Integrated Community Solutions that make a difference in communities with dropout rates exceeding 50 percent, it will take interventions at scale to put young people back on track to re-engage them in school, work, and civic life. It will require constructive engagement of our youth service systems and our public and private resources to build these pathways to opportunities and support young people over time as they navigate from the streets to the programs and campuses, to the labor market, and to adult success. Youth opportunity grants should target low-income communities, foster community collaboration among multiple sectors, and adopt systemic approaches to re-enrolling dropouts into local charter or “back on track” schools or programs focused on dropout reengagement and preparation for the labor market.

Reward and Scale Up Effective Programs so Providers Can Open their Doors to Youth Stranded on Waiting Lists all existing comprehensive programs designed for opportunity youth that have been shown to be effective and have waiting lists should be expanded to welcome all the young people seeking a chance to get back on track. When programs are successful at reconnecting youth, they do not necessarily receive additional funding. the money the government saves by successfully reconnecting youth is often saved by a different program or agency than the one that served the youth. For example, if a program like the U.S. Department of labor’s YouthBuild program is able to successfully train and graduate a youth who was perhaps on food stamps or statistically more likely to commit a crime, the savings gained as a result of the youth no longer needing food stamps or not entering the juvenile justice system benefit these other agencies; they are not reinvested in YouthBuild. We need to turn that equation around by rewarding successful programs with more funding, which could be done at a fraction of the cost of the social services opportunity youth will otherwise need, so we can further reduce the need for government spending over these youth’s lifetimes and reduce the enormous costs to the taxpayer. Invest in programs for success initiatives ensure that savings are reinvested in scaling up successful programs.

Investing in the spread of effective programming is necessary but not sufficient. National investment is also needed to support the invention and piloting of new pathways to success for opportunity youth. Such investment can build on the creativity of local community-based organizations across the country that are on the front lines of serving these young people. The investing in EYRWI-type programs, YouthBuild and the City/County/State’s Workforce Programs are potential models for such an investment.

Disconnected Measurement Systems lead to Disconnected Youth as our call for integrated community solutions made clear, reconnecting opportunity youth requires a number of institutions, systems and organizations working together. To do so with precision, community leaders need rigorous data to hold decision-makers collectively accountable for results. Too often, instead of having one effective data and accountability system, communities have multiple fragmented data systems, each of which lacks the breadth and capacity to be used to drive overarching accountability for opportunity youth. These parallel data systems often make redundant technological expenditures, collect overlapping sets of information, and are built in ways that inhibit the flow and transfer of data among them. As a result, despite new resources devoted to data systems, most community leaders still do not have the information they need to be effective. In 2011, opportunity youth cost the taxpayer $93 Billion. Over their lifetimes, this cohort of opportunity youth Will cost taxpayers $1.6 trillion.

Communities often have multiple, fragmented efforts to serve opportunity youth, each governed by a separate federal policy which creates red tape and frustrates efforts by community leaders to align disjointed services into a coherent strategy to reconnect young people to productive adulthood. Most obvious are the differences in eligibility requirements for various federal programs, and different data management systems to measure demographics and impact.

Employers play an essential role in helping create career pathways for disconnected young adults. While some employers are actively providing career pathways for these young adults, incentives are needed to get more employers to the table as a partner in this critical role. The federal government took a small step in that direction by authorizing the disconnected youth opportunity tax credit (dyotc) in the American recovery and reinvestment act of 2010. The dyotc provided a tax credit to employers who hire an opportunity youth, as defined by the law. This approach needs to become permanent and, rather than just reward employers for hiring opportunity youth, it should include incentives for employers to provide a range of valuable experiences such as training and internship opportunities provided directly by an employer or in partnership with a community-based program. Another tool for employers is the youth employment toolkit being developed by the White house council for community solutions. the toolkit is a resource that helps companies build an engagement program for opportunity youth or expand on an existing program by focusing on activities that can provide opportunity youth with work-related skills, exposure to workplace experiences, and employment. It should be reauthorized in 2023 and beyond.

Bring Opportunity Youth to the table as policies are developed that affect their lives. Our survey showed that opportunity youth are more likely to respond to reconnection strategies that provide strong, integrated supports and treat them as part of the solution rather than the problem. It is important to recognize their responsibility and their voice in reconnecting to school or career training. The programs that engage them should likewise offer a place at the table for opportunity youth and successfully reconnected youth to incorporate their feedback and evaluation in refining programs that serve youth. The federal government could help by establishing a presidential youth council to empower disadvantaged youth across the country, and to ensure that scarce federal resources for youth programs are directed toward where they can bring the most benefit.

Support similar efforts at the state and local levels as was made clear by the 2003 White house task force on disadvantaged youth, the federal government runs hundreds of programs to serve children and youth ages 0-24, spread across at least 12 departments and agencies. Many of these efforts are essential and effective; however, they are not part of an integrated, strategic plan to help opportunity youth achieve successful adulthood and they too often work in silos that create barriers that frustrate outcomes. By creating a federal child and youth cabinet and publishing a cohesive national youth policy strategy, government could provide leadership that transcends silos, provides a clear vision for success for all efforts supporting children and youth, and helps communities implement holistic solutions that work.