Connecting Youth to Opportunity

This is the sixth in a series of pieces on opportunity, income inequality, and economic mobility. Complementing The Boston Foundation’s Opportunity Forums, and its year-long effort to highlight income inequality, this series will touch on a wide variety of research and topics pertaining to economic mobility. For more on the Opportunity Forums, please visit: www.tbf.org/opportunity.

Today’s Opportunity Series piece is particularly special. Below, you will find an interview with Shari Davis, the Executive Director of the YouthZone Fund at the City of Boston. In addition to managing the Boston Youth Fund, Shari oversees the Mayor’s Youth Council, and the Mayor’s Youthline. She focuses on connecting youth and families with employment opportunities and a wide range of other civic engagement activities.

As is highlighted in The Boston Foundation’s opportunity dashboard, the period of youth is a crucial in creating an upwardly mobile city. Raj Chetty, whose work we have profiled here previously, revealed a strong correlation between youth labor market participation, particularly of those teenagers aged 14 to 16, and economic mobility. In explaining the correlation, Chetty writes,

    “This could be because formal jobs help disadvantaged teenagers directly or because areas with good schools and other characteristics tend to have more teenagers who work. In either case, this finding mirrors the general pattern documented above: the strongest predictors of upward mobility are factors that affect children before they enter the labor force as adults.”

As a leader in youth engagement and participatory decision-making processes, Shari Davis’ work speaks directly to many of the factors that affect teenagers before they enter and during their initial years in the labor market. Shari’s experiences offer keen insights into the opportunities afforded to Boston’s youth and, therefore, how upwardly mobile the city can be.

Why is the period of youth so important on an individual level and for society as a whole?

When we think of most major civic or social justice movements, they were lead by young people and young activists. Young people have the potential to be dynamic, passionate young leaders, activists and contributing members of society. The years of adolescence are when these future power holders are shaped, trained and integrated in community decision making. It’s hard to summarize why the period of youth is important, but in short it is vital to shaping the culture, resilience, and priories of society for generations to come.

How does the Boston Youth Zone help youth achieve their life goals and succeed in the workforce?

The Division of Youth Engagement and Employment [YEE] helps youth achieve life goals and succeed in the workforce in four major ways:

• Connecting to resources and opportunities. Our outreach team lead by young people meets youth where they are (in person and online) to connect young people to after school tutors, free things to do and development opportunities, and more.
• Providing youth a voice in government. Young people can serve on the Mayor’s Youth Council as advisers to Mayor Walsh. MYC reps have the opportunity to speak and learn with city leaders and make important connections that add to development, but can lead to further opportunities in the future. MYC reps lead huge engagement projects like YOUth Lead the Change, a democratic process that allows young people to directly decide how $1 million of city funding is spent.
• Training and development. YEE offers regular peer lead workshops and drop in sessions focused on life skills and career goals
• Employment. YEE meaningfully employs about 4,000 young people annually at over 200 community based organizations. The bulk of employment occurs in the summer months.

In addition, as part of Boston’s Centers for Youth and Family [BCYF] we have access to the resources and expertise of the City of Boston’s youth and human service agency. BCYF is the largest employer of youth, placing them in most of their 35 facilities across Boston for meaningful expertise.

How does data play into your work? What data do you wish you could get your hands on?

Data plays a huge role in the work that we are doing. Data helps us determine gaps in services, underserved populations and program areas that need to be addressed. It would be helpful to get labor/job force data related to young people. It would also be beneficial to get regular reports from BPS [Boston Public Schools] on some of the indicators mentioned above. Dedicated reports from BPD [Boston Police Department] around violence, trends and hotspots would also be helpful.

What indicator or indicators do you pay attention to when you are assessing how well, or poorly, youth in a particular neighborhood, city, or region are doing?

Feedback from young people themselves. Graduation rates. Youth violence. Level of civic engagement and contribution to community. Behavioral indicators (self confidence). Access to mental health services. Affordable housing. Family income. School performance.

Those are some of the indicators that the young people on the Mayor’s Youth Council thought were important as well. As I’m trying to determine indicators, I’m reaching out to our young experts to help us think through as well to help for our team. That’s another example of how we put young people first.

When we think about indicators, we have to be careful. Some are true representations of performance and some actually lead to further questions about demographics or social composition. It’s important not to use any indicator as the only measure of success or improvement.

If you could change one thing about the systems we currently have that serve youth, what would it be? Conversely, What’s the best thing about those systems?

One thing that is really important about systems that serve youth is that young people are involved in the design of these systems. When systems do not include youth in the planning, implementation and execution of a service, they are not reflective of or reactive to the target population. I often say, “If we were going to build a building, we would get an expert, an architect. If we are going to make something for young people, we need experts, YOUNG PEOPLE at the table.

Young people have to be engaged from the very beginning. They have to be part of the oversight committee. We’re starting to see a shift here: when a board is being composed of executive leadership and experts from all over, there is a 16 year old at the table because their experience is invaluable. In Boston, that’s the gold standard and we try to continually improve. It’s something I’d love to see happen in other cities and institutions.

In Boston, we have a process called “Youth Lead the Change” where young people truly have the power to determine how $1 million dollars of our capital budget is spent. That got me thinking about participatory policy-making and shared decision-making. Budgeting is easy — it’s a dollar amount, it’s defined. But how do we do participatory policy-making, participatory program-design? How do we use this democratic process to deeply engage residents and constituents? In a way that is meaningful? In a way that reflects communities’ goals and values, so we can think about how to improve our cities for generations to come?