Spring²

Measure of America’s “Decade Undone: Youth Disconnection in the Age of Coronavirus” notes the pre-pandemic youth disconnection rate in Hennepin County, Minnesota, was 6.7% (or 9,100 young people). After the pandemic, it’s anticipated the number will swell to 1 in 4. There is an urgent need to establish the systems alignment, policy, and supports to ensure disconnected youth connect to viable career pathways.

Spring² is a skill-building model that allows young people (ages 18-24) to earn  secondary and career credentials simultaneously. The model brings together state agencies, education institutions, employers, and nonprofits to ensure the systems that impact young people work together to achieve the shared goal. The benefit to young people and the community is that disconnected youth do not have to choose between getting their diploma or work. It allows them to do both, setting them up for livable wage attainment and equipping our economy with qualified workers. 

Prior to COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd, the Minneapolis/St. Paul (Twin Cities) region was in the midst of economic and educational challenges that threatened the economic mobility of young people─specifically, youth of color who face the greatest barriers to high school graduation, post-secondary attainment, and livable-wage employment.

• Students of color in the Twin Cities are less likely (69%) to graduate from high school than White students (88%) (Minnesota Compass, 2019).
• The state average wage for youth with secondary credentials is $12.86/hour. In Hennepin County, alternative high school graduates and students of color are earning less at $11.86 (Minnesota State Longitudinal Data System, 2020).

Today, the onset of COVID-19, distance learning, unemployment, and racial tensions in our communities have caused our students to make difficult choices and many have disengaged from school. The pre-pandemic youth disconnection rate in Hennepin County was 6.7% (or 9,100 young people), and is projected to increase to 1 in 4 youth post-pandemic (Measure of America, 2020). This is concerning as a 20 year-old disconnected youth can expect to earn $392,070 less throughout their lifetime, impose a net tax-burden of $235,680 and cost the community a total of $704,020 (Pohlad Family Foundation, 2015). 

Spring² seeks to change policy (expand K-12 funding to up to age 24) and braid systems together to ensure young people who are disconnected from school and work and who have aged out of the public school system have a pathway to not only achieve their secondary credential, but also attain a career credential to link to the workforce. The design team consists of government entities, education institutions, employers, youth, and community organizations. Our plan is to launch a pilot in Minneapolis, where PPL and the City of Minneapolis have existing youth employment programs that are working to eliminate system silos. The solution will create a pipeline that connects all of these programs and assesses each student’s credit load and career interests, and matches them with the right opportunities within our partner offerings to help them secure their diploma and move forward on their individual career goals. By ensuring state agencies are at the table and goals are aligned, we hope statewide scaling would be possible in the future, if successful. 

Disconnected youth, ages 18-24, who have traditionally been disenfranchised from opportunities are the priority population, including young people with county involvement (foster care, homeless/highly mobile, young parent, juvenile courts). About 90% of the disconnected youth we serve are people of color and impacted by long-standing systemic racism that is baked into the systems they operate in─school, workforce, state, county, housing, income, and more. Spring² offers targeted supports to break down barriers to opportunities for academic and employment success by ensuring that youth are able to secure livable-wage career pathways of their choice. As part of the pilot, we want to ensure Spring² participants beat the state wage average of $12.86/hour.

Feedback received from young people is that they are not comfortable attending adult education because it isn’t designed from them and their interests. Essentially, they are over age and under credit and feel like they need to get a job. Our solution is blending together the secondary and career credential to meet their specific needs. Part of the solution launch in Year 1 is to hold a two-day hackathon, which would bring youth and agency partners together to design and problem solve; ongoing feedback will be collected throughout the year.

Our solution is timely as it builds on existing successes our team has accomplished over the last five years in supporting disconnected youth. The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the urgency around this issue. We believe our proposal relates to all the dimensions noted above, especially increasing access to high-quality, affordable learning and training opportunities or those entering the workforce. Our model does exactly that – it offers an education and training pathway at no cost to young people who have aged out of public school without graduating.  

PPL full-time staff: 4; External partners: 9

Project for Pride in Living (PPL), the lead organization, utilizes a racial equity lens across its operations and partnerships to ensure our services and impact align with BIPOC communities. PPL is led by President & CEO, Paul Williams, who is a person of color, and over 50% of our staff is BIPOC. 

Our solution is equity-focused, acknowledging that not all young people have access to the supports, education, and training they need to be competitive in the workforce. Additionally, our employer partners have been selected because they see the value in hiring young people, are open to shifting hiring practices and policies to make jobs more accessible (ie. changing minimum qualifications to emphasize work experience or career credential instead of Bachelor’s degree), and align with our desire to address systemic racism and barriers within the youth-serving systems. 

As far as we know, there are no other organizations, coalitions, or collaborations outside of our partnership team that are working to expand and combine the secondary credential with a career credential for young people older than 18 years old. What’s innovative about Spring² is that we are listening to young people say that the adult education model does not work for them and, in response, pulling large, siloed systems (state agencies) and stakeholders together to launch a solution that has the potential for significant impact and staying power to ensure youth disconnected from school and work are reengaged. Equity is a focus of the solution, as we acknowledge that the current adult education model is not a one size fits all and is ineffective for many young people aging out of high school.

What’s also innovative about the solution is that in order to put in place a credentialing model that works for disconnected/opportunity youth who are older than 18, we have to shift systems and mindsets, and address tensions within the siloed systems. We are working at both the micro and macro levels to create real change. The pilot will allow us to demonstrate that the new credentialing model can be successful and leverage its results to shift legislative policy to expand K-12 education funding to include this model for 18-24 year olds. As noted in the list of partnerships, we have Minnesota Representative Jim Davnie who is championing this model at a policy level.

N/A

N/A

The theory of change of Spring² puts in place a new secondary and career credentialing model for young people ages 18-24 that empowers them with the knowledge, labor market analysis, and connection to employers they need to secure family sustaining jobs. To fully realize this goal, state policy needs to be aligned to sustain and scale the solution.

Outcomes Pathway 

• Aligning systems and policy creates an education model that captures a priority population that is falling through the cracks. Systems alignment also creates greater opportunities for scaling and sustainability.
• Students securing dual credentials connects more young people to the workforce and sets them up for lifelong learning and earning, boosting the economy.
• Reengaging disconnected youth now, before they age further into adulthood, benefit their wealth earning potential and also benefit the community by breaking the cycle of poverty (over 85% of students we serve receive free or reduced price lunch – an indicator of poverty). This will not only impact their quality of life, but their children’s, and grandchildren’s (two-generation approach).
• Evaluation of the pilot and lessons we learn will create greater opportunities to address systemic barriers in our education and workforce systems to reduce racial disparities in Minnesota. The pilot will be in Minneapolis, but if policy aligns, could shift to statewide and create a ripple effect. 

In Year 1, our goal is to pilot Spring² with our partners and collect data, lessons learned, and make our case for policy change. Over a five year period, we want to expand K-12 funding for 18-24 year olds and work with state agencies to change this policy for sustainability. Once we pilot it in Minneapolis, we will look to launch the model in St. Paul and beyond. 

Existing Barriers

• Funding and policy - currently K-12 funding ends at age 21. It forces young people to lose their earned high school credits and go into the GED system.
• Siloed systems – we are working to align existing programs, support, and resources for youth, and coordinating them to ensure young people have easy transitions among systems.  
• Currently, there are limited providers for the Adult diploma – this is a barrier to scaling in the five year period. Also, credentialing is challenging, and there’s limited ability to offer short-and long-term career pathways right now.
• Data collection/integration among systems
• Ongoing student feedback loop. This is already built into K-12 programming, but how do we create space and place for student conversations to ensure their needs are met.
• Time is also a barrier – the credentialing process will likely take longer than anticipate. It isn’t a linear process as we know students will come in and out of the process.
• There’s also a mental shift that needs to happen at a systems and community level to think beyond graduation happening after the age of 18. 

For many of the barriers identified, having our partners involved and aligned creates pathways for ongoing communication to break down siloes, integrate and analyze data, layer in youth support and feedback by system, and build on our momentum to push forward this new thinking in the community and at the policy level.

As we complete the pilot and demonstrate success, we anticipate that other providers in our communities and region will want to join the fold, increasing the availability of Adult diploma and training providers. To address the non-linear nature of the model, youth case management will be key to ensure participants stay engaged, but at their own pace with the support they need. 

We want to collect disaggregated wages by race at the 18-24 age level. Capturing this data with our proposed pilot will give us an opportunity to do this at a small scale and make interventions as needed to move forward.

While we are tracking outcomes in education attainment, employment, and wage, the big vision is to ensure that our program contributes to moving the needle on wealth building by race. For wage data available for youth with secondary credentials through the Minnesota State Longitudinal Data System (SLEDS), we identified the state average is $12.86/hour, and young people who have graduated from alternative schools and youth of color in Hennepin County earn less than the state average at $11.86/hour. Even with the higher standard of living in the Twin Cities, our young people are making less. We have set a shared goal with partners to ensure youth beat the state average. 

N/A

PPL has provided innovative, cutting-edge education and employment services to the Twin Cities area for over 30 years, and we have strengthened our efforts around youth employment. Experience includes:

• Launching and leading the Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP) cross-sector initiative that provides credit-ready students with one-to-one career coaching, work readiness training, work experiences, and financial literacy education within a school context.
• Running two contract alternative schools, MERC Alterative High School and Loring Nicollet Alternative School, that have a 98% graduation rate for credit-eligible students.

• Contract partner for the last seven years with the City of Minneapolis’ Step Up summer work readiness program.
• PPL’s Career Pathways job training programs have been offered since 2009 in partnership with local employers and post-secondary education institutions. The pathways boast an 88% graduation rate, an 84% job retention rate after one year, and an average hourly wage of $16.95 at job placement.

The project lead, Kristy Snyder, is a first generation college graduate. From teaching middle school, where she supported young people play the game to get into the best public high schools, to teaching community college, where she helped future teachers secure teaching licenses, most of her career has been in direct service to make transparent the codes of power to navigate the education system. In the past few years, she has taken up leadership roles where she can work to remake systems—leaving no opportunity for young people to miss critical information that will help them achieve their goals.

The design team consists of government entities, education institutions, employers, and community organizations─Minnesota Department of Education; Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development; Hennepin County; City of Minneapolis; Minneapolis Public Schools; Minneapolis College; Normandale Community College; and Hennepin Health. These organizations are part of the broader education and workforce systems and are helping design Spring², advocate for policy change, provide credentialing and training, and layer in case management support for young participants. 

Our business model connects young people ages 18-24 to a credentialing process tailored to their needs to ensure they secure a secondary credential, an in-demand, industry-recognized career credential, and a living-wage career pathway. By aligning systems, we will be providing young participants multiple layers of support via case management, individual development plan creation, and training to meet their expressed needs of needing more customized support versus funneling them through adult education. The social return on investment is significant. As mentioned earlier, we know that a 20 year-old disconnected youth can expect to earn $392,070 less throughout their lifetime, impose a net tax-burden of $235,680 and cost the community a total of $704,020 (Pohlad Family Foundation, 2015). Creating a framework to help more disconnected youth achieve their education goals and connect to the workforce is going to be critical in a post-COVID economy. For the sustainability/revenue piece, an award from the challenge will provide us with seed money to demonstrate pilot success, which we would use to advocate for change at the policy level to expand state K-12 funding to support young people up to age 24. 

We already have a Minnesota State Representative, Jim Davnie, who is championing this effort at the legislative level to promote the expansion of K-12 education funding to support young people up to 24 years old. If this policy change happens based on the results of our pilot, we will be a position to sustain and scale the effort statewide. Additionally, in Minnesota, the philanthropic and government sectors are recognizing that youth disconnection is an urgent threat to the strength of our economy. We will also seek grants and resources to support the effort.

Also, with the anticipated disconnection rate of youth post-COVID-19 to be 1 in 4 in Hennepin County, building this pilot will enable our work to possibly get funds from an anticipated second wave of COVID relief funds. 

N/A

For the pilot, we are seeking $100,000 for Year 1. 

Expenses in Year 1 will cover costs associated with staff (teacher and youth navigator to support Spring²) and student credentialing. 

Data Alignment: While SLEDS is a useful tool for data alignment, it is more useful for longer range trends. It does not help us with real time data that helps us to adjust the model. Database support to design more real time alignment of programming data.

Mental Mindset Communication: As this model rests on transitioning the mental models that employers hold about opportunity youth and youth hold for returning to “school,” we would welcome support on crafting literature that pushes against those mental models.

-data collection, integration among partners/systems, analysis, and disaggregated data by race

-shifting systems/policy work/mental mindsets/identifying and resolving tension points among system partners

-growth management/revenue/sustainability

Data integration and alignment is a need and we don’t have a lot of capacity within the partnership currently to dig deeper into this work to capture impact on racial disparity reduction. We noticed that IBM was an identified partner within the MIT Solve/New Profit network that would be wonderful to connect with for consultation. If selected for the award, we’d like to leverage relationships with the MIT Solve network and continue to work with New Profit to shift systems level/policy work to promote sustainability and scale of Spring²