Linking Up with Year Up

How are you using social media to help young people to get a foot in the door to the labor market, complete high school or stick with college until they get a certificate or diploma?

I’m fascinated by the question because of how social networks develop and the power they have in shaping our lives as a form of social capital. For example, it’s a lot easier to get access to foundation dollars if you are able to access the social networks of program officers as so many foundations have an “invite only” policy for grant proposals. Our social networks may also be shaped by the tremendous segregation by race and class that runs deep in our country. Most of us have a tendency towards homophilic relationships (think birds of a feather). So efforts to intentionally strengthen weak ties are one of the most important things we can do to help youth of color from low-income communities cross the bridge to higher income labor market networks.

Year Up is one of the Capital One Foundation’s grantees that are exploring how they can strengthen workforce development through the use of social networks. (If you don’t know about Year Up check out the 60 Minutes show highlighting them in January). Their program is designed to help high school graduates and GED recipients build skills, knowledge and relationships through a combination of six months in the classroom and six months through internships. Matt McCann, Director of Strategic Projects, explained how Year Up is enhancing its program with LinkedIn, using it in multiple ways to strengthen weak ties among networks.

• Year Up’s Job Ready Tool Kit based on research of best practices within the field includes helping students to create a Linked In profile along with the cover letter and resume. 

• Young people are expected to link to their staff advisers, professional mentors and managers at their workplace as well as others with whom they work. As young people move along their career paths, they can nurture those relationships and hopefully use that social capital along the way for themselves and for their own peers. Year Up brings together alumni from each site at an annual summit. The most recent one had panels on furthering your career and higher education and featured a presentation on the power of LinkedIn. Many Year Up alumni attend college part-time while working full-time, further strengthening their networks. 

• Year Up is enhancing the social capital of its alumni through a LinkedIn group that includes primarily alumni, as well as staff, employer partners and mentors. Right now it’s about 1000 people and growing quickly. It’s easy to imagine that as it grows it can support alumni career development, help expand employer partnerships, recruit mentors and raise awareness of Year Up’s mission to close the opportunity divide. 

• Year Up is exploring how they can use LinkedIn to track alumni to provide long-term data about their career trajectories to enhance research on the effectiveness of the program. As is almost always the case, there are challenges about proprietary data systems to work through. The ultimate goal is to integrate LinkedIn and other external data with Salesforce, their information management system. 

Year Up is also exploring how they can use other social media such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with alumni and access data.

All of this raises the question, is it possible for youth-serving institutions to create specifications or functions that we want social media providers to offer so that we can make sure more young people are Connected by 25?