Unlocking Potential: How exalt’s Workforce Development Model Empowers System-Involved Youth
[without exalt] I would’ve never seen my light at the end of the tunnel. exalt didn’t hold my hand, they guided me to the other side and gave me all the tools, motivation, and skills to be off in the wild by myself and succeed to my fullest.” - exalt alumni
By Tatum Burnett
In the United States, over 200,000 youth are arrested each year. Too often, these youth encounter a legal system that exacerbates inequities instead of providing a pathway to healing and hope. Involvement in the legal system can separate youth from their families and communities, disrupt education and professional development, and expose young people to further trauma and violence. Former foster youth and teens involved in the legal system have higher rates of unemployment than the general population, and experience long-term erosion of formal schooling, employment prospects and earnings. Evidence shows that trauma-informed professional and educational programs are essential for youth with system involvement because they address both skill development and underlying behavioral and emotional challenges, paving the way for potential rehabilitation, economic mobility and self-sufficiency.
The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Youth Program is the central federal funding source for workforce development programs for young people, with a priority for system-involved, opportunity youth. Often, however, these youth have significant needs or barriers that must be addressed before engaging in educational or workforce programs — and WIOA and other funding sources often do not sufficiently support them. Innovative and high impact community organizations that provide holistic, wrap-around supportive services must have greater access to flexible, robust funding to increase capacity and scale programs that have been proven to work for all youth.
exalt is an organization based in New York City that is committed to assisting youth who are involved in the criminal justice system to achieve and raise their expectations for personal success. By combining educational and skill development classes, paid internships, court advocacy and mentorships with supportive programming to create long-term behavioral change, exalt empowers youth to avoid further criminal involvement. 95 percent of exalt’s graduates do not recidivate within two years of graduation, 98 percent are re-engaged in high school or GED programs and on track to graduate by age 20, and 100 percent are matched with paid internships in high-growth sectors above minimum wage. exalt’s unique curriculum centers cultural responsiveness and racial equity while giving youth a platform to critically engage with the criminal justice system, race, economics, and social issues affecting themselves and their communities.
exalt is a member of the America Forward Coalition, a network of more than 100 social innovation organizations that champion equitable, innovative, effective, and efficient solutions to our country’s most pressing social problems. In this interview, we spoke with exalt CEO Gisele Castro to learn more about the organization’s programmatic approach and impact, the importance of flexible supportive services, and what funding efforts must be made to sustain positive-long term outcomes for system involved youth.
What are the most pressing challenges or barriers facing system-involved youth in joining the workforce?
Gisele Castro: Our young people are coming into our organization unemployed or underemployed, and often their families are unemployed or underemployed as well. To prepare them for the world of work, it is important to shape their educational trajectory first. There is a strong correlation between GED or high school attainment and creating the conditions (which we do through our internship model) for young people to start changing behaviors to succeed in the workforce. The challenges that we see today are all inter-related — it’s the same pattern with young people coming with chronic truancy and low literacy rates. Because all our youth are justice-system involved, they also come to us with the added burden of potential incarceration.
There is a barrier in that the workforce has changed through virtual platforms and virtual learning. We utilize core, 21st century skills so our young people can adapt to virtual learning and virtual work. The other barrier is preparing the workforce to then work with teenagers who are building new skills. So overall, the complexity is: how do we create the future where young people can thrive?
Can you speak to the importance of workforce development policies and programs that increase access to mental health and behavioral services to system-involved youth?
GC: We have families that are unemployed and underemployed and are under an enormous amount of stress. If an adult has $1,000 in their savings account and that is the only money that they have, and they lose their job, the next month they have payments and don’t know where the money is going to come from. Their anxiety is going to increase, and potentially they are going to get depressed. Research shows your cognitive ability declines when that happens. So when we think about teenagers and their thinking and envisioning a future self, employment matters. Workforce engagement for young people is critical and key for good mental health.
Further, because our young people are in the conditions in which they live, they don’t always have access to proper medical benefits or physicians. So when we are thinking about mental health, it could be trauma-based, situational anxiety, and depression, or it could be the onset of serious and significant mental health challenges. We need to ensure that we have enough money to fund the workforce and enough money to fund mental health services. There are many degrees to this mental health care challenge, including housing sustainability which can create conditions for the deterioration of someone’s mental health and ability to then sustain a job.
From our perspective, the reason we focus on the workforce is because our data and findings show that our young people who came from unemployment or underemployment and go on to not just not be reconvicted of a crime, but also to find employment, access scholarships, own homes, and have families. What that says is that for the next generation — that the cycle and the conditions of poverty are addressed and not passed along. What I want to reinforce is that workforce training has value, is an area that always needs to be funded, and an important part of how we engage teenagers.
Exalt’s model is a holistic, long-term program that prioritizes sustainable, long-term success for your participants. What are the challenges that organizations like yours face in obtaining sustainable or flexible federal, state or local funding opportunities? How can these funding streams be improved to best serve organizations working to create lasting and innovative change for their communities?
GC: We implement long term planning in a holistic way — we are a systems change organization. We work with critical stakeholders, such as judges and District Attorneys, who are able to reduce and vacate sentencing. A lot of our wraparound work involves considering who are the people who we need to work with that can then provide one element of the solution that supports a young person’s progress, in the same way that we work with the teachers, principals and the business sector. So the organization considers what are the conditions that need to be created for anyone working with our young people to then be successful, so that then our young people are successful.
95% of our funding comes from family foundations or individuals, but they’re general operating [donations] with no restrictions. They give to the practitioners, the people who know the issues to then solve some of the most chronic conditions. So I would say that the other barrier is that there’s not an opportunity in the Federal government, and sometimes even in philanthropy, to give organizations discretionary dollars or general operating funds — the funds are typically under some rigid structure. But there are ways to hold an organization accountable, and evaluate and report out as opposed to saying, this is what we want to see. We’re basically giving authority to the experts to then do it the other way around — “we’re going to tell you what we’re finding and seeing”.
As Congress works to reauthorize WIOA, America Forward continues to advocate for the expansion of flexible supportive services. Services that have shown to improve outcomes in education and training for participants include access to childcare, healthy food, affordable housing, and transportation. How can more flexible and comprehensive supportive services aid system-involved youth in achieving positive long-term outcomes?
GC: It’s very important that when we’re thinking about the people that we’re trying to bring into the workforce that we also are preparing the existing workforce.
We are working very closely with CUNY, SUNY, and Boricua College, and our participants’ enrollment in colleges has increased substantially. However, our young people cannot even access Metrocards or laptops when they first come to us. So when we think about, “what is it that they need?”, we give our young people Metrocards and laptops. You think about how expensive this may seem to some, but it’s really it’s not. If we know that it takes about $800,000 to incarcerate a young New Yorker for a year, and that with $15,000, exalt can take a young person out of chronic truancy, poverty, and the burden of incarceration to a life that doesn’t have a conviction and a real career path, that’s important.
The other thing that I want to highlight is the process. How is it that we sustain something like this? As you go deeper into the issues, the more that you understand how to address chronic challenges. You begin to understand that this requires people and teams and thinkers, and then an organization needs expertise and the reach has to be wider.
I think that overall what I want to highlight is the level of investment it requires to get those results. Who are those leaders who are doing this, and what is it that they need to ensure that these policies, that these systems are actually implemented correctly? Because a policy is just something on paper that so many people fought for. That implementation is with the workforce. The barrier is, how do we innovate further? How do we look into 2030–2040, with young people in mind?