Ideas

About This Post:
Millions of young people aren’t in school or working, making them easy to overlook during back-to-school season. This post examines four areas funders and nonprofits can consider when shaping reconnection strategies: belonging, housing stability, connected workforce pathways, and young people’s goals for their futures.

It’s back-to-school season. Across the country, young people are returning to classrooms, campuses, and familiar routines. But millions of young people have no school to go back to. Many aren’t connected to work either.

For young people ages 16–24, school and work are two important pathways to connection, opportunity, and greater stability. The most recent national data available show that that 4.3 million young people ages 16–24, or 10.9% of young people nationally, weren’t working or in school in 2022. In some states, the gap was even larger. More than 15% of young people were disconnected from both school and work in Louisiana and Mississippi, with similarly high rates in several other states.

As another school year begins, those numbers raise an important question: Who is in the gap, and what will it actually take to help young people connect or reconnect to education and employment opportunities?

That question feels especially important now because changes to the policy and funding environment are putting additional pressure on the systems young people rely on. Those systems don’t operate in a vacuum. Changes to federal funding and the safety net are putting additional pressure on many of the systems and organizations that help young people meet basic needs and connect to education, training, and employment opportunities. For young people already balancing transportation, housing, health, caregiving, financial instability, or other barriers, reductions in these supports can make an already difficult path even harder.

Across Community Science’s youth-focused research and evaluation work, particularly our work with workforce training programs, we have seen that connecting young people to employment is rarely as simple as recruit → train → place. A young person may need someone who keeps reaching out when they stop showing up. They may need help addressing transportation or housing before they can consistently participate in a program. They may complete training and still need support navigating the transition into a workplace. Connection often takes time, multiple attempts, and the right relationships and supports along the way.

What, then, should funders and organizations working with young people pay attention to? Four things stand out from our experience.

Four Ways to Better Support Young People in the Gap

1. Belonging comes before building
We often ask young people to build skills: leadership skills, advocacy skills, career skills, workplace skills. But our work reinforces something more foundational. Before young people can fully engage in opportunities to learn, work, lead, and build those skills, they need to feel that they belong.

Relationships can help young people imagine possibilities, navigate difficult moments, and stay connected when circumstances make participation, or even daily life, harder. That makes belonging important for reconnecting young people, and also for preventing disconnection in the first place. Our work with young people reinforces the importance of fostering belonging and purpose alongside opportunities to develop skills.

That shifts the prevention question. Instead of starting only with how to reconnect young people once they have left school or work, we can also ask: What helps them hold onto connection in the first place? Caring relationships are part of that answer. Young people have told us about teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, social workers, and other people who noticed them, supported them through difficult periods, and helped them keep moving forward. Sometimes a relatively small network of people provided an important thread of connection.

It also means paying attention when that connection starts to fray. We have written elsewhere about the importance of looking beyond behavior. Absenteeism, disengagement, or behavior that others interpret negatively can sometimes be signs of something else making it harder for a young person to stay connected: unmet needs, instability, trauma, transportation or safety barriers, or systems that are difficult to navigate.

2. Get housing stability right
One thing that continues to stand out across our work is how often housing comes up, even when the initiative itself isn’t focused on housing. Whether the work centers on education, workforce development, health, or youth engagement, housing stability is often part of the underlying conditions shaping a young person’s daily life and their ability to stay connected to school, work, and other opportunities.

Housing stability is about more than having a place to live. It includes whether a young person or their family can access and afford safe, stable housing and remain housed. In our research with young people experiencing disconnection, we heard about barriers ranging from high rents, security deposits, and application fees to long waits for assistance, frequent moves, and homelessness. The effects of this instability can reach far beyond housing itself. It can make it harder to attend school or training, maintain a job, address mental health needs, and make use of other supports.

So how have funders and nonprofits addressed housing stability as part of supporting young people in the gap? Here are ways this is taking shape in practice:

• Build housing support into youth strategies. Connect young people to housing navigation, referrals, and assistance as part of education, workforce, and other youth-serving programs.
• Invest beyond individual services. Fund efforts to expand access to affordable housing and improve the systems and policies that shape whether young people and their families can access and maintain stable housing.
• Connect youth and housing strategies. When a funder or organization is already investing in both youth and housing, look for opportunities to connect those areas of work and identify where the strategies can reinforce one another.
• Make the connection visible. Use research, evaluation, and young people’s experiences to show how housing instability affects education, employment, health, and other outcomes, and identify opportunities for systems to respond.

3. The employment pipeline cannot end at placement
Back-to-school season is also a time of transition into work. Some young people are returning to classrooms, while others are entering the workforce or looking for employment. At the same time, there is significant national attention on expanding apprenticeships and other pathways into skilled jobs. That creates an important opportunity to think about young people who are experiencing disconnection from school and work — and how we make sure they’re able to connect to these pathways, too.

That matters particularly for young people entering the workforce for the first time or returning after a period of disconnection. We have seen that employers may need more time and capacity than anticipated to provide hands-on supervision and support. Structured onboarding, clear expectations and feedback, consistent supervision, and mentoring can all help young people adjust and persist in a new workplace.

Preparing young people for work is only one side of the connection. Employers also need to be prepared to support young people as they enter, learn, and grow in the workplace. The connections among training programs, employers, and other workforce opportunities also matter. As investments in apprenticeships and other pathways expand, these connections can help make opportunities more accessible to young people who are currently in the gap.

So how have funders and nonprofits strengthened the connection between workforce training and employment for young people in the gap? Here are ways this is taking shape in practice:

• Invest in employer-connected training. Support workforce initiatives where employers are already at the table, helping shape training and providing clear pathways to employment.
• Bring employers together. Roundtables, cohorts, and other structured partnerships can help employers and workforce organizations identify shared needs and strengthen opportunities for young people.
• Be clear about the goal of the workforce opportunity. Career exploration and employment-connected training accomplish different things. Exploration can expand young people’s understanding of available careers and the paths to them. Training provides a more direct route from skill building to a job. Clarity here can help funders and organizations determine which opportunities fit the young people they’re trying to reach.
• Build a connected network of workforce programs. Programs at different levels can work together through referral relationships and intentional handoffs. More advanced training programs can connect young people who need foundational preparation to another provider, while entry-level programs can connect participants to more advanced training and employment opportunities.

4. Start with what young people are working toward
In our work with young people experiencing disconnection, we have heard clear aspirations for financial security, education, stable housing, supporting children and families, and contributing to their communities. The language of disconnection tells us what someone is disconnected from, but not what they want to connect to. That makes a simple question important when designing or funding opportunities: What does this young person want for their future, and are we addressing the conditions that shape their ability to pursue those aspirations and thrive?

Four Questions to Ask About a Reconnection Strategy
Four questions can help put these ideas into practice for funders and organizations shaping strategies to reconnect young people to education and employment.

1. What helps young people stay connected?
Does the strategy invest in the relationships, belonging, and ongoing support that can prevent disconnection and help young people reconnect when they need to?
2. What conditions shape whether connection is possible?
Does the strategy address housing, transportation, mental health, caregiving, income, and other conditions that can affect whether young people can access and sustain opportunities?
3. How connected are the pathways and systems around young people?
Are workforce programs, employers, education and training opportunities, and other supports connected in ways that give young people multiple entry points and next steps?
4. What are young people working toward?
Are their goals and aspirations informing which opportunities are created, which barriers and inequities are addressed, and where resources are invested?

We hope these questions spark practical conversations about how to help more young people stay connected or reconnect to education and employment opportunities. If you’d like to explore how your organization can build or strengthen its strategy for supporting young people, reach out to Brandi Gilbert. We’d welcome the opportunity to learn about your work.

About the Author

Questions this post answers:

• Who is missing from the back-to-school picture?
• What helps young people stay connected to school, work, and opportunity?
• Why does belonging matter for preventing disconnection and supporting reconnection?
• How can housing stability affect education and employment?
• How can funders and nonprofits strengthen connections between workforce training and employment?
• How can workforce programs and employers work together as a connected network?
• How can reconnection strategies reflect young people’s goals and aspirations?