Introduction

In America, nearly five million young people ages 14–24 are not in school or working.¹ Policymakers and practitioners call these individuals disconnected youth, out-of-school youth, or opportunity youth. Life for these young people is not easy. Opportunity youth frequently come from underresourced communities and face higher rates of poverty. Many have experienced homelessness, have disabilities, or have been involved with the child welfare or juvenile justice systems. Youth of color are overrepresented in this population, as are rural youth.²

These young people usually exist in the intersection of multiple systems (like child welfare, juvenile justice, education, and training and employment) that do not interact with each other.³ Successfully navigating these siloed systems to get support requires time, energy, savvy, and sometimes plain luck. It is too easy for youth to fall through the cracks between systems. Services often fall short of being fully effective because the systems within which they exist lack coordination.

This disconnect at the local level arises partly because of how federal funding works. Federal resources for opportunity youth are spread across multiple agencies and sub-agencies, distributing the funding to state and local education, workforce, and human services sectors. Programs that aim to serve the same population end up with different accountability, reporting, and eligibility requirements.

For front-line service providers, this makes it hard to effectively and efficiently serve youth and makes collaboration across organizations in different systems close to impossible. For example, a young person experiencing homelessness might be eligible for support through Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Title I and Reentry Employment Opportunities (REO) at the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), Transitional Living Program (TLP) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and various resources at the U.S. Department of Education (ED), like Community Schools or Promise Neighborhoods. However, each of these programs has different requirements, and each is administered through a different system. These systems are not designed to interact with each other. Rather than creating a coherent system, federal funding tends to support a fragmented landscape of programs that too often fail opportunity youth.⁴

The Obama administration appreciated the urgency of improving services to opportunity youth and began looking for ways to address the fragmentation inhibiting a more holistic approach to their challenges. Federal workers believed programs serving disconnected youth could benefit from a performance partnership approach, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has long used to streamline funding and minimize administrative burdens.⁵ In 2014, Congress approved a new pilot program called the Performance Partnership Pilots for Disconnected Youth (P3), modeled after the EPA’s successful framework.⁶