NYEC’s Mayors Challenge seeks to answer the question, “What does a community that best supports its youth and young adults truly look like?”
With the help of experts from around the country, and key mayoral staff, workforce agencies, and young adults with lived experience in six cities: San Antonio, Buffalo, Louisville, Indianapolis, Scranton, and Atlanta, NYEC is co-designing a Youth Champions Framework to comprehensively answer this question. Together, we are uplifting recommended actions every community can take when working with its youth/young adults), followed by specific practices, policies, and systems level collaborations from communities already doing an admirable job of supporting their young people.
From September, 2023 – February, 2024, we are convening partners together to co-design this Youth Champions Framework. This work includes…
- Visioning Sessions, dedicated to uplifting how communities can best support particular groups of youth and young adults, such as those involved in foster care, impacted by the justice system, identifying as LGBTQ, and more.
- Domain Discussions, dedicated to uplifting how communities can best support their youth and young adults in particular areas, such as employment, training, education, and more.
City Team Meetings, convening all partners across the six communities together to identify common challenges, brainstorm productive solutions, and provide feedback on the information collected so far.
During our Annual Forum, March 4-6, 2024, we will be releasing our finalized Youth Champions Framework. After that point, we are hoping to work with communities around the country to implement what we have learned.
Why a Mayor's Challenge?
The Covid pandemic has only intensified the need to expand services and support for Opportunity Youth, or young people who are disconnected from school and work. Young people face a crisis of disconnection: more young people are disconnected from school and work than before the pandemic, fewer young people are in the labor market, undergraduate enrollments are continuing to decline, and mental health among young people has deteriorated. Unfortunately, there now exists no tool for comprehensively evaluating the robustness of local service ecosystems for Opportunity Youth. Nor is there a network of local leaders that combines the efforts needed to holistically change the odds for young people: changing narratives; marshalling evidence; strengthening local capacity; and, of course, transforming the vision of local elected officials into systems transformation. NYEC is a membership association composed of public agencies, service providers, and local intermediaries. As such, we have a unique window into local ecosystems in communities across the nation. Through Youth Champion Communities: Mayors Challenge, NYEC is partnering with a group of mayors who have a strong vision for youth and young adults in their community.
The Mayors Challenge Will Define a Vision for Young People
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.
Rolling Out The Framework
The NYEC Annual Forum in March 2024 in Atlanta will serve as the official event to finalize, ratify, and kickoff the Youth Champion Cities Framework. This high-profile event will feature mayors, community leaders, young people, and federal and state partners from across the country. At the Annual Forum NYEC will: • Ensure participation of justice-impacted young people, Mayoral Planning Teams, and mayors and local leaders in the field. • Release a brief for the field detailing the Framework, summarizing the existing evidence base, innovations and new data that expands the evidence base, and recommendations for how cities can implement the Framework. The focus will be on building protective factors, such as access to career pathways and training; opportunities for internships and apprenticeships that lead to good jobs; and addressing barriers, including housing transportation, childcare, and mental health services and supports. • Convene a plenary roundtable of Mayoral Planning Teams to discuss elements of the Framework, plans to implement the
Moving Toward Implementation
NYEC plans to develop and deliver a baseline assessment, so that communities can compare how they measure up to the best practices and policies identified in our Youth Champion Framework. We hope to work with at least 13 communities in an initial implementation phase starting in 2024 to deliver this assessment, and to help them implement what we have learned through the development of our Framework.