In 2019, approximately 4.1 million young people between the ages of 16 and 24 were neither employed nor in school.
The Reconnecting Youth project aims to systematically understand what programs and practices are operating in the United States to support these young people, often referred to as “disconnected youth” or “opportunity youth.” Many programs exist to help these young people connect to education and employment pathways and advance along them. The past decade has seen a great deal of research on this topic, stimulated in part by federal evidence-building initiatives.
The Reconnecting Youth project pulls together in one location information about programs that support these young people and their practices and a repository of existing research. The project includes two interactive online tools: a compendium of programs and an evidence gap map. These online tools can be found on the Reconnecting Youth microsite on the youth.gov website. In addition, the project includes two research reports and accompanying briefs located on the ASPE website at the links in the Related Products section below. The first research report and brief provide high-level findings from the compendium of programs and connects these results to findings from the evidence gap map. The second research report and brief focuses on the evidence gap map report and aims to systematically summarize the available evidence about the practices used by programs in the United States to support young people who experience disconnection from school and work during their transition to adulthood.
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