Teens in Little Rock, Arkansas learn construction and painting skills. In 2009, the unemployment rate for 16-24 year-olds topped 50 percent, the highest rate since WWII.
The day before his inauguration as president of the United States, Barack Obama visited the Sasha Bruce House, a shelter and service center for homeless youth in the District of Columbia. The visit was captured on national television, with the president rolling up his sleeves to paint a wall and extol the rewards of community service.
A year and a half earlier, one of the residents of the Sasha Bruce House had been on Capitol Hill, invited by lawmakers to talk about himself and his participation in a workforce development program called YouthBuild. The Sasha Bruce House is a local sponsor of this national program in the District of Columbia; YouthBuild is designed to provide at-risk youth in urban areas with the skills to obtain jobs in construction. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” the young man began his testimony before the Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support. “My name is DeCario Whitfield, and I am 19 years old. I came to the YouthBuild program after coming home from jail. I was locked up at the age of 16 for armed robbery.”
In the remainder of the testimony, the committee learned how Whitfield arrived at this point in his life. They heard about his parents—a father doing time in prison himself and a mother addicted to drugs. They heard about what it was like growing up on the rough streets where Whitfield spent his childhood and youth. “I was in charge of my life, even though I was not wise enough to make decisions for myself. I lived in the ghetto. I saw people getting shot, stabbed, using drugs, and getting robbed every day. It was easy to follow the crew and do the same thing. I found out about Sasha Bruce while I was in jail. I wanted to get my GED because I didn’t graduate from high school. I wanted to be able to get a job so I didn’t ever have to hustle. When I’m all done with this program, I will have training in a trade to use to get a job.”
YouthBuild helps at-risk youth attain a GED and provides them with skills in a building trade. Whitfield and the 10,000 other young men and women who come through the YouthBuild program each year1 may go even further. Many graduates use the income they earn from their construction jobs to pursue dreams like community college, a four-year degree, or apprenticeships in the construction trades. The program ensures that its graduates have a set of skills to fall back on as they work to expand their own opportunities. Some people have left their former neighborhoods never to return, but others have gone back to work with youth stuck in similarly troubled circumstances. They heard the call to help others long before President Obama urged the entire country to participate in community service.
“Programs for young people, like YouthBuild, need to be everywhere,” Whitfield said at the end of the testimony. “Not everybody is able to get to the right people to help them get back straight. Not everybody that fell off the track is in a place where they get word of the chance to do better, fix the wrong stuff, and make something of themselves.”
Unfortunately, programs like YouthBuild are not everywhere. They are a tiny share of the shrinking workforce development line item in the federal budget. Federal spending on workforce development, when adjusted for inflation, has declined by more than 30 percent since 1985. Among the industrialized nations of the world, the United States ranks near the bottom in spending on training for its workforce.2 Moreover, half of all adults who benefit from workforce training services are not low-income workers—the people who will benefit most.
Nearly half of all jobs in the foreseeable future will be middle-skill, says a report by the national Skills2Compete campaign, whose sponsors include business, labor, and education leaders as well as public officials.3 Middle-skill jobs require more than a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree. Well-paying, family-supporting jobs are going unfilled right now because of a shortage of skilled workers. This is a problem bound to get worse as baby boomers retire. In a 2005 survey of manufacturers, 90 percent of respondents reported moderate to severe shortages of trained machinists and technicians.4 A skilled workforce is unlikely to simply appear on its own, without an effort by government and private industry to create one.
“Many local YouthBuild programs are turning away three to six times as many young people as they take in; last year we turned away 14,000 applicants,” says Dorothy Stoneman, founder and president of YouthBuild. “Last year I asked 75 YouthBuild graduates at a conference how many of them had acquaintances or relatives who had applied to YouthBuild, were not accepted for lack of room, and were now dead. Some 80 percent raised their hands.”5
Footnotes
1. For information about YouthBuild, see www.youthbuild.org [back]2. The Economist (January 3, 2009), “The People Puzzle,” The Economist Magazine. [back]
3. Harry Holzer and Robert Lerman (2007), America’s Forgotten Middle-Skill Jobs: Education and Training Requirements in the Next Decade and Beyond, The Workforce Alliance, Washington, DC. http://www.skills2compete.org/atf/cf/%7B8E9806BF-4669-4217-AF74-26F62108EA68%7D/ForgottenJobsReport%20Final.pdf [back]
4. Ibid. http://www.skills2compete.org/atf/cf/%7B8E9806BF-4669-4217-AF74-26F62108EA68%7D/ForgottenJobsReport%20Final.pdf [back]
5. Dorothy Stoneman (2009), “Full Scale Ahead: How YouthBuild Plans to Help Five Times as Many People,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2009. http://www.ssireview.org/images/articles/FirstPerson_FullScaleAhead.pdf [back]
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