On Wednesday, March 4 the Greater Hartford Gives Foundation submitted testimony to the legislature’s Education Committee on Senate Bill 311, An Act Concerning Disconnected Youth. The foundation applauds this legislation’s recognition that reengaging youth starts with good data and requires assessing the risk factors, acknowledging current interventions demonstrated to work, and coordinating across nonprofit, government, and philanthropic partners to build effectively on each other’s investments and learning. The foundation also applauds the legislation’s proposed creation of dedicated funding through the Department of Education to establish a Disconnected Youth Investment Grant program to fund community-based organizations to help youth re-engage with education and employment.
As part of our efforts to dismantle structural racism and improve social and economic mobility for Black and Latine residents of Greater Hartford, the foundation focuses on strategies to create employment opportunities to ensure that every Greater Hartford resident has access to employment which provides a living wage. Black and Latine residents face disproportionate barriers to education and employment opportunities. These barriers start in early childhood and persist throughout high school and college and into the workplace.
Our investments are structured to create opportunities across the education and employment continuum. Building on our investments in young children, we work with nonprofits, school districts, employers, and policymakers to help K-12 students and their families have the resources and guidance to persist in school. Through our investments in education and workforce development initiatives, we have seen firsthand what researchers have indicated how the interplay of race, gender and where people grow up can have compounding effects on whether they disengage from school and work. This is a matter of racial equity.
Through its past and current work in support of the Hartford School District’s Community Schools and six of Greater Hartford region’s Alliance Districts (Bloomfield, East Hartford, Manchester, Vernon, Windsor, and Windsor Locks), the foundation has seen how stronger partnerships among schools, families, nonprofits, and the community help students feel increased connectedness to their school, leading to increased attendance, academic engagement, and persistence to graduation. As the General Assembly has acknowledged with its recent investments in mental health services for children and youth, young people face unprecedented challenges that make it more difficult to persist and achieve in the classroom.
The foundation supports House Bill 311’s focus on sharing data and fostering collaboration among organizations serving youth, requiring DataLinkCT (formerly P20 WIN) to share data with nonprofit organizations that provide data support to other public entities. From our work with many organizations supporting opportunity youth, we know that youth at risk or disconnected may be working with nonprofit organizations; providing access to state data is a critical step in developing coordinated systems and reflects the importance of private and public partnerships. By establishing a link between state data and nonprofit data, we can develop a clearer understanding of the outcomes of youth connected to services versus those who are not connected to services. This represents a crucial step in better aligning resources to services that improve youth outcomes.
Through our investments in this work, we have recognized the challenges and opportunities that exist to facilitate better communication, collaboration and sharing of information. Our investment in the Hartford Opportunity Youth Collaborative (HOYC) engages a broad range of Hartford youth providers which seeks to develop a coordinated, comprehensive system of training and supports to youth ages 16 to 24 who are unemployed as well as for youth involved in the justice and child welfare systems.
The foundation supported a feasibility study and planning efforts that led to the creation of the Hartford Data Collaborative (HDC), a data sharing and linking entity in Hartford originally developed to support data-informed efforts to serve opportunity youth, particularly the Hartford Opportunity Youth Collaborative. HDC is a project of one of our core support grant recipients, CT Data Collaborative. CT Data works to securely share and integrate data from public and nonprofit sources, including from the State Department of Education, the City of Hartford, and Hartford nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit members of HDC have been engaged in developing and communicating data privacy concerns and protocols, developing research agendas, and sharing findings with stakeholders. Part of this effort focused on developing definitions for data collection and sharing data not only with Collaborative organizations, but other efforts that engage opportunity youth.
The foundation has supported the implementation of HDC activities, including funding the underlying governance and data infrastructure that allows for data sharing and integration. In addition to work with HOYC, other projects made possible by HDC include work with the City of Hartford Summer Unity programming and the Greater Hartford Reentry Welcome Center evaluations (supported by HDC and CTData), including executing data sharing agreements between Community Partners in Action and three state entities–-the Homelessness Management Information System (HMIS), Department of Correction (DOC), and the Court Support Services Division of the Judicial Branch (CSSD). HDC has been working to integrate P20 WIN data with local data. This work has been essential in expanding our understanding of the programs and the young people they serve.
We recommend the data sharing and collection efforts proposed in the legislation to build on HDC’s experience and role as a central and coordinating body for data efforts in the City of Hartford. This is a model the foundation has invested in, used, and has found to be effective. It is likely scalable to other cities, regions, and across the state.
The foundation also offers its support of the establishment of a Disconnected Youth Investment Grant program through the Department of Education to fund community-based organizations that help young people re-engage with education and employment through various support services.
The report Connecticut’s Unspoken Crisis: Getting young people back on track was commissioned by one of our early funding partners in supporting the needs of disconnected youth, Dalio Education. The research has helped to draw attention to one of the greatest challenges facing Connecticut: what more is needed to reengage the Connecticut young people at risk of and becoming disconnected from school and work in varying degrees. The data collection with data partner proposed in the legislation is critical in continuing to learn how program serving the same population can be working together.
In August 2021, the foundation partnered with the City of Hartford and Dalio Education and announced an initial 18-month investment of $9.85 million to support opportunity youth (individuals 16 – 24 who are currently disengaged from school or work). The funding was provided to COMPASS Youth Collaborative, Our Piece of the Pie, and Roca, Inc. to allow these organizations to provide individualized, trauma-informed, high-touch support to the young people they specialize in working with:
COMPASS to expand its Peacebuilders programming model, increasing the number of violence interrupters in Hartford working to de-escalate conflict and build relationships with the hardest to reach youth. OPP to significantly increase the capacity of the Youth Service Corps, allowing it to serve 100 additional young people, on top of the approximately 250 young people they currently serve annually. Former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin led the creation of the Youth Service Corps in 2016 to give young people part-time jobs as well as one-on-one coaching and mentoring. Roca, a national youth-serving organization that is also working in Massachusetts and Maryland, came to Hartford to offer a program specifically serving young women, including young mothers, who are victims of abuse and neglect. Roca has recently added basic skills and workforce development as part of their programming.
In 2023, the foundation made an additional commitment to invest $4 million to support this work.
Our collective challenge is effectively assessing the individual risk factors and needs and making support easily accessible. Nonprofit providers recognize that no single intervention works for all youth and the need to coordinate program referrals to provide youth with programming that is good fit at different stages of their development. We also know that youth and their families who have experience in working with programs and government systems add essential insights on how to approach this work. It sounds simple, but it is not.
Our work needs to effectively build on the experience of providers working together to support a continuum of services demonstrated to work with at risk or disconnected youth. The ongoing collaboration across Hartford providers, including COMPASS Youth Collaborative, Our Piece of the Pie (OPP), Roca, and other agencies can help guide strategies for supporting youth at different stages of development needing case management, and support in reengaging and persisting in education and workforce development efforts.
This work presents an enormous opportunity for the state’s economy. Connecticut’s Unspoken Crisis report calculated the economic opportunity if we can help young people get back on track. Not only would it help fill a large portion of the state’s unfilled jobs, but it also has the potential of accelerating statewide economic growth by boosting the gross domestic product by about $5 billion–$5.5 billion and improve fiscal performance by $650 million – $750 million annually in the form of added tax revenue and lower spending on government services. These economic benefits could continue over a reconnected individual’s lifetime as they reach self-sufficiency. We are grateful that legislators recognize the need to act and address the needs of our youth to ensure a better future for them and our state.
The Dalio report acknowledges something that many policymakers, educators, and youth service providers have known for a long time, that while the vast majority of youth disconnected from school and jobs are concentrated in our urban areas, they can be found in every community throughout the state, including in our lower income rural communities.
This is a statewide challenge that demands a comprehensive statewide response that engages policymakers, community leaders, youth advocates, parents, and young people to develop effective strategies to meet the needs of vulnerable youth.
The foundation is proud to support many dedicated nonprofit organizations successfully serving at-risk youth, and grateful for the expertise of CTData Collaborative for its work with us and across partner nonprofits to enhance the data available for collective learning. We encourage the state to develop strategies that enhance and complement effective programming already in place to provide more supports and opportunities for students and youth.