The Wallace Foundation recently launched its new Youth Development effort, the Advancing Opportunities for Adolescents Initiative, to look at how cross-sector partnerships can leverage and support the contributions of the local youth development sector to advance their long-term economic mobility goals. This work will take place in seven communities around the country.
Over the next few years, these partnerships will participate in national and local research to document the impact on youth outcomes, produce evidence-based tools and playbooks, and share lessons learned with the broader field.
We sat down with Bronwyn Bevan, Wallace’s vice president of research, to hear more about what we are hoping to learn—and share more widely.
Wallace Foundation: What has Wallace been learning from the field over the past few years from a research perspective that is now being integrated into the initiative design?
Bronwyn Bevan: Wow, so much. And it’s been super inspiring in terms of what we see communities across the country doing. This was a research-and-practice journey all the way: We commissioned research scans, had many field-facing conversations, and funded community partnerships to learn with them about strategies and needs. At the heart of the process, what we saw was how the out-of-school time (OST) sector, at its best, provided a supportive space for young people to find their future. But, we saw that many young people, often those contending with the most significant structural barriers, were not participating in these opportunities.
At the same time we saw many cross-sector partnerships across the country gearing up to help young people prepare for their future working lives. And we didn’t see many partnerships with OST at the table. This looked like a missed opportunity. We also saw most of the partnership efforts on workforce exploration and preparation happening at the late adolescent stage, but heard from the field that they wished they could start earlier with middle schoolers.
Wallace Foundation: Focusing on adolescents is new for Wallace. What does the existing evidence base say about adolescents and what they need—and how positive youth development can be helpful?
Bronwyn Bevan: Adolescence is such an amazing moment of opportunity. Anybody who has had adolescents in their lives knows that it’s like this chrysalis moment when a young person suddenly is metamorphosing into their future selves. Lots of research talks about the cognitive, social, and physical changes that take place in adolescence. There’s a heightened need for places where youth this age can be seen, challenged, and supported to grow in new directions and expand their horizons. When it’s at its best, this is what the out of school time/youth development sector does best. The recent synthesis report from The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine details the developmental power of the sector, and also the need to better coordinate and leverage it to reach more youth. We hope the Advancing Opportunities for Adolescents (AOA) initiative will help to address that need.
Anybody who has had adolescents in their lives knows that it’s like this chrysalis moment when a young person suddenly is metamorphosing into their future selves.
Wallace Foundation: What gaps in knowledge is Wallace hoping to fill through this initiative?
Bronwyn Bevan: There are a few. How can OST programs and practices be coordinated and enhanced at scale to serve more youth, including those facing the greatest barriers to thriving? How can OST programs expand on their strengths as sites for youth development to intentionally help young people explore future directions? What supports do adults need to help young people navigate connections, resources and opportunities? Can fully leveraging the OST sector accelerate the progress of community efforts to advance young people’s workforce readiness and long-term economic mobility?
Wallace Foundation: What are the kinds of things that the research team, American Institutes for Research (AIR), will be looking at over the course of the multi-year initiative?
Bronwyn Bevan: In addition to the “how” partnerships do the work of leveraging the OST sector, AIR will be looking at what happens for young people as a result. Specifically they’ll be looking at how high quality OST experiences, in the context of the cradle-to-career initiatives already underway, help middle schoolers expand their horizons, develop workforce interests, expand their social relationships and connections, and gain the essential competencies and skills that they need to pursue their goals in late high school and beyond.
We are partnering with such a diverse set of communities, spanning rural to urban and suburban; we think that the research has the potential to be useful to many different cross-sector partnerships. It’s also one of the first times Wallace has funded rural community change efforts, and that’s a lot of learning for us.
Wallace Foundation: Can you share any early thinking about the kinds of knowledge products or resources that will come out of AOA?
Bronwyn Bevan: We hope to produce a Playbook on “how” to do this work: how partnerships organize centrally, how they increase the quantity and quality of OST opportunities, how OST programs bring specific assets and value to efforts to support workforce exploration for middle schoolers. We hope communities will use the playbook to map out what to do, how to do it, who does it, and how it can be adapted to different contexts.
We also anticipate research providing evidence of the benefits to young people from leveraging OST in cross-sector partnerships.
Finally, we’ll be funding locally-specific studies that dive deep into particular contexts or strategies to expand the evidence base. There is so much coordinated activity going on across the country to better prepare young people for their futures, it’s exciting to learn how the OST infrastructure—developed over the past several decades and sitting there in plain sight—can be a part of and perhaps accelerate these efforts.
