New & Noteworthy
Hartford Foundation Submits Testimony in Support of An Act Concerning Disconnected Youth
On Wednesday, March 19, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving submitted written testimony to the legislature’s Education Committee in support of Senate Bill 1511, An Act Concerning Disconnected Youth. The foundation applauds this legislation’s comprehensive approach to addressing the education, mental health, and employment needs of Connecticut’s youth at risk of and currently disconnected from school and employment. The bill recognizes that reengaging youth starts with good data and requires assessing the risk factors, acknowledging current interventions demonstrated to work, and coordination across nonprofit, government, philanthropic partners to effectively build on each other’s investments and learning.
As part of our efforts to dismantle structural racism and improve social and economic mobility for Black and Latine residents of Greater Hartford, the Hartford Foundation seeks to work with government, nonprofit and other public-private partners to increase stable employment opportunities for adults and youth in our region facing barriers to employment.
This work recognizes that all residents of our region need access to training and employment options that provide a sustaining wage. The Foundation’s efforts focus on increasing opportunities for education and training along with hiring and retaining residents with significant barriers to employment, including opportunity youth who are disconnected from school and work and people returning from incarceration.
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, its research has helped to draw attention to one of the greatest challenges facing Connecticut: what more is needed to reengage the tens of thousands of Connecticut young people at risk of and becoming disconnected from school and work in varying degrees.
Through the Hartford Foundation’s longstanding work with education, youth-serving and other partners, we know that chronic absenteeism in Hartford is an ongoing challenge, which was exacerbated by the pandemic and its lingering effects. Dalio’s report acknowledges that there was a 99 percent increase in chronic absenteeism from 2017 to 2022, and one in three Connecticut high school students were at risk of not graduating in 2022.
Truancy has also been shown to be an early risk factor that can lead to justice system involvement. 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 collective 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 Roca, COMPASS Youth Collaborative, Our Piece of the Pie, and other youth agencies serving opportunity youth 16 to 24 in school or working managing multiple challenges 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.
Through our own investments in education and workforce development initiatives, we have seen firsthand what researchers have indicated that 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. There is a critical need to support residents in building basic and professional skills while providing wraparound supports they need to be successful.
According to the Tow Youth Justice Institute (TYJI) young Black or African American, Hispanic/Latino and American Indian/Alaskan Native young people are twice as likely as people of almost all races/ethnicities to experience disconnection compared with White young people. Hispanic/Latino young people have the strongest association with disconnection, at two times that of White young people. Black or African American young people have the second strongest association, at 1.8 times that of White young people. Young men of color are particularly vulnerable to disconnection, with 41 percent of this population ending up disconnected. Twenty-nine percent of young men are disconnected versus 20 percent of young women, indicating heightened risk of disconnection dependent on sex. We recommend considering the definitions for disconnected youth fully using the experience from the TYJI which supports the work of Connecticut’s Juvenile Justice Policy Council.
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 applauds House Bill 1511 for addressing the need to increase the foundation amount for equalization aid grants by adding funding weights for students eligible for free or reduced-price meals, multilingual learners, and students requiring special education. From our own work with our region’s Alliance Districts, we know that school districts with large numbers of students with lower incomes, multilingual learners and those with special education needs require significantly greater supports at school, which can be burdensome for under resourced districts.
The foundation also supports House Bill 1511’s focus on sharing data and fostering collaboration among organizations serving youth. From our own work with opportunity youth, we know that youth at risk or disconnected may be involved in multiple government systems, including the Department of Children and Families foster care system as well as Department of Correction and Court Support Services and DOC systems. Including the DOC and CSSD systems in the Preschool through Twenty and Workforce Information Network (P20 WIN) is a critical step in developing coordinated systems and reflects the importance of government partnerships.
Through our own 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 CT Data Collaborative which works to securely share and integrate data from public and nonprofit sources, including from 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 is working over the next 6-12 months to integrate P20-WIN data with these local data.
We recommend the data sharing and collection efforts proposed in the legislation 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 supports this legislation’s requirement that the Department of Public Health partner with a school-based health center to create a telehealth mental health services program for students, ensuring free access to mental health services, particularly for uninsured students. This free option could expand access to mental health services. It will also provide the opportunity to assess students and families comfort with using a telehealth mental health service option and when in-person services may be needed.
As a community foundation that serves urban, suburban, and rural communities, the Hartford Foundation recognizes the vital role that community-based nonprofits play in providing mental health services, particularly for low-income families who often lack access to behavioral health care. For example, the foundation has been a long-time supporter of services provided by Andover Hebron Marlborough Youth & Family Services, Inc. (AHM) which is the primary source of providing human services and basic need supports to residents in the towns it serves. AHM’s services are in high demand and the foundation recently provided a grant to expand its counseling services at a critical time to meet the social and emotional needs of residents. In 2020 AHM surveyed RHAM High School and Middle School students and found that approximately 55 percent reported feeling a little or a great deal more depressed, anxious, or lonely. The foundation’s support for AHM provides local residents—including youth—with access to affordable behavioral health services by addressing an underserved geographic area.
In 2021, The City of Harford had 8,504 opportunity youth residing in Hartford with 37 percent identified as Hispanic /Latino and 55 percent identified as Black. Fifty-two percent of these youth identified as female, and 45 percent identified as male. Since mid-2021, youth providers report that the number of opportunity youth in Hartford overall had drastically increased as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic along with an increase in gun violence in the City of Hartford, which has disproportionally involved and impacted this youth population.
In August 2021, the Hartford Foundation partnered with the City of Hartford, Dalio Education announced an initial 18-month investment of $9.85 million to support opportunity youth, who are 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.
For many years, the Hartford Foundation has invested in programs that offer pathways for students, young adults, and families to develop skills that can lead to family sustaining employment. In partnership with the City of Hartford, Capitol Workforce Partners, Hartford Public Schools, and local nonprofits, we have provided year-round youth employment focused on basic competencies and work-based learning. More recently the foundation has included access to mental health and career navigation services to support young people participating in youth employment programs.
The foundation offers its support for the proposed changes in how youth employment and training funds are distributed to regional workforce development boards, allocating funds based on the percentage of disadvantaged youth in each region. Like the bill’s proposal to weigh certain factors in education funding to support disadvantaged youth, making similar allowances for youth employment and training is a thoughtful approach to prioritizing scarce resources to those who needed it most. The foundation also appreciates the legislation’s call for workforce development boards to expand apprenticeship, transitional employment, and youth employment programs, acknowledging that expansion of these programs would require increased state investment.
The Foundation also offers its support for the intent of House Bill 1511 to mandate that local regional council of governments establish a youth success oversight board to map regional needs, engage with disconnected youth populations, and coordinate service providers.. This work should build on ongoing mapping work that has been conducted. We also ask that the legislature consider the resources required for local council of governments to effectively engage in this work. The regional councils would need to collaborate closely with community-based nonprofit and philanthropic organizations that have knowledge of the needs of opportunity youth, current available services, what additional services are needed and where. The foundation is proud to support many dedicated nonprofit organizations successfully serving at-risk youth. 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.
While the foundation recognizes the need for the state to develop its own findings, the Dalio Education report and other data referenced in this testimony and other sources already exist that can be reviewed and analyzed to determine what additional work needs to be done to ensure all of our young people have an opportunity to live fulfilling successful lives.