By Shannon Holmes
October 9, 2006

As the funding for the Youth Opportunity (YO) program dried up across the country this summer, Baltimore’s city leaders kept the doors of YO! Baltimore centers open. They made the decision to do so after an in-house evaluation showed that disadvantaged young people they served were more likely than their peers to make a living, go to school, stay out of jail and avoid pregnancy. These centers proved to be invaluable in a city where about 20,000 16- to 24-year-old residents, one out of four, are unemployed and/or out of school at any given time.

The city council allocated $3 million to the YO! Baltimore program to continue operations for at least one additional year after federal funds ended June 30. Karen Sitnick, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development (MOED), credits the positive evaluation of the YO program and measurable results for local elected officials’ willingness to keep these youth centers alive while other cities seriously curtailed services and/or closed doors.

“We knew that if we had the statistics to show that we made a difference, someone would listen,” Sitnick stated.

In 2000, Baltimore won the largest of the 36 Youth Opportunity grants awarded to cities across the country. Te funds are used to fund center-based employment and youth development services for out-of-school and otherwise at-risk young people in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Approximately $44 million was spent over five years, which helped the city open two main centers and three satellites. These sites eventually offered a menu of services ranging from GED and parenting courses to job placement, college tours and access to recreational and cultural activities, including, at one satellite center, the use of a recording studio.

Over the years of federal funding, numerous national reports came out suggesting that the YO movement generally suffered from little guidance and planning and that it lacked documented positive results. This year, in fact, the Government Accountability Office identified that about 91,000 youth nationwide were enrolled in the YO program, many of whom completed high school, entered college, or found employment after enrolling in the program. MOED officials decided to explore the outcomes of their participants to see if the YO! Baltimore program made a difference in their city, and they found that it did. For the roughly $38 million spent on the city’s YO program by the time of the evaluation, it had served about 4,300 young people.

The in-house study, validated by experts at John Hopkins University, found that YO participants earned an average of $15,569 over three years following their enrollment, compared to $10,792 in average earnings over this period for their peers. This might not seem like much, but some of these young people attended school or received services on a full-time basis. Moreover, the median annual household income in their neighborhoods at the start of the YO initiative was just above $23,000. Looking into Baltimore City Public School System records, the evaluation found that YO! Baltimore participants enrolled in high schools showed up for the morning bell more often than their classmates in 2004. Attendance rates at the four city high schools in neighborhoods served by the program were lower than the attendance rates of program participants going to those schools. In the most extreme case, Southwestern High School, 85 percent of YO participants were in school on a given day, compared to 59 percent of the school’s total student population.

Only four percent of YO participants who attended high school that year dropped out, compared to nine percent of high school students across the city. YO! Baltimore accounted for more than 470 students staying in school and earning high school diplomas and more than 200 out-of-school young people obtaining general educational development certificates. More than nine percent of participants who enrolled as out-of-school youth earned their GEDs, compared to 4.5 percent of their peers. About 36 percent of young women who engaged in the youth program’s services had babies after enrollment compared to 48 percent of young women who once walked into a Baltimore YO center but didn’t stay. Looking at justice statistics, 20 percent of YO participants were locked up after enrollment compared to 30 percent of their peers. Among young people who came to a center’s door with a conviction on their record, 46 percent of participants went on to be found guilty of another crime, compared to 60 percent of their peers—a rate pretty much in line with national recidivism statistics.

The data from the evaluation impressed Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley and city officials enough that they allocated $3 million in local tax revenue for YO! Baltimore as part of the annual city appropriations process. While the program had been operating on about $5 million a year as federal funds were waning, “that was a huge amount more for the city to dedicate to any individual program,” Sitnick said.

MOED has nonetheless scaled back its operations. It is maintaining the Westside Youth Opportunity Center, which it runs directly, as well as its contract with the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition to run the Eastside Youth Opportunity Center. These two major YO! Baltimore sites, offering a comprehensive array of services, are expected to serve 1,000 participants this year, which is in line with goals for the overall program in years past.

The city office is no longer able to fund YO! Baltimore’s three satellite centers, though the local workforce board is now providing Workforce Investment Act (WIA) youth funding to YO at Studio 760, a project run by the Washington Village-Pigtown Neighborhood Planning Council, according to Sitnick. The evaluation also helped bring in other investments in the program, including support from the Family League of Baltimore to deliver adjudication services in the main centers and a grant from the state Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation to expose participants to careers in construction and health care.