The National Crisis: Youth Disconnection in America
The Human and Economic Cost
The Scale of Disconnection: Nationally, there are typically between 4 and 5 million young people (ages 16–24) who are disconnected from both school and the workforce at any given time.
Economic Burden: The national estimated lifetime cost to taxpayers for each young person who drops out of high school is staggering, often cited in the hundreds of thousands of dollars due to lost wages, increased healthcare costs, and higher reliance on public assistance.2
The Job Deficit: Without jobs and education, these youth are exponentially more likely to live in poverty, burden the state, engage in criminal activity, and live unfulfilling lives. The lack of early work experience creates a skills gap and a wealth gap that persists throughout their entire lifetime.
Deepening Disparities: Who is Affected
The youth jobs crisis is not evenly distributed. Your local Atlanta data is mirrored across the country, validating YFUSA's focus on communities marginalized by systemic disinvestment.
| Demographic | National Disconnection Trends | YFUSA Pillar Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Race & Ethnicity | Youth of color, particularly Black and Latino youth, are often two to three times more likely to be disconnected than White youth. | Justice & Policy: Mandating equitable resource allocation and funding advocacy campaigns to dismantle systemic barriers. |
| Geography | Disconnection rates are significantly higher in low-income urban neighborhoods and rural areas with limited access to public transport or higher education. | The YF Network: Scaling the organizing model to activate CBOs in diverse high-need geographies across the country. |
| Education | Young people without a high school diploma or equivalent are four times more likely to be disconnected than those with some college experience. | Future Workforce: Integrating work readiness with academic support and training in future-ready skills (e.g., technology-augmented trades). |
The Youth Jobs Crisis: Advocacy is Economic Necessity
The crisis is compounded by the fact that young people are actively seeking opportunity but often denied it.
The Opportunity Gap: Pre-pandemic data showed that many teens who sought summer employment could not find it. For teens in low-income families, having a job is an economic necessity to support themselves and their families, not merely for "pocket change."
Public Safety Strategy: When youth lack opportunities, they are at higher risk of involvement in criminal activity.3 As the data shows, jobs should be considered a crucial public safety strategy for making communities safer and healthier places to live.
Building Power: Taking away a job from someone who wants to work hard is like taking away their voice. By teaching youth the organizing skills embedded in the YFUSA National Organizing Toolkit (which includes the City Council script), we restore that voice and empower them to advocate for the resources they deserve. This is how the Culture-to-Capital Loop invests in both their wallet and their civic agency.
The Justice & Policy Pillar: The $5.5 Billion Investment Mandate
Our Youth Jobs Campaign is the operational blueprint for the Justice & Policy Pillar—the part of The YF Network that builds youth civic and economic power. This progressive, data-driven advocacy is funded by the Culture-to-Capital Loop, leveraging Liberty's influence to create the infrastructure necessary for youth to advocate for themselves on a national scale.
As Liberty's creator platform expands, so does the national microphone we can use to advocate for youth jobs, workforce mobility, and community investment. This is a creator-powered advocacy engine — built with your engagement.
By engaging youth leaders at every stage—from developing strategy to meeting with elected officials—we are translating youth cultural influence into long-lasting, concrete policy change around the issue of youth jobs and economic self-determination.
The Two-Front Campaign
We are concurrently concentrating on a Public Sector Campaign and a Private Sector Campaign to ensure a holistic, sustainable investment in America's disconnected youth.
Public Sector: Driving Policy & Systemic Funding
Our public sector campaign targets the policies, practices, and funding for youth jobs on the City, State, and Federal levels. We want to secure a generational investment to match the scale of the national crisis.
Our Mandates:
- Systemic Funding: Secure a long-term, dedicated investment stream for year-round, community-based youth jobs, moving away from temporary budget line items.
- Future-Ready Work: Mandate Quality Jobs that include training in digital literacy, data-driven problem-solving, and skills that prepare youth for technology-integrated careers (aligning with our Future Workforce pillar).
- Equitable Access: Improve and streamline online application and notification processes to eliminate systemic barriers for disconnected youth.
- Youth Leadership: Require that Youth Leaders and our YF Network partners be seated at the front of the debate surrounding youth jobs and economic policies.
Private Sector: Integrated Corporate Responsibility
We believe that companies and corporations are equally responsible for providing quality youth jobs. We target large companies and hospitals, integrating them into the Culture-to-Capital Loop ecosystem by persuading them to commit to new pipelines for the future workforce.
Our Goals:
- Ecosystem Integration: Develop relationships with companies across all industries—from technology and healthcare to finance, retail, and manufacturing—to create tech and AI-informed roles for teens, including data entry, user experience (UX) testing, and tech support positions.
- Social Entrepreneurship: Empower the entrepreneurs in our network to hire youth and integrate them into their ventures.
- Investment Goal: Win a minimum of 1,000 new, high-quality, technology-integrated youth jobs annually within large private sector organizations across our initial flagship cities.
The Investment Mandate: $5.5 Billion
WHAT ARE WE ORGANIZING FOR? A $5.5 BILLION NATIONAL INVESTMENT
This figure represents the required scale of commitment—across public and private capital—necessary to seriously address the national youth disconnection crisis (which affects 4-5 million young Americans). We are organizing youth to advocate for:
- Public Sector: Dedicated $4 Billion in State and Federal block grants over five years to fund systemic jobs and support programs.
- Private Sector: $1.5 Billion in combined wages and training grants from corporate and philanthropic commitments to the Future Workforce pillar.
- YFUSA's Role: Youth Fund USA, through its Culture-to-Capital Loop, acts as the fiscal and organizational backbone, offering employment and organizing training to youth workers (ages 15-24) through our network of Community-Based Organizations (CBOs).
The Quality Job Philosophy
It is our philosophy that it is imperative to provide not only a paycheck but also a quality work experience that grants youth the opportunity to discover new skills and gain an understanding about the technology-integrated workforce they will encounter in the future. Through their YFUSA experience, each youth employee is able to gain a sense of responsibility, teamwork, and a heightened sense of economic and civic agency, ensuring they are prepared for their inheritance: the future of this country.
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