Raise DC Acts With Courage and Conviction

During their monthly check-in, the YTFG Multiple Pathways to Graduation Work Group heard from leaders in the Raise DC movement including Lee Christian Parker, Director Community Foundation for the National Capital Region; Laurie Wingate, Director, Raise DC; and Celine Fejeran, Senior Policy Advisor, Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education.  Raise DC is a collective impact model with a focus on cradle to career. Unlike most of these models, Raise DC includes a goal to have every youth who is not in school reconnect to education, training, or employment opportunities.  Sure, most of the other cities in the Strive Network focus on dropout prevention and high school graduation, but I can’t find anyone else that is honestly and courageously willing to do anything to help young people that are desperate to find a way to reconnect to school or jobs. 

According to the Raise DC Baseline Report, at least 9,910 16-24 year olds are neither in school nor working (based on the American Community Survey), or about 1/3 of the population.  The presentation helped us to understand the systemic and community dynamics that led to youth becoming disconnected: 

• Of those youth, 19% were on probation or committed to the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS); 16% were currently or formerly in foster care; and 32% are pregnant or parents. 

• The two largest reasons for not being in school were not being able to earn credits quickly enough and not having enough financial resources i.e. need to work. Horrendously, 12% said they didn’t have enough money for transportation to school. 

• The most frequent explanations for not being able to find work are not having enough experience, not having adequate education, no jobs where people live and not having transportation to get to jobs outside of their neighborhoods.

Raise DC is managing their work together through five Change Networks: Early Childhood, K-12, Youth Employment, Disconnected Youth and College and Credential Completion.  They’ve set a goal of reducing the number of “disconnected youth” from 9,910 to 7,000 by end of 2014.  Their strategy is to 1) establish re-engagement centers, both physical and virtual centers, and 2) develop referral systems that help young people get to programs that respond to their situations while also informing Raise DC on where there are service and programmatic gaps or misalignment. 

Re-engagement centers are definitely a must in any eduployment infrastructure (they may be run by youth intermediaries, based in school districts or workforce development organizations).  Based on Raise DC’s analysis it’s also clear that our nation’s economic segregation is having an enormous impact on our young people’s well-being. We need our mayors, city councils, and regional transportation agencies to ensure affordable transportation between concentrated areas of poverty and where schools and jobs are located. 

From what I can tell, Raise DC has a lot to offer the other cradle-to-career movements. Next time I’m in DC, I’ll stop by Raise DC and get a closer look at their work.