Youth Development and the Preparation of Youth for Employment

A Forum — January 24, 2003

Background

To celebrate its ten years of service as a non-partisan, professional development organization educating the youth policy community and bridging the gaps between policy, practice, and research, AYPF commissioned a series of four papers focusing on the next decade of youth policy. At this forum, Dorothy Stoneman presented her paper on youth development and preparation for employment. Karen Hein and Andrew Hahn responded.

Forum Summary

Dorothy Stoneman, founder of YouthBuild USA, an organization in which low-income young people build housing for homeless people while completing their high school education, argued that it is essential that all of our students have opportunities to engage in meaningful and tangible ways in their communities. In her talk, she addressed how well we are currently doing in preparing our youth for meaningful employment and productive engagement in our society. In response, she asserted that it is a national sin and a violation of trust that we are tolerating a situation in which 450,000 young people each year drop out of high school and have nowhere to go but dead-end jobs, mean streets, and prison. As a nation we have given up our commitment to creating a society in which all people have the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations and take responsibility for helping other people do the same.

Stoneman argued that, as a nation, we should seek to achieve two goals for our young people: self-sufficiency and self-fulfillment. All of our young people must be able to achieve self-sufficiency through work, and to support themselves and their family with adequate food, shelter, education, and healthcare. They should also have the opportunity to fulfill their potential and have meaningful work that allows the expression of their talents and convictions while contributing to the well-being of the society as a whole. Stoneman argued that we while a vision of all young people both self-sufficient and fulfilled is a radical one, it is one that is consistent with our ideals of our nation.

To realize this vision, we must focus on the young people who are unprepared for employment, those who lack a high school diploma or a college education, and those who may need help transitioning back into society after incarceration, particularly children of color. Stoneman claimed that we currently do have enough knowledge about how to dissolved poverty and despair for these adolescents and how to help them achieve self-sufficiency and fulfillment; we simply need to fund the programs that work.

From her own observation and consultation with other experts over 24 years of managing and observing employment programs, Stoneman identified the characteristics of successful programs. These programs provide 1) opportunities to perform meaningful work in a well-supervised context which enables trainees to learn saleable skills and good work habits while producing something of value to the community; 2) warm, on-going relationships with caring adults; 3) systematic and extensive attention to improving basic education skills toward another level of accreditation; 4) development of a positive peer group with a set of positive values and a philosophy of life which can compete with the negative values encountered on the street; 5) careful linkages with the private sector providing employment opportunities, and follow-up for an indefinite period after job placement, with counseling and job development support available; 6) similar linkages with institutions of higher learning; and 7) involvement of the students in governance, in significant decision-making roles regarding the policies followed and staff hired (this will build negotiating and analytical skills, and result in greater accuracy of the policies as well as greater student commitment to the program.

Stoneman argued that America’s workforce preparation system for youth has steadily lost ground since 1979 in terms of the level of investment, intensity of program services, and the numbers of youth included. Disengaged young adults who are not self-sufficient or fulfilled are a danger to our national interest; there are also serious monetary, social, moral, and spiritual costs to dismissing these young adults. We must build public and political support to put the forgotten half back on the agenda. We must also take to full scale those programs that work and in which demand currently exceeds supply, Stoneman concluded.

Karen Hein, President of the William T. Grant Foundation, responded by saying that public policy for youth is at a crucial point, given the current political and economic situation. Recently, the White House announced the creation of a Task Force for Disadvantaged Youth; this Task Force will spend the coming months recommending ways to coordinate interagency efforts to implement best practices for positive youth development. While this Task Force is a promising development, Hein expressed concern that policy discussions that focus on “disadvantaged” youth oriented conversation toward what is wrong with American youth. In order to take advantage of this moment when federal attention is on youth issues, we should work to shift the focus from asking how we can solve the “problems of youth failure” to an asset-based approach which asks what programs can offer supports and opportunities to young people and how we can make these programs more available to them.

Andrew Hahn, Director of the Institute for Sustainable Development/Center for Youth and Communities, praised Stoneman’s paper, particularly for its reminder of the distinction between youth programs that aim at self-sufficiency (free of government benefits) and those that aim at self-fulfillment, and for its refusal to settle for instrumental outcomes such as minimum wage jobs for poor young adults. Hahn agreed that a central issue is to find the key that opens the hearts of Americans to young adults who need a second chance. Hahn made the further argument that we need to focus not only on the young adults who approach the second-chance programs, but those who do not do so. To help those youth, we will need to reach out to them wherever they may be found: playgrounds, churches, jails, or GED programs. He estimated that between 6 to 12% of all youth need a kind of system that goes where they are. He proposed a new way to ensure that we can reach all youth, namely, a national, voluntary, youth registry system. This system would start with each 5th grade student and track and broker career services for those who slip out of formal systems of care and service such as schools. This intermediary program would help to overcome some of the shortcomings of our fragmented first and second chance systems in the U.S., which are too porous and offer too many opportunities for our youth to slip between the cracks.

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