Promising Practices in Work-Based Learning

Today's blog previews a new paper from the National Skills Coalition and the National Youth Employment Coalition on the promising practices in extending work based learning models to youth populations. You can find the full report, Promising Practices in Work-Based Learning for Youth, here!

As the U.S. labor market recovers from the Great Recession, businesses are hiring new workers and taking advantage of emerging opportunities. In fact, the unemployment rate is below five percent for the first time since 2007. Unfortunately, young workers are not benefitting from the improved economy at the same rate as the overall workforce.

People between the ages of 20-24 are unemployed at a rate nearly double the national average and the jobless rate for those between the ages of 16-19 is nearly triple the national rate. Disconnected and at-risk youth have more difficulty finding employment, earn less throughout their career, are more likely to be incarcerated, and are more likely to be young parents than their peers who are in school or working. Youth unemployment also leads to lost income tax revenue, a greater burden on safety net programs, and increased expenses associated with higher crime levels. Connecting these younger populations to high-quality employment and training opportunities is critical to ensure that the next generation of workers can access the same economic opportunities as generations before.

Interview with Eshauna Smith: DCAYA Beginnings

This fall, the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates turns 10! On September 26th, youth advocates, business leaders, and councilmembers will come together to celebrate the accomplishments of the past and our aspirations for the future. As a coalition, DCAYA’s story lies in the experiences of our members who make up the collective power of the alliance. Each week leading up to the 10-Year Anniversary Celebration, we will feature an interview from an advocate who helped build DCAYA into the strong coalition it is today.

This week we spoke with the founding Executive Director of DCAYA, Eshauna Smith, who is now the CEO of Urban Alliance.

Join us and Eshauna Smith at the celebration by purchasing tickets to the 10th Year Anniversary Celebration.

The following interview has been edited for length.

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How did you start working with youth?

My first stint was way back in college at UC Berkley. I was part of a group called the Black Recruitment and Retention Center. Berkley has a very small African American student population and at that time in the early 90’s – mid 90’s it was getting smaller, so this organization was created where current African American students would go out to high schools in the Bay area and do presentations inside the high school classrooms and support them by helping with college essays, FAFSAs, SAT Prep and those kinds of things. So that was my first real stint working with young people and the first real time that I recognized that me being at UC Berkley was a huge privilege and an opportunity, but one that did not come as a result of me. There were people before me who had been the first in their families to graduate and struggled at Berkley and that was the reason that I was able to be there. So there was something in me that said, “I need to figure out how I’m going to give back.”

How did you get into the policy realm?

Immediately after Berkley my first job was at the Boys and Girls Club in the Mission District of San Francisco. I was the Education Center Director and I was basically in charge of the tutoring center and that’s how I was again working with youth. Working there gave me a perspective – I had the opportunity to work at a brand new club that was the result of a campaign promise of San Francisco’s incoming mayor Willy Brown. One of his promises was that if he was elected he was going to build this brand new Boys and Girls Club in the Mission, which was a very, very poor part of San Francisco.

So he built this brand new club and I had the opportunity to be part of the first team of staff that was ever in this new club. It had a recording studio, it had a brand new gym, and it was this big pillar in the community and part of what I saw was “Oh, this came at the hands of this political piece,” and then I also got to see that the club was funded by various philanthropies like the Gap Foundation and so on. I started thinking, what’s behind these programs for young people? I really love young people, but maybe I want to see the other side of it: how did this club get here, where was the funding from, what where the politics behind it. So that drove me to apply to graduate school and I went and got a master’s degree in public affairs from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. That is where I then became exposed to systems change and how policies and legislation can positively impact a change and how it works and how the federal government works and how the cities are run. So that gave me the bug for policy work.

Then when I came to DC I was very lucky to be hired by the Moriah Fund which was my very first job out of graduate school at the age of 25.

How did you become involved with DCAYA?

I had been recruited and hired by Accenture after graduate school, and I thought I had it all together and I was going to be in this consulting job and I was going to be consulting for government agencies, so even though it wasn’t right in my sweet spot of social justice and policy work, I felt that it was a good compromise. I was thinking about all of these student loans I had to pay for and I come from a family that actually struggled with poverty as well, so I was like ok, this is going to be my way out. I got to DC and the company told me that they over-hired, so I had to start all over again to find employment.

I luckily landed at Moriah working for Rubie Coles who is one of the founders of the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates and Rubie hired me as a Junior Program Assistant to help her with her portfolio which was focused on poverty reduction in DC. As a result of working so closely with Rubie and the grantees that she had, I got a bird’s eye view and a serious, deep education on poverty in DC and the fact that there are two DCs. There’s the prestigious, wealthy DC, and then there is the DC that is struggling every single day right in the shadow of the Capitol with extreme poverty and not enough resources. 

Rubie had a really strong strategy, her focus was on trying to support women who were running their households by themselves and had children. So she thought: What were the supports you would line up around that female-headed household to then reduce poverty? I got this education and began working closely with grantees and so I met a lot of the founding directors of DCAYA: Metro Teen AIDS, Martha’s Table, Urban Alliance, etc. Then I left the Moriah Foundation and DC in 2003 with the notion that I would come back in 2006. When I came back, Rubie called me and she said they were starting something called the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates and they wanted to know if I would be interested in working with them. That’s how I first got started with DCAYA.

How did DCAYA shift to being policy-oriented on behalf of youth?

One of the first things I had to do was organize a youth-led forum around the mayoral campaign. We did the forum, which was hugely successful and had an amazing turn out by working in collaboration with the other youth organizing groups. The forum really put us on the map in that way. Folks understood that we weren’t trying to take over a particular space around youth organizing, that we were just trying to build a larger voice for young people and on behalf of young people.

I believe after that, we knew we had a lot of work to do as far as who we wanted to be, and what we really want to do. I think it was clear after the forum that we did want to continue to have youth leadership be a focus. We did some strategic planning over a three day session with executive directors, youth organizers, and anyone who was interested, about where DCAYA would focus. The result was that we were not going to be a youth-led organization, but we were going to have youth voice as a huge part of the movement. By working in conjunction with youth organizers and with our member organizations, DCAYA was going to be an adult coalition advocating on behalf of young people and with young people.

We then decided through that strategic planning process to focus on three areas: youth homelessness, strengthening out-of-school time programs, and youth employment.

What do you see in disconnected youth? What is the myth that you want to break?

For me it’s a myth around all at-risk youth, not just those who have disconnected, you know, there are spectrums, there are dropouts, kids who struggle with food insecurity, there’s a whole range. I think for me, the myth I would like to bust around at-risk youth is that it is absolutely not their fault. I feel like, a lot of us are born into families that for whatever reason, deal with a number of circumstances whether it be with poverty, domestic violence, drug abuse, food insecurity, where there’s just not enough support and it’s never that that family doesn’t want the best for that young person, but they are just not equipped to give that young person what they need and they are not equipped to leverage that young person’s talents. And I’m thinking of this personally. That was my exact same situation, where my family loved the hell out of me, but they were going through a lot of things that just didn’t allow them to, you know, find me extra sports, or any sports activities, or any extracurricular activities or find me jobs or point me in the right direction. They had a lot of stuff going on, unfortunately, with some of the things I just named, domestic violence and drug abuse and things. So I was kind of out there on my own and I think a lot of these young people are out there on their own. What saved me, and what I know has saved other young people, and what will be the thing that continues to save young people in the future, is when you have programs that are run by caring adults that actually get it. Adults who are really able to help these young people understand that they are special, that they are talented, and let them know that there are folks who believe that they can be more than they are right now and who can expose them to more. Because a lot of times, you can’t be what you don’t see. I just think that that is the myth I want to bust, that these young people are not in these situations because they want to be.

So then, what is the importance of DCAYA supporting these youth organizations across DC?

I think it’s the concept that many voices lift up the issues. You know, really, you can’t do this by yourself. I think DCAYA was founded-- and I know this for a fact actually-- the reason Rubie decided to bring all of these executive directors together is because she was saying to them “Look, I’m funding you guys individually and individually you’re doing great things. You’re meeting certain outcomes, you’re helping people, you’re meeting certain goals, but you are also coming back to me year after year with similar challenges.” I don’t think she felt that people were looking at, well how do you make long-lasting systemic change. That’s great to provide the services, we have to do that. But you also have to think about how we’re changing the infrastructure so that we do not have to keep fighting the same problems.

I think that her message to her grantees was that one of the ways you can combat these reoccurring problems is by collaborating more, because you can’t fight every single battle as a single organization. The reality is the only way to build that systemic change is for everyone to come together and to fight as one. Then, if you have a hundred groups saying “look you guys, disconnected youth needs to be a priority” eventually, that makes a difference. Now, there is a really strong network of EDs working together and as much as they may have wanted to do that, they were too busy focusing on just keeping their organizations afloat. What Rubie pushed them to do was pretty ground-breaking because all of them were not like “Yahoo! I’m ready to do this collaboration thing on top of the one million things on my to-do list.” It was really Rubie spending a lot of time talking to EDs and convincing them that this was the only way that our city is going to get better. This is the only way that we are going to make the city better for our young people and their families. So that’s what I think the power of DCAYA is, it’s this collective voice, which is where the power actually is.

What is your vision for DC?

We would be jealous of Philadelphia because there was a mayor who stood up and said “I will not allow for my city to treat young people like this. I will not allow for us to have a 50 – 60% dropout rate because that says more about us than it does about any of the young people dropping out.” I feel like DC was craving for such a leader.

So my vision for DC is “where do we find these champions who have influence” – in the business community, in the government sphere, in the philanthropic sphere, at the community level. How can we get them to get out there and say “This is not right”? It is not okay that youth are growing up like this and we are just sitting around and saying that we’re accepting this plight. My vision is that we create this set of champions that have real influence that continue to lead this vision forward. The idea goes beyond the mayor; there needs to always be a network that doesn’t turn over politically, that is in it for the long haul. That’s my hope. I hope that we will land on two, three, four, serious champions to say “It’s not ok that DC allows that only 62% of our kids are graduating high school on time today.”

What can they do for the city?

It’s not what they can do, it’s the context that they set, the expectation that they set. What actually is implemented is back to every single person in DCAYA, the folks working with young people, those folks who are in the trenches. These champions, they need to set a sort of context and expectation for any business that lands here, for any educational leader that come here, that you can’t come to DC without making a commitment that you are going to help us do better for our kids. Once that context is set, I think the doers will be who we already know. I don’t expect these champions to do; I expect them to put the pressure on so it makes the job of those in the trenches much easier.

*Edited for length

A special thank you to Eshauna Smith for being a part of our 10-Year Anniversary Celebration. Your dedication helped lay the groundwork for a decade of youth policy and advocacy accomplishments. Join Eshauna and DCAYA on September 26th and help craft the next ten years. 

For more on youth issues in DC you can FOLLOW us on Twitter,LIKE us on Facebook, SUBSCRIBE to this Blog and VISIT us at www.dc-aya.org.

Youth Voices: Jonathan Williams

When I first met Jonathan, he was soft-spoken and laughed often. In between interviews, he talked about “females” and wanting to get his driver’s license. When we shot b-roll on the street, he would stop people and chat with them about school or the military or whatever other topic popped into his head. Jonathan is an easy-going, likable guy.

One afternoon, when the red record light was off and we were chatting on the way back to the car, he shouted hello to a guy across the street. Just making casual conversation, I asked if the guy was in his program. “Nah,” Jonathan said, “we were on vacation together.” Genuinely excited to hear about his trip, I asked him where they went, wondering if it was a perk of the program and thinking how great of an experience it must be for him to get out of the city. Jonathan just chuckled and said, “Nah, it’s not that kind of vacation, we were incarcerated together.”

Hand to the forehead moment.

Depending on an interviewee’s personality, the lens of a camera can either cause a person to clam up or open up. In Jonathan’s case, if people are willing to listen, he’s willing to talk. During the time we spent working on his Youth Voices video, he touched on topics from gang violence, to family loss, to homelessness. Jonathan tells stories exactly how he sees them and is not afraid to give his opinion, even when he prefaces his thoughts with, “don’t get me wrong,” and “I don’t want to offend anybody, but this is how it is.” His honesty leaves you sickened by the system, but rooting for him and his generation.

Once the camera is turned off though, it’s easy to forget his struggles, because he’s just another guy. 

We mentioned in last week’s blog that November is Homeless Youth Awareness Month and that homeless youth are an invisible population. Homeless youth and disconnected youth are often one in the same. Unstable housing makes lasting stability in jobs or school next to impossible. Sadly, most of the time an average person only hears about a homeless youth or a disconnected youth in DC when they are in the news for theft or gang violence or worse. What these news stories fail to mention is everything that leads up to that single bad choice; personal histories that many youth keep hidden.

Jonathan’s story is one worth listening to and his on-camera persona and off-camera personality are one in the same. Young people are multifaceted human beings with complicated pasts and undefined futures. As members of the DC community, we should do more than just root for Jonathan’s generation. It is our responsibility to ensure all youth like Jonathan have a place to stay, a warm meal to eat, opportunities for employment in the city, and the chance to be a contributing member of society.

Because after the YouTube video ends, Jonathan’s just a 21 year old guy trying to survive in Washington, DC. 

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Want to help youth like Jonathan? Read the Plan to End Youth Homelessness in DC and write your councilmember a letter stating why DC must invest in opportunities for local youth.

E-Sign-On Letter

Plan to End Youth Homelessness in DC

Personalized Sign-On Letter

Pre-populated Sign-On Letter

As the Multimedia and Communications Associate at DCAYA, Angela Massino, works to #unmask  youth homelessness through social media outreach and short films. You can follow Jonathan Williams Twitter and Tumblr campaign #iamDC as he defines what it means to be a youth living in Washington, DC. 






For more on youth issues in DC you can FOLLOW us on Twitter, LIKE us on Facebook, SUBSCRIBE to this blog and VISIT us at www.dc-aya.org.

Expanded Learning for All

October is here. Shocking I know, but before we get mired in the pre-winter angst let’s all take a deep breath and enjoy all that October has to offer. No, I’m not talking about the sugar rush of Halloween. October is Lights on Afterschool Month. In short, October is when youth, parents, providers, advocates, policy makers and funders celebrate the powerful impact expanded learning programs have on our community, and commit to supporting them in the year to come.

In many ways DC is fortunate. We live in a city that is rich with youth development opportunities. Starting with the littlest of humans, programs like Jump Start and the The Homeless Children’s Playtime Project ensure all children start school ready to succeed. At the elementary level, parents take a collective sigh of relief knowing that their youngster has the opportunity to participate in programs that support whole child development. Programs like People Animals Love, FLOC, Jubilee Housing, and Horton’s Kids start to tease out and develop areas of cognitive strength while building competencies in areas of weakness. 

At the middle school level -- those 3-4 years that represent a time of greatest risk and greatest reward in youth development -- we can have faith that organizations like DC Scores, Higher Achievement, Kid Power, Inc., and Sitar Arts Center are connecting this vulnerable age group to positive opportunities, social networks, and caring & consistent adults.

By high school, expanded learning takes on a whole new level of nuance. As Urban Alliance, BUILD, Life Pieces to Master Pieces, Beacon House, and Sasha Bruce have demonstrated, expanded learning opportunities at the high school level means many things all at once. They are opportunities for tutoring, experiential learning, SAT/ACT prep, post-secondary and career exploration and finally, for continued pro-social development that can inform a lifetime of healthy decision-making.

High quality, expanded learning programming during non-school hours and the summer, is one piece of the educational pie.  One that cannot be underestimated: it’s how we excite disengaged learners, engage non-traditional learners, and allow high fliers to fly. It’s a rising tides lifts all boats scenario.

Unfortunately, only a fraction of our youth have the opportunity to participate. Decreases in funding to the DC Public School Out of School Time Programming and The Children Youth Investment Trust Corporation (among others) has gradually diminished the degree to which DC dollars support expanded learning opportunities.

So, if you believe that educational aptitude is not defined by test scores. If you want to know that we are cultivating investigative, not simply rote learners. If you know a youth who may not always excel in the classroom but thrives in a wood-shop, debate hall, on a theater stage or on the field. If you are a parent who wants to know that your child is participating in positive activities during the gap between the end of the school day and the end of the work day. Then October is your call to action. 

Follow DCAYA during the month of October as we rally together to call, email, tweet at, and send letters to Councilmembers and Mayor Gray letting the DC government know why expanded learning matters to us!  

By speaking up for your child, your family and your community, you can help us make sure the lights stay on for all DC youth. 

Maggie Riden is the Executive Director of DC Alliance of Youth Advocates. As a child, Maggie learned to read by participating in an after school theatre program which provided her with the confidence to overcome her reading disability. While she no longer participates in theatre, she credits the expanded learning program for having a profound impact on her adult life.

  

To read more about youth issues in DC you can FOLLOW us on Twitter, LIKE us on Facebook and VISIT us at www.dc-aya.org.

College and Career Readiness Should Be Accessible to All Students

Last week the District announced an exciting new initiative to reinvigorate career and technical education in the city. The nearly $3 million dollar investment comes at a critical time for the District as young people are struggling to gain a toehold in the local economy without the advanced skills and training that programs of study like CTE pathways can offer. Further, CTE coursework that is well aligned to labor market demands, taught by high quality teachers, and well integrated into a school is a proven strategy for curtailing dropout rates, improving school climate and increasing post-secondary success.

As part of this new initiative, the city is partnering with the National Academy Foundation (NAF) a national leader in the career education field. In partnership with NAF, eight of the District’s schools (McKinley Tech will have two academies for a total of nine) will engage in a year of intensive planning to build “career academies” in specific program areas (schools applied for IT, engineering, hospitality or health sciences).

This partnership is especially exciting given the outcomes and evidence base that NAF career academies have achieved nation-wide. According to NAF:

• 52% of NAF graduates earn bachelor’s degrees in four years (compared with 32% nationally).
   
• Of those who go on to post-secondary education, more than 50% are the first in their families to go to college.
   
• 90% of students report that the academies helped them to develop career plans.
   
• 85% of 5 and 10 year alumni are working in a professional field.
   
• Career-academy graduates sustained $16,704 more in total earnings over the 8 years following high school than non-academy group members who were also studied—11% more per year.
   
• Young men from career-academies experienced increased earnings (due to a combination of increased wages, hours worked and employment stability) over 8 years totaling $30,000 – 17% more per year than non-academy group members studied .

These types of outcomes are essential in moving the needle on youth unemployment and post-secondary attainment here in DC and it is our hope that DC’s career academies will be wildly successful at achieving similar or even better outcomes. One consideration that should stay at the forefront of people’s minds as the District roles out these academies though, is that only eight schools received planning grants to implement these programs. Further, career academies are supposed to adhere to very strict standards of practice (to ensure fidelity to the evidenced model) that include small “school within a school” models which drastically limit participation in academic programming. So while the $3 million dollar investment is a good one, there are still thousands more high school students that need better career preparation services and programming that adds real-life applicability to high school.

The city needs to remember the students who will miss out on the opportunity to be enrolled in one of the career academies because of which high school they attend, or because of enrollment caps at a school they do attend as it plans and executes a more comprehensive system of career preparation in the District’s schools. On that note, DCAYA has a few ideas to expand on the current system of career education in the District:

1. Foster more meaningful collaboration between the Department of Employment Services Office of Youth Programs (they run programs like SYEP, the High School Internship Program and the Pathways for Young Adults Partnership with the Community College) and schools so that students can be placed at sites the align with their career interests while in high school or early on in their post-secondary endeavors. This is especially important for students who are enrolled in CTE courses, but may not be in a career academy.
    
2. Ensure existing career preparation programming at high schools (traditional CTE coursework) is high quality and to the extent possible is leading to at least some of the same outcomes that career academies are. This means ensuring there are ample facilities and high-quality staff teaching these programs in all high schools.
    
3. Begin career exploration and career preparation early on in a student’s academic life. The CTE Task Force and the Raise DC College and Credential Completion Network are working on implementing more career exposure and more informed counseling services so that students know what their options are by the time they get to high school. This is exactly the kind of thing the city needs to be doing more and we need to ensure these efforts are implemented in all schools, not just a few.

The city is right to start small and get its house in order before working to expand the NAF model to other high schools, however reform efforts for CTE need to be equitable in the long run. This requires a vision for the creation of a comprehensive system of career preparation at all schools and not just a few.

Anne Abbott is the Policy Analyst for Youth Workforce Development and Educational Pathways. Abbott is currently working on a report on Disconnect Youth in Washington D.C.. You can follow her on Twitter our write her an email at anne@dc-aya.org.

 To read more about youth issues in DC you can FOLLOW us on Twitter, LIKE us on Facebook and VISIT us at www.dc-aya.org. 

Feeding Our Capital's Youth One Summer Meal at a Time

Every year during these last few weeks of the summer break, DCAYA likes to take a look back on the summer and how well our government agency partners executed their summer programming. Today we’ll be focusing on the Office of the State Superintendent for Education’s (OSSE) summer meals program which historically has the top summer meals utilization rates in the nation.

If you’ve been paying any attention this summer, you have heard at least something about the Free Summer Meals Program. OSSE’s Department of Wellness and Nutrition Services administers the program's federal extension of the free and reduced price school lunch program and reimburses organizations that provide meals during the summer to children from low-income areas or to individuals with disabilities.

According to OSSE 

“the DC Free Summer Meals Program was created as a safeguard for children in under-served low-income areas to ensure continued access to good nutrition during long school vacations when access to school provided breakfast and lunch meals are unavailable. The health and wellbeing of children in the District is important, therefore access to nutritious meals should not end when school is out.” 

We couldn’t agree more with this statement especially given that nationwide low-income families say they spend an average of $300 more per month on food when kids are out of school.

Summer meals are an open access service in the District which means any young person under 18 can drop-in and get the nutrition they need at a number of sites across the city. There is no proof of income eligibility required, which makes this an especially youth-friendly resource for our city’s young people. As a result many children and youth who take part in summer school, parks and recreation activities and camps and even the Summer Youth Employment Program utilize this service and the District is better for it.

Last year the summer meals program served 26,000 daily meals to children and youth. While this number is impressive, what our friends at DC Hunger Solutions found in their analysis this Spring, was that we’ve actually been experiencing a decline in use from previous years. It was this finding that led to the decision by OSSE to extend the free summer meal program to Saturdays for the remainder of the summer in an effort to expand the reach of the program and ensure that DC’s children and youth have consistent access to nutritious meals.  This shift, combined with the diligent work of the One City Summer Initiative and the outreach that organizations, agencies and concerned community members undertook to get the word out about free summer meals this year, will (we are hopeful) have a measurable impact on youth access to this program for this year and be the first step toward fixing the decline we experienced last year.

At the same time, all stakeholders acknowledge that there is more to be done to maintain high use of this program. Yet, to get there, we need better information on what led to the decline in use of the summer meals program, and some tangible interventions that can be fully implemented for next year. To that end, DCAYA and DC Hunger Solutions are collaborating on a short issue brief (to be released late Summer or early Fall) that explores the causes for this decline, examines the impact of this decline on youth development and presents some solutions to ensure DC remains a leader in ensuring children and youth have access to healthy and nutritious meals.  With that in mind, as you wrap up your summer program and before the crush of fall hits, if you have any suggestions, feedback or thoughts on how we can continue to spread the word about summer meals, remove barriers to access or support expansions of this program please don’t hesitate to share them.  

Anne Abbott is the policy analyst at DC Alliance of Youth Advocates. Her favorite summer meal as a kid was the traditional PB&J, on special occasions she'd add in a banana. To contact her with suggestions for the summer meals program you can email her at anne@dc-aya.org. 

To read more about youth issues in DC you can FOLLOW us on Twitter, LIKE us on Facebook and VISIT us at www.dc-aya.org.