About the Project 

Youth participation in out-of-school-time (OST) opportunities has been shown to improve access to internships, develop workforce readiness, and cultivate occupational identities. However, in metro areas like Kansas City there often is a disconnect between where youth live and where jobs and out-of-school time opportunities exist.  Combined with a lack of reliable transportation services this significantly impacts youth from low-income homes and schools, who are disproportionately Black and Latinx. This project’s goal is to increase OST-activity participation and address marginalized-youth employment disparities by providing tools to discover, access, and participate in OST opportunities.

The Connect KC project was awarded a $1M National Science Foundation grant through its 2021 Civic Challenge program - a multi-agency, federal government research and action competition that aims to fund ready-to-implement, research-based pilot projects that have the potential for scalable, sustainable, and transferable impact on community-identified priorities. 

In 2021, the project set out to support the Kansas City region’s youth by boosting work readiness and cultivating occupational identities, and through its 2023 summer pilot helped young people access more opportunities through innovative civic technology through a youth-centered mobile app, while studying their transportation behavior, and offering shared-mobility options like bikes, transit, and micro-transit services. 

The Connect KC included a robust research initiative where the University of Kansas explored and unpacked youth travel behavior relative to learning opportunities and employment, and engaged youth around transit identities and views on safety, efficiency and sustainability that influence their mobility choices when it comes to accessing education and work experiences. The goal was to learn from youth voice and choice, and to catalyze innovative mobility solutions for Kansas City, and beyond. 

The project’s research was led by Dr. Alexandra Kondyli from the University of Kansas, and youth engagement by Dr. Kiley Larson from KC Digital Drive, along with the Kansas City Public Library and ThrYve, and technology and application development was led by Drew Davidson from the University of Kansas. 

The project team developed and launched a mobile app (ConnectKC) that offers information on various out-of-school (OST) opportunities that occur in the Kansas City metro area. The ConnectKC app also included information on the location of these opportunities as well as ways to get there. Apart from the typical transportation options shown in the app (e.g. transit, walking, biking), the team partnered with zTrip and offered the option to book a trip through that mobility provider directly.