The Opportunity Youth Forum has evidence of over a dozen years of improvements in the lives of youth and young adults. The initial years of the Opportunity Youth Forum saw consistent, long term declines in the numbers of opportunity youth, nearly a 25% reduction through 2019.

The Covid pandemic temporarily erased some of those gains, but recovery has been speedy across the OYF network, with communities reducing disconnection rates 19% in just the past couple of years, and in the last year alone, seeing a reduction of 40,000 opportunity youth.

Given the impacts of the pandemic on disconnected youth, OYF and other partners have renewed our commitments, through a new 10 year plan to reduce disconnection rates by 50%, by 2033.

OYF is also a network operating at scale. Based on reporting from only a portion of the entire OYF network, in 2024 OYF communities and service partners served over 230,000 young people. These services are focused both on young adults disconnected from both work and school, and also the considerable number of young people who under-connected to school and work, and at risk of disconnection.

Why Focus on Opportunity Youth?

As of 2023, in the U.S. there were about 4 million opportunity youth – young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are neither enrolled in school nor participating in the labor market.  Disconnection has serious impacts on the lives of young people.

In addition, many more young adults are at risk of being disconnected from school or work. This disconnection has significant consequences, both for young people and our society.

The OYF’s engagement of young adults results in big economic dividends for young people. and our whole society. The tax benefits, alone, of reconnecting a disconnected young adult are estimated to be over $20,000 per year per person connected, plus other social costs are accrued, from having more, higher educated workers who, over their lifetimes, will use fewer social services programs and themselves contribute to the social safety net. All together, these add up to  billions of dollars in economic benefits from engaging supporting and connecting opportunity youth in OYF communities.

The Opportunity Youth Forum’s Approach to Change

OYF member communities are a network of over 40 place-based urban, suburban, rural and tribal community collaboratives, all working to improve outcomes for youth. These place-based local collaboratives bring together many kinds of education, workforce, and social services institutions and providers to create better futures for young adults.

OYF believes that strong collaboratives can influence local systems to change, which will drive improvements in youth outcomes, and that all this work must be based in values prioritizing youth and impacted community members to be leaders in equity-focused ways of working. Further, annual assessments of OYF place-based partnerships has validated that higher capacity collaboratives do results in greater systems changes. And preliminary data shows a promising relationship between greater systems changes, and, ultimately, greater improvement in youth outcomes.

Local Collaboratives Lead the Way

OYF collaboratives, which are proven to be successful through independent evaluations, focus on improving local programs and changing the systems and policies that have an impact on the lives of young people. And research shows that investment in opportunity youth collaboratives increases other public funding for young adults.

Evidence shows that strong local opportunity youth collaboratives are essential to making this progress happen. OYF collaboratives bring together local communities to enhance programs and policy that ultimately lead to improved youth outcomes. Recent success of local OY collaboratives include improvements in youth outcomes and changes to funding and policy related to opportunity youth.

How We Track Impact in the OYF

We track a large number of youth outcomes and other leading indicators of change in individuals and communities in the OYF.

Using a variety of data sources and assessment methods allows us to understand in greater depth what changes are happening for youth and in communities.  In brief, these annual data sources include:

1. Data on opportunity youth numbers and characteristics, at the community level, from the US Census Bureau.
2. Data from OYF collaborative partners on the numbers of youth they serve and their outcomes.
3. Data on the characteristics and capacities of each OYF collaborative.
4. Data on changes to local programs and systems in each OYF community.

Please see our OYF Assessment and Evaluation page for more details.