Opportunity Youth (OY) are young adults between 16-24 who are neither enrolled in school nor employed (nor enter the military). These youth are disconnected because they are not reachable through high schools or employer sites, typical programming audiences.
In Houston, the Kinder Institute reports over 111,000 opportunity youth. Over 3/4 of OY have completed high school but are not employed.
There are too many barriers between opportunity youth and employment. Transportation is commonly cited as one of the top barriers disconnected youth face. It is crucial to focus on training programs in locations with high OY populations. Another common barrier is a lack of support after finishing the training program. Trainings with guaranteed employment, or at least support in the hiring process, would help OY with educational experience struggling to get employed.
Other barriers include a lack of mental health services, as OY are more likely to have adverse childhood experiences, cultural competency/relationship building in programming, and small-dollar fines (for instance, library fees that prevent students from enrolling in classes).
Criminal backgrounds are a major setback in a person's job pursuit. Finding positions that do not disqualify candidates based on a background check and concentrating efforts on those applications can help a disconnected youth with criminal history's chances of getting hired.
OY strains the economy. EdTX found that the government receives $12,000 in annual tax revenue after connecting a person to work or school. They state, "the lost earning potential over the lifetimes of Opportunity Youth in the Houston area alone is estimated at $27 billion". Connected youth are 9x more likely to have medical coverage and 45% more likely to own a home, making them less dependent on government aid for these needs.
The problem is not specific to central Houston. Those in rural areas face the same barriers (lack of transportation, health services, disposable income, etc) that disconnected youth in cities face. Many OY live in suburban areas, including Angleton, Baytown, Cloverleaf, Humble, and Texas City. The Fifth Ward has a large OY population.
A large indicator of disconnect is generational wealth. According to the Kinder Institute, OY are more likely to have parents who have not completed high school and who are not actively employed. 55% of OY live in households with an annual income below $25,000.
Race is also a large factor. Hispanic people make up almost half of the OY population in Houston. Hispanic and Black youth are more likely to be disconnected than White youth.
Hover over the first heatmap to see the number of opportunity youth and MorePathways training program in each zip code. The layer box allows you to view just OY, just training programs, both overlapped, or a plain map of Houston. The second box still has OY by zipcode, but you can visualize the training programs with the red briefcases. You can scroll further out or further in.
A few areas of Houston have a high OY population and a lack of training programs.
Southeast Houston (77075, 77089) has only one training program in the general area.
For OY in Missouri City/Fresno/Richmond (77459, 77545, 77469), the closest training programs are in Stafford.
Northwest/east Houston (77090, 77088, 77022) has a large OY population. While a few surrounding zipcodes have training programs, it is worthwhile to invest extra concentration
Liberty County (77327, 77535), a more rural area, has no training programs.
Cypress/Tomball have smaller OY populations as the above areas but also lack in training programs
We should focus on searching for training programs in Suburban Houston, like those in Liberty County, Southwest Houston (Fresno, Stafford), North Houston (Spring), and central areas with large pockets of OY (Hobby Area,
In a few locations, we have a high training program and OY population.
For instance, Pasadena (77503, 77505) and Baytown (77520) have substantial training programs to equip local OY.
The inner loop, around West University Place (77005) and Astrodome (77025), there are a lot of training programs in 77030 but a small opportunity youth population.
We have a lot of programs in Uptown (77056) and the Central Business District (77002), but very few OY in those zipcodes and in surrounding zipcodes.
We should continue to support the Pasadena and Baytown area as well as we do. Wealthier areas in central Houston do not have a large OY population and we should consider shifting focus from these areas.
MorePathways addresses many barriers OY face. It eases the transportation burden by helping youth find programs closer to them, helps OY with criminal backgrounds with its "background check" filter, and overall creates a connection between employers and OY that previously did not exist.
OY are disconnected to programming in schools and do not find MorePathways through CTD fairs or in-school advisors. A common way to address this disconnect is to reach youth before they drop out of school or graduate. Social media marketing is another way to reach OY.
Overall, MorePathways is accessible on any device and helps youth find programs that fit their needs. If we can reach OY, and list programs in their areas, MorePathways is a very effective method of reengaging disconnected youth.
Effective programming focuses on:
Getting to know participants well: building relationships with disconnected youth helps build confidence in a population that is prone to distrust institutions and the adults within them
Redefining success: celebrating milestones and letting the youth determine their own definition of success and goals sets them up better for success
Parterships: working with high schools, colleges, employers, and social service providers help ensure that youth are supported and have a tangible pathway throughout their journey
Youth Insight: using feedback from OY themselves and listening to their lived experience is the most valuable gauge we have for what works
YouthBuild Houston provides GED, on-the-job instruction, and soft skills training for out of school youth between 17-24. Houston reVision reintegrates gang-affected and adjudicated youth. UpSkill Houston focuses on the skills mismatch in middle-skill jobs in Houston. They are developing a career pathways system to help unemployed, low-skill youth meet the requirements of high-demand middle-skill jobs.
Opportunity Youth: Following the same definition as the Kinder Institute Mapping of opportunity youth, here opportunity youth is depicted by those 16-19 not enrolled in school that are unemployed. The data is derived from the 2020 American Community Surveys. The Kinder Insitute only includes data from those 16-19 because that is the only public data available that is broken down by location. It is also most effective to target programs at earlier ages when trying to help disconnected youth.
Training Programs: The training programs are not representative of all the different programs MorePathways offers. This is a sample of roughly 130 training programs.
Yay! It is time to recreate the data with all of our new training programs. I have specific instructions on my GitHub, and my code + data are centralized there. You can also reference the blurb below:
Export the training programs from Salesforce as a CSV (the default ISO-8859). Use the Data Cleaning Doc to clean up our data. Either export the OY from ACS or use my 2020, cleaned data. Use my json file for the shapes. Then, run these files into Heatmap Creation Doc!! You'll have to download pandas, folium, geopandas, and numpy libraries.