Urban.
This project looks at five collaborative efforts across the country to examine and compare their approaches to collaboration in the Justice Impacted Youth space. The goal of this work is to help bridge the gap between research and practice for individuals in the youth justice and workforce space and provide a deeper understanding of current cross-collaboration efforts. This report documents successful efforts while offering recommendations for those seeking improvement.
Young Adults in Economic Recovery Legislation
From spring 2019 to spring 2020, unemployment among young adults spiked from 8.4% to 24.4%. As many as one in three young adults may now fall into the opportunity youth group, or over 10 million people.
NYEC, along with Heartland Alliance, CLASP and several other national organizations are working on a bi-partisan basis with Congress, the Biden Administration, other stakeholders to shape federal recovery packages. Our March 2020 recommendations for economic support for Opportunity Youth can be found here. More recently, NYEC has been urging Congress to prioritize youth in future recovery plans such as the American Jobs Plan [subsidized jobs sign-on letter & youth sign-on letter].
Past Projects
Mental Health
NYEC released its report: Identifying Gaps in Youth Employment Programs’ Capacity to Address Youth Mental Health Needs. The National Youth Employment Coalition (NYEC), in partnership with its member agencies, youth providers, academic institutions, and other partners, deployed a national survey in March 2022 to understand the readiness of youth programs across the US to respond to the youth mental health crisis; the processes and systems providers have in place to fight the crisis; and what supports they need to combat this ongoing, life-threatening challenge. This nationwide survey and report received responses from 564 organizations across 49 of the 50 states along with 3 focus groups comprised of the youth that the respondents serve. This report identifies the many challenges practitioners face on micro and macro levels, insights into what young people are experiencing, and the types of interventions and support that are needed. Thank you to the Annie E. Casey Foundation for funding this important project, and we look forward to addressing these gaps and ensuring the progression of addressing the needs identified by both practitioners and youth.
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Youth Justice & Employment Community of Practice
NYEC was very excited to collaborate with the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Pretrial Justice Institute in working with 10 cities to improve outcomes for youth with justice-involvement. A major goal of this project was to strengthen the bridge between courts, juvenile justice, and youth employment programs; bringing to life some of the findings in the NYEC toolkit. Between July 2021-June 2022 our Community of Practice has brought together juvenile justice officials, workforce-development officials and youth-leaders who have worked to build formal and long-lasting collaboration between both systems. Topics covered in our monthly sessions include, “Implementing Effective Mental Health Practices in Programs,” “Leveraging Violence Prevention Efforts for Youth Employment,” “Enacting Youth Leadership,” and “Strategies to Maximize Employer Connections.” Each community and youth participant has brought incredible insights and ideas for improving collaboration and outcomes. The Community of Practice exists in the following cities:
- Camden
- Philadelphia
- Baltimore
- St. Louis
- Atlanta
- Birmingham
- Phoenix
- Seattle
- Tacoma, WA
- San Francisco
Youth with Justice Involvement Toolkit
In December 2020, the National Youth Employment Coalition, with support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, has released Job Training for Youth with Justice Involvement: A Toolkit. The toolkit will help leaders and practitioners in both the juvenile justice system and workforce development system collaborate to effectively serve youth with justice involvement. This toolkit, directed at practitioners and leaders in the juvenile-justice system and others with limited familiarity with the workforce development system:
- Outlines evidence-based practices in youth workforce development,
- Provides an overview of the workforce system funded under the federal WorkforceInnovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA),
- Makes recommendations for how to make WIOA-funded services work better foryouth with justice involvement at the local level, and
- Lays out some key steps to forming effective interagency partnerships.
The Green Economy & Youth Employment
The green economy- an economy in which forces of economic growth is tied to economic sustainability and responsibility- is poised to grow 10 million jobs in the US over the coming years. NYEC has partnered with several national agencies to drive discussions on what the growing green economy could mean for youth employment. Our ongoing working groups’ goals are to craft policies, principles and values of how this burgeoning economy will shape landscapes, localities and the lives of young people around the country.
Vocational Rehabilitation (VR)
Undocumented Young People
Young people without right-to-work documentation face unusual barriers to employment in the formal economy, further marginalizing them from American life. This problem is especially acute for young people who are not eligible for temporary protection under DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Supporting the transition to adulthood for these young people often requires creating unusual partnerships that integrate education, workforce-development, and legal services, while meeting the needs of young people and their families to make money. NYEC is uncovering and sharing emerging practices for serving undocumented young people not eligible for DACA, and identifying comprehensive policy solutions that will expand services to these young people. On Sept. 12-13, 2018, NYEC, with the support of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, convened a working session of California-based practitioners in Stockton.
Justice-Impacted Young People
For young adults who contact the juvenile- or criminal-justice system, lack of access to education, job training, and work experience is often a barrier to their successful transition to self-sufficiency. Young adults who were sentenced to out-of-home placements face even bigger barriers to employment. With the Youth Advocate Programs, Inc. (YAP), and the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), NYEC is in the second year of identifying paths to collaboration between juvenile-justice and workforce-development agencies. In 2017 NYEC and YAP released New Funds for Work: Connecting Systems for Justice-Involved Young People, documenting best practices and initial recommendations. We are currently piloting an approach of working with local agencies to arrive at commitments to action modeled on the 2017 report. On October 17, 2018, NYEC, YAP, AECF, and the local workforce development board convened local leaders in Camden County, New Jersey, to chart a better path for young people from the county who have been sentenced to out-of-home placements. In 2018 and 2019 NYEC seeks to release updated findings from this convening and translate the experiences of this project into a template for other jurisdictions to apply in their local context.
Employability Skills for Opportunity Youth
Whether called job readiness skills, college and career readiness, or employability skills, the youth-employment field is working hard to define what skills and mindsets young people need to thrive in the world of work. In 2017 NYEC convened a national working session to provide feedback on the new Tenacity employability skills curriculum developed by the District of Columbia Public Schools.