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Transcript of Webinar

2015 YouthBuild Webinar Series

Planning for Placement and Follow-Up

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Transcript byNoble Transcription Services

Murrieta, CA

ERIC BELLINO: So I'll turn things over to Jenn Smith, who is the YouthBuild national director, Division of Youth Services. Jenn, take it away.

JENN SMITH: Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. And good morning, for those of you on the West Coast, I should say. Thank you so much for joining us for today's webinar, "Planning for Placement and Follow-Up." We're thrilled to have you.

I'm just going to give a brief overview. I'll be acting as the moderator for this webinar, so I'm going to give you a brief overview before I turn it over to your presenters. So here's what we think you should expect to receive in this webinar. You'll receive recommendations to ensure follow-up and placement retention strategies are part of your YouthBuild program model. And we also think you will be able to learn about promising strategies for continued engagement.

So the webinar format is following the general format that we always use, for those of you who have been on other webinars with us. The content was available to you at registration for a webcast. We also included again the link to that webcast for those of you who weren't able to view it ahead of time. I would certainly recommend, if you have the chance and didn't view it ahead of time, that you go back and view it. There's a lot of great additional, more detailed content in that webcast.

But today what we're going to do is go ahead and just give a brief overview of the content from the webcast and then we're going to go into our great peer sharing discussion format. So on discussion, please make sure that you are aware your phones are going to be unmuted, as was mentioned. So just try and reduce extraneous noise, be courteous to those that are speaking, and mute your own phone if you have to make some noise because someone's come in the room or whatever else. We would really appreciate that.

So you will see further instructions when we get to the breakout period about what breakout room to choose. It'll be based on the number that you'll see on your screen. But we will guide you through that at the time that that happens.

So at this point I'm going to turn it over to Phoebe Reeves-Murray with YouthBuild USA and one of the YouthBuild technical assistance coaches, who's going to start the overview of content for you. Phoebe?

PHOEBE REEVES-MURRAY: Thank you so much, Jenn. And hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today on this webinar.

And to kick off our presentation, we are going to start with a poll question. And the question is, "Do all staff in your program know what to do to help students have a successful placement?" So if everyone would please vote by pressing the appropriate answer button there in the middle of your screen. And we see that the votes are coming in. And looks good. We've got the majority of people saying yes. Very good sign.

Planning for Placement and Follow-UpTuesday, May 12, 2015 of 14

Sixty-one, 62 percent saying yes; and roughly 36, 37 percent saying no. Well, hopefully after this is over that 36, 37 percent will have a much better sense of what to do to help the students with a successful placement. So thank you, everyone, for voting.

So today we'll be hearing from two of our DOL YouthBuild site TA coaches about key recommendations for placement and retention. But first, we're going to summarize a key structure for strong placement and retention. And at the heart of this structure is aligning and engaging all staff with specific placement and follow-up activities, from managerial on down to direct service staff, across all program components.

Additionally, we recommend making placement and follow-up a key focus in staff meetings, including benchmarking and specific progress made towards the benchmarks, from day one through the completion of your grant. Be deliberate, open and clear in working with and managing your youth participants at all three stages in your grant; that's active programming, transition into exit and follow-up.

Schedule specific interactive career and postsecondary activities to take place beginning in mental toughness and continuing through placement and through the end of follow-up. Have the nature of these activities align with their location in your program calendar. For instance, interest in (appeal ?) career and postsecondary activities taking place during mental toughness; exploration and preparation activities taking place during active programming; and follow-up, support and debrief activities taking place during follow-up.

Review each participants IDP with him or her on a consistent schedule, using an interactive case conferencing model that engages him or her to take ownership of their plans for placement and retention. Reinforce that placement and retention is an expectation and that so is a plan B for placement and retention. Meet at the same time each week or every other week to review IDPs with your youth.

We're going to take another quick pause to do a second poll. And this time, our question to you is, "Do you think your program has a comprehensive placement plan in place?" And if you would go ahead and select your answer yes or no. (Pause.)

And here we're looking at roughly 31, 30 percent saying yes and roughly 70 percent saying no. So this is where the recommendations that we're going to be making hopefully will be a help again to strength your program's sense of having a good solid plan in place.

So key to successful follow-up is to budget and plan well before exit. Your staffing pattern and staff responsibilities can change significantly from active programming to exit and/or from the middle to the end of your grant, depending on what staff are devoted to active programming versus what staff are devoted to follow-up and retention activities.

Direct and regular active contact with your employer and postsecondary education partners is also key and must be coordinated and carried out by designated staff. Incentives and ongoing


professional development opportunities can be strong, positive reinforcements for successful placement and follow-up.

In reviewing your caseloads, make sure your review includes the following. One, clear, specific deliverables each youth needs to meet; two, a strong set of support services that are offered and taken part in throughout the follow-up, not just emergency but preventative supportive services; and finally, a follow-up calendar of touch-base meetings, services and expectations.

And now, for examples of successful practices, I'm turning our presentation over to DOL YouthBuild TA coach Patricia Bravo. Thank you, Patricia.

PATRICIA BRAVO: Hi. Thank you, Phoebe. And welcome, everyone. My name's Patricia Bravo. I'm from Washington, D.C., where I was a YouthBuild director for seven years and now I'm a YouthBuild TA coach.

And what I want to focus on for this discussion is culture, because in order for your program to have success in placement and retention, your program culture needs to revolve around these elements and really reinforce them from day one.

And so I realize that now it's May and you have a group of students who are going to be finishing in May and June and you're probably very focused on what their placement is going to be, which is as it should be. And we're going to talk about some very specific tips for those students in a few minutes. But I'd also like you to think about laying the groundwork over the summer for the coming year and having a culture of placement and retention woven throughout your program all year long.

And so the elements of a program culture focused on placement – some elements of that culture could be program design. And what this means is that your program's design has – just everything about it is focused on placement and career development and college placement. And so you've got time set aside for internships. You've got work experience built in. You've got financial aid workshops, visits to employers and colleges. Having career development and PSE placement everywhere, so no matter where the young person turns, they're just sort of running into that element of your program.

Another element of culture focused on placement are the priorities of the program director. And the priorities of the program director really need to include placement as well. So an example of this would be the program director is spending a large amount of time developing strong partnerships with employers and colleges and apprenticeship programs, because a lot of these partnerships need to really start from some of the highest levels and then the staff end up doing a lot of the work but the partnership is kind of begun and often continued by those contacts.

Another element of a culture focused on placement are the daily rituals of your programs. So for example, in your morning meeting having a college career moment every day at morning meeting, in which a student or a staff member can describe a different career, an area college or an apprenticeship program. And this could be a different student each day, who does some research and shares what they've learned.


Or another weekly – a ritual that you could do weekly is having a different graduate visit the program and make a presentation on the job or the college that they're attending. And in addition, having alumni as guest speakers.

Another way to keep reinforcing this culture of placement is to schedule guest speakers from employers or colleges and have them do presentations about opportunities they have for YouthBuild students.

A way to continue your culture on placement is to think about your physical environment. Look around your program and look at the walls. Are they filled with posters about colleges and careers? And do they have examples of alumni success, like pictures, college acceptance letters, diplomas, that sort of thing?

The next slide that I'm going to show has a great example of a wall like this filled with alumni success. It's from YouthBuild Bogalusa. So you'll see that in just one minute when we finish up this one.

And also, the messages on your recruitment materials should really stress that YouthBuild is a program that prepares its students for college or a career, and not just that it's a program to help you get your GED. Because that's not sending the right message to students so that they realize that you're in it – once you join YouthBuild, you're in it for the long haul.

So after creating this culture that's really rich and richly focused on placement, and now you have all your young people placed, how do we make sure they retain their jobs?

You can see there's the YouthBuild Bogalusa wall. You can't get a lot of detail there, but it's a great wall and a lot of programs have such an alumni wall of fame.

So as we talk about strategies to promote retention in placement, I want to share with you a study I just read about that's really fresh in my mind. It's a Stanford University study, a randomized controlled study of students in eight different colleges. And one group of those students received coaching and one did not. And I think alumni engagement, if done well and done consistently, is like coaching.

So the study found that after six months the students in the coached group were five percentage points more likely to still be enrolled in college than the students in the non-coached group. And those effects lasted for at least a year after the coaching ended.

So compare this to studies which show that for another $1,000 increase in financial aid there's about a three percentage point increase in retention. And this coaching in this study was $500 per semester and that's half as much as the $1,000 of financial aid.

So I guess I just really wanted to share this with you in case you're doubting the importance of keeping in touch with your alumni and providing support and encouragement and help in


addressing challenges that arise. It's really effective and now we have a randomized study to show how effective it is.

So a way to keep the alumni engaged are to have regular alumni events. And when you have these events, I would just encourage you to incorporate both a social element – like food, some games, catching up, that sort of thing, prizes – and a skill-building event, like a workshop on updating your résumé or helping you with tax preparation and that sort of thing, as well as individual staff check-ins. And if at all possible, you should always provide childcare at these events and you'll have much better attendance.

Using alumni as guest speakers is another way to keep them connected to the program and have an opportunity to check in with them when they come back to present, and send the message that they're still valued by the program and that the program still cares about them.

Having those achievement certificates we talked about. And again, just like with placement, alumni programming starts at the beginning of the program year. And that's by sending a message, once in YouthBuild, always in YouthBuild. And we're going to keep in touch after you're placed in a job, after you're placed in college, and we'll be here for you.

So now Mary McRae is going to move on to the next steps of successful practices.

MARY MCRAE: Thanks, Patricia. Again, my name is Mary McRae and I am a YouthBuild – DOL YouthBuild technical assistance coach for the last five years. And formerly was also a program director and program manager of a YouthBuild program up in Massachusetts.

So we're going to talk a little bit about strong employment placement. And as Patricia said, placement begins at the very beginning. So what you need to be sure in thinking about moving forward – and those of you that are recruiting or planning on recruiting a new cohort, you really have to have a very strong intake process.

You need to know your young people inside and out. You need to look at everything from your applications to how you are bringing those young people into your program prior to mental toughness. Obviously, the more that you know about them and the more they know about you, the more opportunities there are for success all the way through the program.

We need to embed career readiness into our culture and practice. It can't be something that is an add-on, something that we do only on Friday afternoons. It has to be a complete – completely part of what we're doing each day.

There needs to be a good career assessment during that mental toughness. And there are lots and lots of different assessments. But starting with mental toughness, the young people start getting the message that what you're doing and working towards is important, that it's about your future; it's not just about today.

There needs to be lots of opportunities for career awareness. Things like presentations and visits and bringing in employers, bringing in graduates who are now working, just to be able to talk


about what kinds of careers exist. Remembering that this generation will change careers at least five times between now and their retirement; not just jobs, but careers.

We need to be sure that every young person in our program has at least one job shadow and has an internship, either paid or unpaid. And there's lots of ways to do those. They don't have to break a budget. But job shadows are easy; they're very often just a visit to an employer where they can visit with somebody and hear about what the job is like, what the employment is like. Look at your own organization for those opportunities. Look at your board of directors of your organization and connecting young people with them.

There has to be opportunities for first jobs, for those who have never worked. Remember that a lot of our young people have never had an official job, so they need to know what that's like. And things like the summer youth jobs programs is a great opportunity to provide those first jobs.

And we need to be sure that we're partnering and engaged with the American Job Centers and the WIBs. Again, these are the places where – that develop the workforce, atmosphere of the workforce, credentials of the workforce, practices and funding for your local areas. So having a very strong partnership with both of those groups is very important to how we build strong employment placement.

Some examples – just some things that you can do in-program is create a professional atmosphere within your program. There are YouthBuild programs that during non-construction time, that the youth and staff alike are dressed for success. I had one program that every Wednesday they did a whole math day, but that was also the time where all the young people were dressed – the young men were dressed in button-down shirts and ties; the young women were dressed in professional garb. It just provides this new atmosphere for young people.

We need to be sure that we're connecting their educational goals and their career goals. The college is not just about going to college, that college is a time of transition, it's a time of credentialing, it's a time to gain more knowledge towards what your end game is. And that your end game is not really an end game; it's a continuation. But we have to make that connection between them. You're working on your GED, you're working on your high school diploma, working on employment; these can't be siloed events. There has to be bridges between them.

Employment retention starts on the first day of enrollment. Again, things like creating a professional email account is imperative. And it has to be something that you help a young person create. And then each and every day there has to be the use of that email account. Our young people are very tech-savvy when it comes to Facebook and Instagram, texting, but they do not use emails. And yet most of our workforce does continue to use emails as a way of connecting.

So there are lots of ways to use email; but again, what we want to do is have the young people to get into a habit of checking email as a way of staying connected once they have left a program, above and beyond their Facebook pages. And it also helps them to stay connected during program.


YouthBuild is all about relationship. And they've got to feel connected to both staff and staff must stay connected with youth after their graduation and exit, so that this isn't – as Patricia said, this isn't a day after graduation or day after exit everybody walks out of their life. So they need to stay connected.

Think about creating a job club model. There are lots of models out there and job club – again, folks like a sense of belonging. So having something like a job club, creating a peer-to-peer mentoring model. As youth move from placement to retention, they mentor somebody coming into placement. This is a way not only to keep your young people who are starting to move out further into the retention quarters engaged, but it's also a way of engaging those folks immediately after exit that are moving into employment, into postsecondary education.

Immediate next steps, graduation versus exit. So this hopefully is just a quick review for folks. But thinking about most programs have a graduation event, but it's a programmatic event. It's a celebration of completing the entire program. The programs usually have a graduation criteria.

Graduation also means coming to an end. If we think about graduations in our lives, it was – we were ending one part of our life and potentially moving into another part of our life. With our young people, they may not have that bridge naturally in their lives to that next part after graduation. So thinking long and hard about when graduation is held in your program and what it means for the young people.

Exit is a DOL event. Exit is the official end of active core programming and moving into placement and retention period of a YouthBuild program. Exit is not the end of the entire program. And exit is done in the quarter before placement and should be based on a program's exit policy. Your FPOs should have requested or have seen an exit policy developed by you. Exit is that hard MIS data piece that starts the second phase of your YouthBuild program.

Something to think about is do you have a distinction between graduation and exit? And they do not have to be the same thing. One of the things for you to think about is in your program – is consider having graduation after the third quarter of retention, when a young person meets all of their goals.

Very often we're having that graduation right around the time of exit. The problem is, we still have three more quarters of engagement, minimally, with a young person that we need for them to engage with us. We need to engage with them not only for their success but also to meet our outcomes. So consider having that at the end of the third quarter so that the young person – you're celebrating the entire length of the program. It does not mean that you do not have other celebrations going along the way.

So the following slides present ideas for preparation for placement that can be done now, as well as for thinking about future cohorts. As Patricia said, many of you may be thinking about gearing up for exiting folks towards the end of this current quarter. Some of you may be carrying a full cohort through the summer. What we want to do is present some ideas that you can both engage in now and also engage in for future cohorts.


So exit into placement from an employment. So this is when you're exiting somebody in the quarter following exit; you're placing them in employment. What is it? It's paid part-time and full-time job. Remember that placement in employment cannot be subsidized employment. For example, WIOA summer job cannot count as a placement. So if you're thinking about exiting somebody in June, for July 1 you want that young person to potentially have that summer job but you're going to have to find an unsubsidized job for them before September 30th.

Preparations prior for placement in employment prior to exit includes – but remember, this is not limited to – summer job enrollment or slots through WIOA, job shadows, internships – paid or unpaid. Determine if a youth needs first job or has a work experience. Make sure, again, résumé, cover letter, those kinds of things. Mock interviews, dress for success, being sure that they know how to dress for interviews, how they should dress on the job. Do they know how to fill out a job application?

And this should be all part of your career readiness piece of programming, again. But again, if you're getting folks ready to exit in June and they haven't done these kinds of things, then you may want to consider putting these things in place.

Exit placement into postsecondary education, or PSE. What is it? It's part-time or full-time college. Preparation includes – but again, is not limited to – college visits. Every single person in your program should have a visit to at least one college, even if they're not interested in college. We don't know what that tipping point might be for a young person. Introducing them to community college, introducing them to private and state colleges are imperative to them thinking that postsecondary education might be an option. It's also where a lot of credentialing is happening now.

You want to be sure that they have completed and submitted a college application, if they are interested remotely in college; that they've completed their FAFSA and that they're scheduled to take a COMPASS and Accuplacer.

Preparation, thinking about for the summer, that if you're exiting folks and that they're looking at going on to college in September, consider a summer bridge program to increase the opportunity for passing pre-college testing to avoid remediation courses. This could potentially be considered placement, depending on design.

Remember that a lot of young people, both high school graduates, GED attainers, drop out of college if they are placed into remediation courses and those are non-credit. So helping our young people be more successful in getting into college and getting into credit courses right from the start is important.

Consider enrolling them in some summer jobs programs through WIA/WIOA. You may be able to combine this with a bridge program. Again, remember that this can't be considered placement since it's subsidized employment. But giving them that summer work experience.


Exit into placement, a training program. What is it? It must have an industry-recognized credential of completion of the training; for example, certified nursing assistant, welding.

Preparing them for exit. Prior to exit for this is, again, things like job shadows. If they're interested in the health care system, have they had an opportunity to shadow a CNA? Have they had an opportunity to be touring a hospital or a nursing home, seeing what those jobs are like? Have they applied for the training program? Have they filled out a FAFSA? Again, this will be needed for a proprietary school. And also, making sure that you've not limited them to proprietary schools; also look at what the community colleges might be able to offer in the way of credentials.

Other options for placement if they're already AmeriCorps. If they're already in AmeriCorps during their active core programming period, the placement post-exit must be a different type of placement. And I gave one example here that a YMCA after-school program.

If they have not been in AmeriCorps during core programming, then placement in an AmeriCorps slot could potentially be more full-time on the construction side, if they were interested in that. Or something else in your own organization or another organization.

You want to be sure, again, preparation for placement is based on the career plans. Have a young person research and interview with different opportunities. Again, there's an awful lot of AmeriCorps opportunities outside the YouthBuild system.

Look at Job Corps. Not all Job Corps centers are alike or have the same offerings. The preparation for placement is bring folks in from the regional Job Corps office to talk about what options exist. Again, young people could go anywhere in the country to a Job Corps center, even if they've obtained their high school diploma or their GED.

The military. The military is a placement for us. Remember that there are – some branches, if not all branches, require college credits for those that are GED recipients. And some are requiring college credit now for high school diplomas.

Preparation. Bring in the recruiters to talk about the different options and bring the different branches. Again, recruiters are in our communities. They can be great connections and partners in general with our program. But this is a great opportunity for everybody to hear about more options here.

And I am going to turn it back –

MS. SMITH: To Jenn.

MS. MCRAE: – to Jenn.

MS. SMITH: Yeah. Thanks, Mary. Actually, thank you, Mary, Patricia and Phoebe for that great content.


So this is just to provide a bit of summary for you guys, some thoughts and recap on some things that you can do.

Develop a follow-up and retention plan for your participants. And again, you want to start that on day one. Involve all your staff in maintaining contact with all participants. It really does take a village here.

Maintain updated and current contact information for your youth. Easier said than done. Follow up early and often in each follow-up quarter and find ways to bring your alumni back. Enter follow-up data in a timely manner; that way, you don't have to worry about losing it or forgetting to enter it.

And then along with that, certainly check your data for accuracy and make sure it's really portraying an accurate picture of your placement. Get credit for the things that you guys are doing.

And then finally, watch the webcast for more strategies. This is the webcast that we mentioned at the very beginning of the webinar; it's the webcast that went out with the registration. So again, for those of you who weren't able to view it ahead of time, you still have an opportunity and we would certainly strongly encourage you to do that and gather some additional information. And maybe even use it as a training tool with the rest of your staff, if they weren't able to join you on this webinar. We would highly recommend that.

OK. I believe I'm going to turn it back over to Eric now, who's going to give us an overview of how the breakdown will work for the discussion break-out rooms for us.

MR. BELLINO: OK. We're back in the main conference. We're going to report out. So believe break-out room one is first. So Jenn or Olga, if you want to jump in and explain what happened and your notes, feel free. (Pause.)

MS. SMITH: Thanks, Eric. So just trying to pull up our notes here so I can start reviewing them. So I guess I'll go ahead and take the lead. And Olga, if you want to weigh in, anything that I miss, please do.

OLGA: Sure.

MS. SMITH: OK. So we generally followed the discussion questions we have. We had a lot of really great, engaged, thoughtful feedback from people both on the phone and via chat, which was really helpful.

So we asked people what the most common approach programs use to stay in touch and we heard a lot of feedback around all of the most obvious social media sources. A lot of Facebook, texting was a common one. Some staff expressed concerns about using text and not wanting the youth to necessarily have their personal phone number, for understandable reasons.


So one person shared the idea of this great free app called Remind that I guess is developed with teachers in mind, which is a way to be able to send either text messages or emails to participants without them being able to see the cell phone number, so that you can maintain that sort of protective barrier of communication. So we thought that was a really interesting idea. And it's, like I said, a free app, so that's something people can use.

A lot of programs also talked about using events to draw alumni back in. But really the whole gamut – Facebook, Twitter, texting, emails, in-person, phone calls. Everything from the old fashion to the new fashions.

In terms of what incentives programs use to encourage exiters, we heard a lot around the use of stipends, such as a $20 stipend; the use of gift cards, such as Target; invitations to lead activities as an alumni leadership event; or to help with the construction sites.

One program described how they gave $50 to the youth for every three months they were in employment. And then the youth – that would also be a way to encourage the youth to bring in the documentation. And every three months, in order to get that $50, they would bring in their full paystub.

Some also talked about the use of free meals or tool giveaways, but we did make it clear that of course – while we understand the importance of food, if you're going to do that, you need to use other leveraged resources or other funding dollars, not grant funds, unfortunately. Which we know of course is not the ideal.

We asked whether some incentives worked better than others and the response we got was – some said transit passes are a really great need and that that's something that is really helpful. A lot of people mentioned bus passes at this point. And we talked about ways to try and use other opportunities to get bus passes or a lot of community agencies that may have access to free bus passes and trying to find ways to leverage funds so that those incentive costs don't necessarily have to come out of your grand dollars.

Some people also talked about how they've – programs have had better luck with using leadership invitations for alumni rather than monetary incentives to bring them back to the program. And also the idea of using events like a family potluck.

We asked at what point programs – when in the year they start thinking about supporting graduates and program completion. And they basically said it needs to start at the beginning of the program, which I think we'd all agree with.

We had a lot of new programs on the phone as well and they talked a lot about, OK, this is a good opportunity for us to be thinking about these steps now and really planning for it.

One program talked about their – what they called bridge programming, which was their pathway to placement period to really get you thinking right away about what post-program – what post-exit placement looks like for them.


And then we also asked whether grantees had used things like alumni councils as a strategy for providing post-program support. Heard back from most people that they hadn't done it but thought it seemed like a great idea. So we also shared with them that back in January 2014 we had a webinar that is archived and it's viewable around policy councils. And it includes some information on developing alumni councils. So we would encourage everybody to look at that as a resource. Again, that was the January 2014 webinar.

And then finally, we asked about how – specifically, Mary had mentioned how job shadows and internships can be very important and how grantees should be leveraging their boards as well as their staff to provide these opportunities. And asked a little bit about whether programs were doing that. And we heard that some programs had said that board members, along with peer leaders and staff, were interviewing potential participants for actual recruitment.

And that was pretty much the point at which the break-out ended for us. We were having a spirited discussion until the very end. So I think it was a lot of great information and I guess I'll turn it over to break-out room number two now.

MS. : OK. Definitely agreed on the spirited discussion. I think that people were coming up with some wonderful techniques and approaches that they've been using.

Definitely in terms of the approach to stay in touch, we had phone contact, we had texting, Facebook. Also included were street outreach and home visits. The question was asked if anybody was utilizing LinkedIn. Another site said that they use a family contact form that is updated throughout the year by participants.

And that goes back to what Mary and Patricia were saying earlier about always having these active involvements by the participants to be working at keeping their IDP updated. And certainly contact information is key there.

Snail mail was still being used. Alumni clubs, job clubs, Mary asked were people using these and finding these effective? We had sites who were saying that their alumni clubs planned quarterly alumni mixers and did outreach themselves, based on how they were connecting to one another. They were also planning agendas and workshops and presentations based off their needs for that follow-up period.

That we had suggestions for having youth either on policy council or on the board of directors who were alums and could help with that kind of recruitment all the way through to placement and retention.

What types of incentives were being used to keep youth engaged after exit? People were using gift cards. There were tracking systems that were named in terms of how to follow up to ensure that students were getting the gift cards. Gift card ranged across support servicings, like gas, which obviously would be something key to getting someone to a job.

That we also had a suggestion about connecting with employers on incentives, putting together raffles where youth could get entered into a raffle if they brought in their documentation. That


we had a reiteration about thinking about budget when your youth are between year two and year three and there's the change from the active programming to exit and follow-up.

Return to discussion about inviting alumni to service projects to role model, as well as to stay connected to the program and continue their engagement. We moved from that strategy to again tools to be able to track the various incentives.

Challenges that were mentioned by people included having a tough time to place youth that had intellectual challenges, even with job-seeking support and techniques. And Mary had suggested to connect with the state rehab system to help with testing and qualification and services.

Another challenge was finding housing for our youth who had felonies or jobs that checked background for felonies and misdemeanors. And we need more assistance there with getting records. Mary suggested also success with going an entrepreneurial route and approaching the smaller businesses – the mom-n-pop businesses – to possibly place someone who's facing that kind of a challenge.

Also mentioned was placing youth who live in rural areas. Sometimes job opportunities and transportation is limited.

People also brought up having challenges not necessarily around follow-up but around enrollment and getting youth to commit from the beginning. And I think there were a range of solutions to that with the biggest one seeming to be relationship, relationship, and making sure that you are consistent and clear with youth.

Passing pre-hire drug testing for employment. Driver's test being another barrier. With programs saying they drug test throughout the program and they don't give incentives unless they pass the drug test. That referrals are word of mouth. Enrollment is a challenge.

I think that definitely towards the end of this we moved back and forth between the placement and follow-up period and going back to the beginning and how do we really connect and be clear with youth as they're coming into the programs. That you need transition plans for them from day one. That you need to meet monthly on transition and meet with staff, as well as youth, monthly to stay focused on this.

That you should reach out to your coaches on help with having a consistent policy around drug testing. (Experts ?) being another possible resource. Keeping the youth actively engaged. Utilizing your graduates for recruitment, as well as your community partners for recruitment.

And that Patricia will go back to finding that study to be able to have that as a resource that we can either send out to people or have posted for access through this site.

And that about covers it.

(END)


media/files/webinars... web viewso we generally followed the discussion questions we have. ......

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