Dear Guest of the May Convening:

Thank you for joining us at the Opportunity Youth Forum (OYF) Convening at the Millennium Biltmore hotel in Los Angeles, CA. We look forward to bringing together leaders from backbone organizations and their collaborative partners, including young leaders and those representing school systems, institutions of higher education, community-based organizations, foundations, the private sector, and government.

We return to Los Angeles – where the OYF’s first place-based convening took place in 2014 – at a particularly challenging time for the country, our communities, and our young people. It is more important than ever to reaffirm our commitment to the values that have animated our work from the start, including equity and justice. More than ever, we are aware that this moment requires us to elevate love and healing at the core of our work, to celebrate the diversity of the communities in our network, and to recommit to advancing belonging for all.

As OYF enters its second decade, we must also celebrate the progress that is being made around the country. Across the OYF network, youth disconnection rates continue to decline as communities recover from the pandemic, with the most recent data indicating that OYF communities reconnected nearly 150,000 youth to jobs and education in 2022-2023.

We designed our convening agenda to learn from the promising innovations and practices that the OYF communities are putting in place to scale reconnection and to illuminate strategies that can prepare us to face the challenges that lie ahead. We are especially looking forward to highlighting the work of our partners in Los Angeles. Our return to Los Angeles provides us with a unique opportunity to understand how place-based strategies evolve over time, including the evolution of the new Horizons 32K Strategic Plan that aims to reduce the number of opportunity youth in Los Angeles by 32,000 over the next four years. Local leaders and practitioners will share long-term lessons, promising practices, and innovations that are reconnecting opportunity youth to pathways leading to thriving futures. Teams from OYF communities will also participate in site visits to exemplary local organizations to gain a deeper understanding of the local youth-serving ecosystem.

Simultaneously, participants will hear from national leaders and experts during plenaries and breakout sessions that illuminate lessons and challenges from our collective work across the OYF. We are thrilled to welcome leaders who will help us understand why the most critical efforts of our time must focus on investing in and building the power of communities, centering youth leadership and youth organizing in the intergenerational struggle for social change, and preserving and protecting our democracy.

Finally, we are excited to once again convene key communities of practice: our philanthropic partners will come together for the Funder BMWP Community of practice; the Criminal Justice Reform Network (CJRN) will bring together network members and OYF community partners; and young leaders will gather for the Youth-Led Change Summit to strengthen their networks and advance youth-led solutions.

During our time together in Los Angeles, we look forward to reaffirming our commitment to the foundational values of the OYF and to finding belonging, healing, purpose, and joy in our work. We look forward to being together, and the entire design team is thrilled that you are here.

Best regards,

Melody C. Barnes
Chair, Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions