Non-Profit Initiative Award Finalist

Year Up, Inc.

Year Up is a U.S. based, national non-profit organization that enables urban young adults to move from poverty to professional careers in one year. Year Up seeks to close the Opportunity Divide—the gap between those who have access to education, resources, and living-wage employment, and those who do not. Their mission is to close this divide by providing urban young adults with the skills, experience, and support that will empower them to reach their potential through professional careers and higher education.

To achieve that mission, Year Up employs three strategies: direct service, innovation, and systems change. Since its founding in 2000, Year Up has served nearly 9,500 students in eleven program sites across the U.S. and will serve over 2,100 students in 2014.

Their direct service model provides an intensive 12-month core program for urban young adults, ages 18-24, who are unemployed and not enrolled in school. For the first six months of the program, students develop technical skills in high-demand career areas, as well as professional skills that will enable them to be successful in a corporate setting. Students then apply those skills during a six-month internship through one of Year Up’s nearly 300 corporate partners. Each Year Up site is partnered with a local institution for higher education, requiring students to be dual-enrolled and earning stackable college credits.

Year Up’s Million-Person initiative explores pathways that closely link education and work experience while incorporating the central tenets of a core model: contextualized learning; attachment to the local labor market; soft skills in communications, critical thinking, and teamwork; high expectations; and social and emotional support. Currently, they are developing and piloting program variations designed to scale rapidly and be capable of serving 100,000 students each year, in order to continue their mission of putting young people on the path to rewarding careers and higher education.

Millions of young adults in this country are facing social and economic injustice. Year Up’s model-combining marketable job skills development, life skills training, stipends, paid
internships, college credit and a behavior management system- seeks to provide underserved young adults with the skills, knowledge and experience today’s businesses demand, ensuring those young adults will begin successful careers and earn a living wage. The program is now in 11 sites nationwide and has served 9, 500 students since opening. It has shown a 70% student retention, and has 84% of its alumni working or in school full time within four months of graduation, earning a starting average salary of $30,000.

A rigorous, two-year evaluation through the Economic Mobility Corporation found that attending Year Up boosted a young adult’s annual earnings by an average of 30%, compared to a control group. Similar results have been demonstrated through a recent engagement with the Analysis Group, and they are currently working with the federal government on a 10-year, randomized control trial study on the long-term impact of their program as well.