We’ve written for several years about “opportunity youth,” 16-24 year-olds who are neither in school nor working, and how this is one of the two key measurements for whether Memphis is making progress.
The other indicator is whether Memphis can improve its position as the city with the worst chance – 2.6% – for a child born into the bottom fifth in income to move to the top fifth.
Back to opportunity youth, five years ago, our friend, Dr. George Lord, researcher and former academic dean, was the first person who raised to us the importance of addressing the issue of opportunity youth in Memphis and the substantial economic advantage of moving these young people into the economic mainstream.
Those conversations were expanded by the work of our friends at Seeding Success, whose mission is to improve the educational outcomes for children and young people. It may be largely working away from the headlines and below the radar, but the items on its agenda are some of the most important in Memphis and Shelby County.
To cap it off, a few weeks ago, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, in his weekly update, spotlighted the importance of these disconnected youth.
Do It In Your Own Self-Interest
It wasn’t just that this is an important issue for Memphis because of the need to expand the economy or to give every youth a fair chance at success in life. Rather, the alarm was sounded because the Memphis MSA had a higher percentage of its 16-24 year-old population in the opportunity youth category than the other 50 largest metropolitan statistical areas.
There have been several reports since 2013 that have reiterated the fact that in the Memphis region, almost 20% of 16-24 year-olds are opportunity youth. Meanwhile, a report for New Orleans showed that every reduction of 1% saved taxpayers $20 million yearly, and we suspect a similar benefit here. As for Memphis, Dr. Lord suggested that the taxpayer burden for all opportunity youth was in excess of $389.2 million and the lifetime social burden came to $13.2 billion.
In other words, even though many people aren’t moved by the moral or religious or patriotic implications, reducing the number of opportunity youth falls clearly in the category of enlightened self-interest. After all, reducing their number puts more money in cash registers in businesses all over the region, frees up tax dollars to be spent on other priorities, and reduces the unemployment rate.
While these troubling statistics for the Memphis region, when compared to our region’s peers, were enough to get our attention, we’ve wondered what the profile is for the opportunity youth in our community.
Thanks to Seeding Success, we now know.
The Profile
Executive Director Mark Sturgis and his talented staff, in cooperation with what they call the Opportunity Youth Collaborative Action Network (CAN), has issued a report that tells us more about these 16-24 year-olds than we have previously known. The group’s name may sound a lot like a bureaucratic buzzword, but it’s all about action and working together to change things.
Mark Sturgis
Members of the Opportunity Youth Collaborative Action Network are Boys & Girls Club (Technical Center), CoreFire at the Kroc, Goodwill Excel Center, Greater Memphis Alliance for a Competitive Workforce, Health Tech Institute of Memphis, Literacy Mid-South, Mediation and Restitution/Reconciliation Services, ResCare, Seedco, Workforce Investment Network, and Yowealth Academy.
In the U.S., there are 5.25 million “opportunity youth” and 29,830 of them live in the Memphis MSA (as of 2014). Of that total, 8,013 are between 16 and 19 years old, and 21,817 are between 20 and 24 years old.
In other words, 18.7% of 16-24 year-olds are neither in school nor employed, and the breakdown by gender is 15.7% for females and 21.5% for males. Fifty-nine percent of all opportunity youth total is male.
The racial breakdown shows that 23.8% of African American and Hispanic youths (20,543 and 1,826 persons respectively) are opportunity youth, compared to 12.3% of Caucasians (7,690 persons).
Better Job Opportunities
It’s no surprise that poverty has a strong association to opportunity youth: 23% percent are living at 0-50% of the federal poverty level; 24% are living 50-100% of federal poverty level; 16% are living 100-150% of poverty level; 11% are living 150-200% of federal poverty level, and 26% are 200% or above.
In the Cowen Institute’s report last October in New Orleans, it found that female opportunity youth had children at twice the rate of all female 16-24 year-olds. Also, one-fifth of opportunity youth there have some college experience and 74% had no income in the past year.
Tulane University’s Cowen Institute has led the research and evaluation about opportunity youth, and three years ago, it launched a program that impressed us: the Earn and Learn Career Pathways Program. During the yearlong program, the opportunity youth are employed and are paid by Tulane while also receiving skills training through the Accelerating Career Education program at Delgado Community College.
The Earn and Learn program trains 16-24 year-olds for jobs in high-growth, livable wage industries. It’s that emphasis on jobs that pay decent salaries that is intriguing, because too often, here, we plug newly trained workers into a market dominated by low-skill, low-wage jobs that often act as disincentives for workers to stick with it. In particular, the New Orleans program shortened the time to get a postsecondary credential.
While this and other programs in New Orleans are interesting, what is most impressive is the degree to which Tulane University, a private, research universities with 13,500 students, is engaged in the development and execution of opportunity youth programs. It’s further evidence how the university stepped up its impact post-Hurricane Katrina and has become even more of a model of academic leadership.
Keeping Perspective
Back to Memphis, the Seeding Success report listed “best, exemplary, and promises practices” that included listening to opportunity youth to learn firsthand of their needs, experiences, and challenges; locate resource and service centers in communities where the youth are located; connect a youth with an adult to provide support through a one-on-one relationship; tailor classes that respond directly to individual needs; offer better skills development aligned with actual jobs and the teaching of “soft skills”; work with local employers for job opportunities and engage them in developing solutions; improve accountability (we can’t find an annual report in a city with a high number of opportunity youth that reports on its rate of success and number of program participants; and identify and scale up effective programs.
The good news is that there are Memphis programs with proven track records of success, but frequently, they are touching only a small percentage of the total youth who need intervention and support. Because of it, the need to scale up programs to touch more youth has to be a top priority, and that is what the Opportunity Youth CAN plans to do. In addition, next steps include data sharing, a one-stop-shop for these youth, and applying for a grant from Aspen Institute.
We’ve written before that in tackling our challenges in Memphis, there is a tendency to wring our hands, excuse ourselves from action because our challenges are so much worse than anyone else’s, and to magnify the negative while dismissing the positive.
4:1
So, while we have to address in serious ways the issue of opportunity youth in the Memphis region, let’s also remember that while 29,830 16-24 year-olds are neither in school nor working, there are 56,244 of their counterparts who are enrolled in school; there are 31,904 of their peers who are enrolled in school and are working, and there are 41,624 16-24 year-olds who are not in school but are working.
It says to us that while we all have to set opportunity youth as priorities, we can’t lose sight of the fact that for every one of them, there are 4.4 youths who are working, in school, or both.
At a time when the news media, especially television news, suggests that every youth in Memphis is a threatening presence, we should keep in mind that many times more of them are doing the best they can to get ahead, and that many of them do it in environments in which it would be understandable if they throw in the towel and give up.
In that way, while we have serious problems that we have to confront honestly and with vigor, we should pause often along the way to celebrate those young people who defy the odds to stay on a positive course for the future. They should inspire us all…and especially their peers who are neither in school nor working.
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Opportunities for youth are important for any city, but in Memphis any viable opportunities are few and far between. Programs like the ones described here are just a drop in the bucket because we have so many bigger problems and needs in every segment of society. When coupled with the city’s staggering poverty, high crime, poor schools and few job opportunities nothing is really going to improve. These are tough times for young people, especially in Memphis.
Yeah, nothing will ever get better. Let’s all just quit.
38120: Have you ever managed to have a constructive suggestion about anything? If you are so good at pointing out everything is wrong, what have you done about it? How are you helping to solve the problems you keep talk, talk, talking about?
That’s what I thought.
38120: Sorry, but we had to delete your second post. It was just the same attitude stated again. We wish you would answer Frank’s question.
Tom Jones, here is my response. I’ve lived in Memphis for 27 years and built a successful business. During this 27 years I’ve witnessed up-close the continuous decline of this city. Unacceptably high levels of crime, staggering poverty, infant mortality, poor public education, sub-standard institutions, and incompetent leadership continue to be to norm in Memphis. As a result I’ve pretty much given up hope on Memphis ever improving very much because things have already deteriorated to a point where it will be impossible to improve life enough for most residents. We pay high taxes, yet things just stay pretty much the same or get even worse. We see other cities eclipsing Memphis is every area. The economy here is built on low wage warehouse and fast good type jobs. There is little hope for the average worker as people rightly choose to leave the city. All one needs to do is look at the flat and declining population rates to see that Memphis is a stagnant city that people do not want to live in. There are just too many major obstacles to improving the city as a whole because the basics like crime, poverty, schools are all badly broken. If I could point out one reason for this decline it would be the incompetent, corrupt, incestuous “good ole boy network” that has run Memphis into the ground. With the removal and censoring of my earlier comments, I’m convinced that Smart City Memphis is also a part of this “good ole boy” network.
When you’re a hammer, everything in Memphis is a nail. So, you have given up and you say it over and over and over. There are no solutions that you can suggest to address the “major obstacles” you cite?
When we started this blog 12 years ago, we hoped to stimulate a conversation, but to do that, you (meaning all of us) have to be willing to contribute in a constructive way to it. It’s too easy to throw up our hands and say nothing will change and contribute to a defeatist narrative.
PS: We didn’t censor your comments. You’d already made your point and expressed your opinion. Help us find the solutions or potential solutions. If you’ve built a successful business, it’s clear you have some ideas…and if your business is successful, doesn’t that say something positive about Memphis?
Finally, the crime rate is down, poverty rate is down, infant mortality is down, and strategies of the schools have produced signs of progress (although every major city that we know of complains about its schools), city property taxes are lower than when Chandler was mayor, etc. We don’t say this to be Pollyannish but to point out that there are signs of hope that we can amplify.
So, back to our point, you have 27 years experience in Memphis, so you have to have some specific ideas of how to improve the indicators that you cite. We’d welcome them.
Ok. I’d start by firing and exposing the do-nothing shenanigans of Kevin Kane. He’s been in his CVB job far too long and with no real success. He’s only enriched himself and his more important side businesses by sucking the CVB dry for years. Good Ole Boy personified.
So, what would you do to increase the tourism and convention sector of the Memphis economy? How would you define “real success”?
SmartCity, I’m surprised you let 38120 stick around. He used to make thousands of negative comments on the old Commercial Appeal site when they allowed anonymity. When they ran him off he took his act to the Memphis Flyer boards. The editor there banned him within a week. About the only place he has left is this blog. I’ll tell you like I told the CA monitors, his continuing trolling brings down the value of the entire site. There is absolutely no truth to anything he says about himself. For the sake of the people that enjoy the writing here and legitimate comments and dissension, drop the hammer on this troll, please.
38120, that’s a classic answer by you. No facts, no real thread, just another attack. I’m not a big Kevin Kane fan, but I know enough to know that he doesn’t set his salary, his board does. I also remember the paper spending weeks and printing stories about his suggested conflicts and it came up empty. If there’s corruption, call the FBI. Other than that, just shut up.
Ziphead, you’re lying about your background, and we all know it.