2024 Opportunity Youth Forum: Collaborating to Transform Local Systems, An Update

Equal Measure’s 2024 evaluation for the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions looks at six-year trends (2019–2024) across the Opportunity Youth Forum (OYF), providing a picture of collaboratives’ work to connect 16- to 24-year-olds to education and jobs.

Building on Equal Measure’s 2023 report, this year’s evaluation analyzed trends in two main areas: collaborative capacity—the infrastructure and processes for collaboratives to accomplish their work—and systems change in education and employment pathways.

Collaborative Capacity

The OYF’s network collaborative capacity is at its highest level in six years. Overall, collaboratives—which include partnerships such as community-based organizations, K–12 and higher education institutions, and government—improved in foundational elements to shift local systems for opportunity youth.

Data and learning, one type of collaborative capacity, is also at its highest level. The Forum for Community Solutions’ focused support in technical assistance and capacity building has likely contributed to collaboratives reporting improvement in this area.

Systems Change

This year’s evaluation continues to show that there is no one common journey toward systems change for collaboratives. However, the data also shows systems change scores are at their highest level in six years. Of the areas tracked, programmatic change was reported as the largest area of local systems change in 2024.

Across the network, youth disconnection continues to go down, after a jump during the COVID-19 pandemic. The disconnection rate has almost returned to pre-pandemic levels. In 2023, the most recent year available, about 11 percent of young people were not connected to school or work. Collaboratives continue to build their capacity to reduce that number and support a path for young people’s success.