Recommendations & Next Steps

Recommendations

Based on our analysis of the BCYOL quantitative and qualitative data, we recommend the following actions are prioritized by city stakeholders:

Develop an Integrated Data System: The Baltimore CITY Youth Data Hub

BCYOL also establishes a starting point for determining the current capacity of youth service providers. This is valuable data to inform the priorities and resource-allocation decisions of public systems, funders, and policymakers. While BCYOL is a necessary initial effort to understand the nature of the youth opportunities ecosystem in Baltimore City, subsequent analysis incorporating individual-level data on which students attend which programs is critical.

Understanding youth participation patterns and inequities in opportunities on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, and age requires a cross-agency data sharing infrastructure not currently available in Baltimore. Baltimore’s Promise is responding to this need through the development of the Baltimore City Youth Data Hub, an integrated data system, in partnership with several city agencies and nonprofit organizations. The Baltimore City Youth Data Hub will be able to integrate and de-identify individual level data to be able to perform the kind of analysis that will give our city a better understanding of the young people who are and are not served by programs. From this analysis we can also learn which programs have positive long-term impacts on the lives of youth. For more information about the Baltimore City Youth Data Hub, please click here.

Develop a Shared Definition of Youth Instability for Baltimore

Youth disconnection data, which counts the number of young people ages 16-24 who are not in school or working, is readily available via the U.S. Census and other regional or local data collection efforts. Many jurisdictions, including Baltimore City, use this data to understand the prevalence of the most vulnerable youth in their locality, often referred to as Disconnected Youth or Opportunity Youth. However, being disconnected from school and work are not the only factors that indicate youth instability and impact young people’s long term self-sustainability and success. And, in Maryland, most young people are unable to officially drop out of school before age 18, which may skew some of the existing youth disconnection data and paint an incomplete picture of youth instability.

To help improve the actionability of the BCYOL data and the work of youth-serving entities, Baltimore City should develop a new definition of youth instability. Given the context of youth experiences and outcomes in Baltimore, it is imperative that the city consider additional situational factors — including but not limited to educational attainment, housing stability, involvement in the foster care or juvenile justice systems, and socioeconomic status – in addition to disconnection from school and work to determine the true extent of youth instability locally. We have also prioritized the development of the Baltimore City Youth Data Hub, referenced above, with a key goal being to understand the true prevalence of youth instability.

Expand Youth Opportunities

The current number of youth opportunities in Baltimore City is not meeting the baseline needs of youth ages 0-24. The youth opportunity gap is not a simple calculation of subtracting the number of program seats identified by BCYOL, (92,604) from the number of young people in Baltimore City ages 0-24 (185,551 youth). Without an integrated data system, BCYOL is unable to determine how many unique youth are served by BCYOL-identified programs. As such, some youth may be accessing multiple youth opportunities, and it is likely that more youth than we realize may have no access. With this in mind, it is imperative that resource holders invest in the expansion of youth opportunities for all of Baltimore City’s youth.

Given the data show a disproportionately small number of opportunities available for youth ages 16-24 who are not in school or working, prioritizing investment in expanding opportunities for older youth in this age range would help address some of the inequities present in the BCYOL dataset. Baltimore’s Promise has helped to expand opportunities for this population through Grads2Careers, a partnership initiative of Baltimore’s Promise, Baltimore City Public Schools, and the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development, to connect recent high school graduates to occupational skills training opportunities leading to employment on a career track in a high-growth sector. Investing in Grads2Careers, as well as other out-of-school time programs serving the older youth population, is an important step in addressing the youth opportunity gap in Baltimore City.

Listen to Our Youth

Baltimore City youth are full of ideas about how to make existing programs better and how to create new programs to better serve young people. For example, we learned in youth engagement sessions that young people want programs with accessibility, engaged and professional staff, youth-centered structures, safe spaces (mentally and physically), exposure and diverse experiences, and skill and knowledge building. Young people deserve agency and a seat at the table in discussions around what city programming should look like and which existing programs should be funded.

Systematic Program Data Collection

There have been several past efforts to centralize, maintain, and make publicly available a directory of youth opportunities. However, these efforts have often failed or been abandoned because of a lack of sustainable funding, organizational capacity, and infrastructure to allow partners to continuously update program information. In addition, there have been data-quality issues that stem from not having standardization in the data collected across youth programs. Such a data-collection process is essential to ensure that information about programming is recent and up to date as we work to understand the landscape of programs and services available across the city. This process is even more necessary in a pandemic climate, where programming opportunities are rapidly being created, eliminated, or adapted.

Promote Action on Landscape Findings

The BCYOL Dashboard will allow community members, advocates, and policymakers the ability to leverage information about the strengths and gaps in youth opportunity in and around their neighborhoods as a catalyst for action. As a result, stakeholders can use the data to support case-making and testimony in public meetings and hearings, to articulate needs for public and private funding requests, and to inform planning and prioritization in community initiatives.

Baltimore’s Promise has created two stakeholder-specific info pages to support program providers, young people, and parents/caregivers in engaging with BCYOL data and using it for self-advocacy. Click the buttons below to download the right resource for you.

Next Steps

The BCYOL work conducted from December 2019 to April 2021 is Baltimore’s Promise’s first endeavor to provide Baltimore City with an accurate baseline count of youth opportunities with complementary analyses showing types of opportunity gaps. BCYOL is envisioned to be a sustained process that ensures these baselines are updated for Baltimore City stakeholders, including but not limited to families, program providers, and decision-makers.

Expanding Existing Data

Our current data set contains incomplete information about many of the programs included. As described in more detail in the Appendix, some data sources provided more complete data than others. Filling in these holes and getting a more comprehensive picture of youth programming in Baltimore City will require time and capacity to analyze each individual program in the data set. One way to expand the data we use to inform this analysis is by obtaining and utilizing needs assessments done by community school coordinators.

Collecting More Data

As an initiative that has never been done before in Baltimore City, BCYOL is a work-in-progress that requires multiple partners from around the city to collaborate to form a comprehensive landscape of youth programming in the city. We are currently reaching out to foundations and other partners to gather more information on local programming that we may have missed in Phase 1. With the public release of the BCYOL Dashboard, programs themselves will be able to inform us of their work through a survey link on Baltimore’s Promise webpage. We will continue to conduct engagement sessions with youth and community members from around the city to directly learn from their insights and perspectives. Themes from our engagement sessions have been and will be instrumental to this work and to our efforts with the Summer Funding Collaborative and other initiatives.

Developing The Baltimore City Youth Opportunities Index

The Baltimore Youth Opportunity Index (BCYOI) will be a comprehensive measure of the access to opportunities that support the well being of young people in Baltimore ages 0-24 and help them become thriving adults. The index will offer decision-makers a way of identifying and understanding opportunities for critical youth investments. Data going into the index will include the type and number of programs in a certain area, as well as the quality of the programming as determined by themes from our youth engagement sessions. The release of the BCYOI is scheduled for Fall 2021.