“We don’t want to fast-track our young adults to employment,” said Fernandez-Ketcham, of the New Heights center. “It’s more than job readiness. We cannot put our young people at a job without deeply looking at where they’re at in their lives.” A sizable number of disconnected youth come from environments of poverty and failed public systems.
Justin Figueroa, a 19-year-old from Brooklyn, spoke to the challenge of "reconnecting" after a life of hard knocks. "I’ve been through the foster care system, five group homes and I’ve been incarcerated as a youth and an adult,” said Sigueroa, who is trying to get a job on his own. “A job is nothing like you can go whenever you feel like it. I know I have to be on time, respectful, and if I’m getting mad I can’t take it out the street way, I got to go and talk to the bigger boss.”
Another drawback of the SBS program is that many of its clients cannot access Individual Training Accounts (ITAs), vouchers that are given to SBS workforce clients to purchase focused job training services. ITAs are targeted to unemployed individuals who have a high school diploma or GED, leaving out half of all disconnected youth. “You can get them a job but you also need to increase their education level,” said Zisser. “When you’re working with these kids you have to pursue both.”
There are few comprehensive programs available to disconnected youth that utilize a combined education and workforce development approach, offering basic literacy through GED attainment and workforce readiness and training. Administered by the Department of Youth and Community Development, the Out-of-School Youth program offers the most wide-ranging services of any workforce initiative that serves youth. “Mayor Bloomberg and the city of New York are committed to providing youth who are not working or in school with the hard and soft skills they need to thrive in today’s competitive economy,” said Ryan Dodge, deputy chief of staff at DYCD. The Out-of-School Youth program provides educational support, vocational training, stipends and placement into education or work for approximately 1,000 disconnected youths a year.
According to the report, there are 17 different workforce and education funding streams across eight different public agencies, which report to three different deputy mayors within City Hall. Because many young adults require a range of services, coordination of existing services is a crucial part of addressing the challenge of reconnecting youth. “We need to find a way of bringing it together so that providers don’t have to get multiple contracts and that it’s easy for a young person to figure out what’s right for them,” said Treschan.
