Approximately 4.1 million young people between the ages of 16 and 24 are neither employed nor in school.
The Reconnecting Youth project aims to systematically understand what programs and practices are operating in the United States to support these young people, often referred to as “disconnected youth” or “opportunity youth.” Many programs exist to help these young people connect to education and employment pathways and advance along them. And, the past decade has seen a great deal of research on this topic, stimulated in part by federal evidence-building initiatives.
The Reconnecting Youth project, which is supported by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, seeks to pull together in one location information about programs that support these young people and their practices and a repository of existing research. This website includes two tools: a compendium of programs and an evidence gap map.