Sponsor a student at Year Up Puget Sound

The mission of Year Up is to close the Opportunity 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.  We achieve this mission through a high support, high expectation model that combines marketable job skills, stipends, internships and college credits. Our holistic approach focuses on students' professional and personal development to place these young adults on a viable path to economic self-sufficiency.

Year Up seeks to close the Opportunity Divide through the provision of its one-year intensive training program for urban young adults, ages 18-24, that helps them secure jobs, continue their education, and join the economic mainstream. Founded in 2000 in Boston, MA, Year Up has served nearly 6,700 young adults to-date.  We have expanded to ten sites across the country and are opening our eleventh site in Silicon Valley in 2013.  Our alumni base is projected to grow to include over 10,000 young adults by 2016.  

Our program model combines four key elements—education, experience, guidance, and support—to help empower youth to achieve their career and educational goals. The first six months of the program is spent in the classroom, developing technical and professional skills that prepare young people for the corporate world.  Students learn concrete technical skills such as software installation, fund accounting, and customer service.  Additionally, students learn professional and communication skills that are valuable in the workplace such as time management, presentation skills, and conflict resolution.  Students then have an opportunity to apply those skills during the second half of the year at an internship with one of Year Up’s 250+ corporate partners.  Throughout the program, students earn community college credits and a weekly stipend and are supported by staff advisors, professional mentors, and other partners.

Year Up Puget Sound launched in March 2011, and has served a total of 171 disconnected young adults.Year Up has four core program goals across all sites:

1. 100 percent internship placement for students who complete training;
2. 90 percent internship partner satisfaction;
3. 75 percent graduation rate;
4. 85 percent “positive outcomes”—job placement and/or college enrollment—for graduates

Over the last year, we consistently met the first two goals for each of our classes across all core program sites. We are also proud to report that 86 percent of graduates from our two classes graduating in 2012 both achieved positive outcomes: 85% of students at the Puget Sound site have achieved positive outcomes since graduating in July of 2012, making an average starting salary of $14.80/hour.

We graduated approximately 70 percent of both the January 2012 and July 2012 classes, falling slightly short of our retention goal across all sites. Our most recently enrolled cohort (set to graduate in July, 2013) achieved 85% retention in the first six months of the program. Retention in our rigorous program continues to be a challenge, and meeting this goal is a priority of our organization.  We intend to increase retention rates by 3-5 percent across our program sites in the next year by analyzing our student data and developing best practices based on what we have learned throughout our 10+ years of service. In fact, over the last six months, we saw a considerable improvement in internship retention.  If we retain the same percentage of interns in July of 2013 as we did in the January graduating class, we will graduate at a rate of 77 percent across all sites. 

Year Up Puget Sound will expand to serve 160 students in the upcoming year. Puget Sound has been focused on building human capital capacity, increasing internship partners, and expanding its philanthropic efforts in the community, particularly around building an individual donor base in order to most effectively serve our students. We are excited to continue to strengthen and grow our core program, while also expanding to new cities and scaling our model to serve more young adults each year.  Our success would not be possible without the support of our partner organizations and generous donors.  We are grateful for your support and hope to have the opportunity to continue to develop our partnership in the coming year.  We appreciate your commitment to our mission as we work together to close the Opportunity Divide. 

Links:

• Year Up Website
• Follow us on the Opportunity Movement Blog