Current Projects
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 Workforce
Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), - Makes recommendations for how to make WIOA-funded services work better for
youth with justice involvement at the local level, and - Lays out some key steps to forming effective interagency partnerships.Â
The National Youth Employment Coalition (NYEC) invites you to attend the 2020 Annual Forum on December 7-10 2020. The convening will bring together hundreds of policymakers, practitioners and young leaders for a four-day virtual convening.
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. Want to be included in our on-going discussions? Email Rashaun.bennett@nyec.org to join our meetings! Our new website is live and can be accessed here.Â
Vocational Rehabilitation (VR)
NYEC is a partner in the Youth Technical Assistance Center (Y-TAC). Y-TAC focuses on helping vocational rehabilitation (VR) agencies improve services for out-of-school youth with disabilities. Through Y-TAC, NYEC works to raise the quality of services delivered to young people. First, NYEC leads a process to update trainings being delivered to VR staff around the country. The trainings, based on the Institute for Educational Leadership’s YSP/KSA competencies, were originally developed 15 years ago to complement NYEC’s PEPNet standards. A second updated training module will be delivered in Virginia in December 2018. Second, NYEC has developed a series of toolkits to introduce VR staff to best practices in serving out-of-school youth and partner with other youth-serving agencies. The toolkits, which will soon be public, are bolstered by extensive case studies from across a dozen states.
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. View the final report here.
Justice-Involved 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.