The keynote by Chike Aguh, Chief Innovation Officer, U.S. Department of Labor, framed how he and the team at the Department of Labor are thinking about youth employment with five key questions: 1. What are the jobs of the future? 2. For those jobs of the future, how do we make sure that youth that are prepared for those jobs? 3. How do we make sure the worker and the work can find each other? 4. How are we supporting youth while they’re in that job? 5. How do we make sure these workplaces are where people are respected, protected and dignified? He emphasized that if we’re serious about equity, we have to attack the issue of youth employment. Access to their first job at 16 dictates their economic outcomes at 60. There is no future we can create unless the youth are a part of it.

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Sixto Cancel, CEO of Think of US, shared a list of daunting stats showcasing how the lives of youth who experience the foster system are impacted and left out of upward mobility solutions. The economic outcomes for youth who experience foster care were already poor pre-pandemic. This past year, Think of Us was able to offer emergency relief grants and within three weeks received 27,00 applicants from foster youth who have aged out of the system. Applicants shared the number one thing they needed to answer these problems was help in being connected to a professional in the career they wanted to work in, help creating a budget, professional interview clothes, help writing a resume. This goes beyond people needing jobs. This moment will signify one of the biggest leaps in our infrastructure where we have the opportunity to say we were actually inclusive of the most marginalized communities and that it was not at their expense.

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Kumar Garg, Managing Director of Schmidt Futures opened the Future of Youth Employment Forum with a call to action “This won’t happen without our collective effort.” Garg acknowledged that we have a huge amount of potential with the rescue plan and American Jobs plan to invest in infrastructure that sets youth up for success with access to paid opportunities and skill development. If we don’t act quickly we will miss out on getting the work done for this summer and substantial funding opportunities for youth employment programs in the future.

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Community, organizing, and innovation was at the core of Megan Smith, CEO, shift7 and former U.S. CTO’s talk about Mapping Ecosystems. She emphasized the importance of change and collectively upgrading our systems in order to serve youth long-term -- the more we talk to each other the faster we’re going to move because of collective genius.

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“It’s on all of us to save the world,” as Irma Olguin, Jr. CEO and Co-founder of Bitwise Industries said to wrap up the threads woven throughout the forum. Olguin shared her personal story as she felt it related to a lot of youth served by these programs. She said it was important to be aware that like a lot of the young people we want to serve better, she knew from experience when you see your life a certain way, you don’t see something else without exposure. Your version of success is being able to pay all of your bills in the same month, and you have this success dream from a really young age. After accidentally going to college and falling into computer science, she knew the only way to change the world was to help shorten the time between learning and earning for other people. The goal was to make sure people who grew up like she did got experience like she did by creating systems to make opportunities more accessible. That’s why Bitwise focuses on underdog cities, because for every tech job that is created, 4.3 additional jobs in local goods and service jobs are also created. Importantly, that new tech workforce is representative of the places we service. Who are the faces of the people who are getting those high growth, high wage jobs? In Fresno, greater than 50% female and gender non-conforming, greater than 50% minority which in Fresno is majority Latinx, and 20% first generation. This is the new technology workforce. We are producing the most diverse and inclusive tech workforce in the nation.

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Adam Bouhmad, Executive Director of Project Waves, has been working on bridging the digital divide in Baltimore since 2018. Bouhmad shared that in 2020 nearly 30% of students in Baltimore lacked the internet or devices they needed to continue to receive a constitutionally promised education, and while investment upfront to build out infrastructure is fantastic, we must be cognizant of how we are measuring those successes. Comcast claims they built out infrastructure across cities nationwide, however being available does not mean it’s accessible in terms of price and user experience. Everyone regardless of their socioeconomic status, the youth regardless of their family’s socioeconomic status, deserve to benefit from the knowledge economy of the 21st century.

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Ashley Putnam, Director, Economic Growth and Mobility Project, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia talked about how to build a more inclusive recovery, particularly with young people. We are in a critical moment as we look at uncertainty about the future and jobs, increasing income inequality, funding shortage in governments, automation and changes in work, and business closures and layoffs. We have to look at how we think about an equitable recovery for workers and what that means. She explained that while we have known wage disparities have been in existence for a long time, we also know job loss disparities have increased due to the pandemic. Black and Hispanic workers faced 1.6 to 2.0 times the unemployment rates of their white counterparts and nearly 2.3 million women have left the workforce, and historically we have seen uneven recoveries. We know that in previous recessions, Black and Hispanice workers, women, those without college degrees, and younger workers are slower to regain employment, so just going back to normal isn’t going to work. Putnam showed us how the Occupational Mobility Explorer was built to help workers chart pathways with transferable skills that lead to upward mobility and increased wages.

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