Good morning Chairperson Bonds and members of the Committee on Executive Administration and Labor. My name is Amy Dudas, and I am here to highlight the urgent need young people (ages 14 to 24) emphasize for paid, high-quality career readiness opportunities and early work experience. My testimony takes a system-wide view of the District’s youth workforce development programs, with a focus on the role DOES can play as an anchor agency. I will focus on scaffolding additional supports around youth programs to ensure the inclusion of youth experiencing structural and racialized barriers to workforce success, and advocate for DOES to improve outcomes data and reporting.
Through DC Action’s Youth Economic Justice Coalition which comprises youth housing and workforce development providers, research and policy partners, youth and community leaders, we are working to define and develop career readiness policy priorities that will improve economic mobility outcomes for Black and brown youth in the District. While this work will highlight challenges, both new and familiar, its goals are aligned with DOES’s vision for a “competitive DC workforce based on lifelong learning and economic stability”. We look forward to working collaboratively with this committee and DOES to shape a bold policy agenda and citywide priorities around supportive workforce programming with, and in service to, young people. Young people have already identified strong support for the Pay Our Youth a Fair Summer Wage Amendment Act of 2025 as an early priority, and we urge this Committee to advance the bill.
Youth are eager to prepare for professional careers but face labor market exclusion!
While there are significant gaps in available data, what we know about the racial inequities keeping Black and brown young people from equal job opportunities is alarming. Early career outcome data for youth who grow up in the District is limited, but existing evidence suggests significant exclusion from the labor market, especially for Black native residents.
The District’s education and workforce development systems strive to prepare youth for careers, perhaps starting with career exploration in middle school, offering career preparation during high school, and perhaps connecting youth to career launch programs with living wages and advancement potential as a high school or postsecondary option. Unfortunately, 24% of DC high school students do not graduate in 4 years. Only 72% of Black students and 79% of Latine students graduate in 4 years, while 95% of their white peers do the same. A high school diploma is a key signal to employers of workforce readiness. And while we know a majority of jobs in the District require a college degree, only 1 in 4 young adults born and living in DC has been able to earn one.
As a result, nearly 1 in 5 young Black workers were looking for but unable to find a job between 2021 and 2023. Unemployment hurts young people now and negatively impacts their futures. Despite these efforts, data indicates that by the time we would expect District-born youth between the ages of 25-34 to enter the workforce full-time, our labor market is flooded with transplanted talent and our youth lose out on the opportunities they need to develop high-value skills, build professional networks and earn income sufficient to build their lives here. In 2023, young adults ages 25 to 34 born and living in DC made an average of $53,695 a year. This is only about half of the annual average income of their peers who lived here but were born elsewhere: $103,849. The effect of that income disparity is magnified when it comes to building generational wealth. Because Black households have been systemically denied opportunities for asset building, white households in the DC area hold 81 times more wealth than Black households (Urban Institute, 2016).
Data alone doesn’t tell the full story. Youth are eager to prepare for big, professional careers, but do not always know how to access the specialized training or develop the skills necessary to obtain them. In focus groups conducted by DC Action in 2023, youth facing structural barriers to work (e.g., economic hardship, homelessness, being expectant or parenting, or identifying as trans or nonbinary) shared that they:
- Have big dreams and want to be lawyers, teachers, business owners, or healthcare professionals, but lack support and services to tackle obstacles and meet their goals.
- Seek well-paid, year-round work experience to develop skills, meet pressing demands for income, and gain developmental experience to support long-term career goals.
- Are discouraged when jobs and job training opportunities don’t align with their interests, skills, and goals. They seek employers that affirm all gender and racial identities, accommodate life experiences, and support career advancement.
- Suffer financially and emotionally from unemployment, experiencing depression and stress from isolation, lack of productivity, and financial challenges.
When government witnesses appear before this committee in a few weeks, I urge you to ask them how the agency has shifted or improved workforce development programs over the past year to better align with the needs and priorities expressed by young people. For example, what opportunities do they offer youth to inform the agency’s workplans and how do they use the feedback they receive?
Structural barriers prevent youth from participating in existing programs.
While the District does provide an array of youth workforce development opportunities (such as Career and Technical Education, the Marion S. Barry Summer Youth Employment Program, year-round programs funded through the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act, career exploration opportunities offered through out-of-school-time programs, and private sector partnerships looking to scale paid internships and apprenticeships), many young people experience insurmountable barriers to accessing or completing these programs, such as:
- Experiencing housing instability or homelessness, requiring them to prioritize competing demands on their time to reach stability. Homelessness can also lead to young people needing to prioritize income sufficient to afford housing over job training opportunities that pay partial wages.
- Balancing work responsibilities as a young parent, especially when faced with a lack of affordable, reliable childcare.
- Identifying culturally competent and affirming work environments as nonbinary or transgender young people.
Youth facing such significant barriers must be accounted for in the design and implementation of career readiness programs, and proactively connected with the individualized supports to help them thrive. Prior testimony from DC Action has highlighted the specific resources and program interventions necessary to support these specific populations of young people, which can be provided either directly through DOES, or in managed coordination with community-based service providers. Last year, the DC Fiscal Policy Institute (DCFPI) released a report detailing how a DC youth job guarantee policy that prioritizes those most in need can cut through structural barriers erected by a long history of racism by connecting those young people with jobs with a livable wage, benefits, and supportive services. DC Action looks forward to exploring how this model may be implemented in the District to confront high barriers with high-quality and highly-supportive early work experiences.
DOES must improve outcomes data and reporting.
In order to inform and prioritize career readiness strategies, there is a need for DOES to enhance outcomes data and reporting across youth programs. While not under the purview of this committee, we are encouraged by the work underway in the Office of Education Through Employment Pathways (ETEP) under the Deputy Mayor for Education (DME). As the ETEP Office builds cross-agency data infrastructure to gain a longitudinal view of how residents are served by District education and workforce programming, it is essential that contributing agencies are prioritizing and collecting robust outcomes data to best understand their influence on the economic mobility of District residents over time. Specifically, understanding the long-term impact of DOES youth programs on career development requires standardized and systemized reporting on participant outcomes including on-time grade promotion, high school graduation or credential attainment, employment rates, median earnings, postsecondary credential attainment, and skill gains. While some of this information is available for DOES’s federally funded programs through the Workforce Investment Council’s Expenditure Guide, public reporting on outcomes does not extend to all locally funded youth programs, including the Marion S. Barry Summer Youth Employment Program (MBSYEP).
Within this broader data work, the District should also examine why so many more youth apply than complete the MBSYEP. While the program has huge reach, with 20,213 14-to 24-year-olds applying in FY23, only 11,513 actually started an MBSYEP summer experience. Furthermore, of the young people who started their summer placement, roughly one in five did not complete the six-week program. Taken together with applicant attrition, roughly half (47%) of youth who showed interest in MBSYEP by applying completed the program. By collecting data on MBSYEP from youth who apply but do not begin a placement, begin a job but do not continue for the full six weeks, and those who do complete the program, DOES could both improve program completion rates and provide valuable insights to other system partners on the factors influencing young people’s decisions. MBSYEP data on program non-completion could inform the types of scaffolded supports missing across career readiness programs that likely influence system-wide underutilization.
Collecting longitudinal outcomes data requires coordinated infrastructure and dedicated resources to follow up with program participants and share data across agencies. We ask this Committee to prioritize this work in the upcoming budget. In our collaborative efforts to root out racial inequities in economic outcomes for DC’s residents, DOES program outcomes are a key element to understanding the District’s cumulative return on career readiness investments, and can help identify existing brights spots and areas of opportunity to close persistent gaps in job training, employment, and income. We encourage the committee to ask what steps DOES has taken in the past year to improve its data collection, reporting, and analysis so that the committee, employers, and the public are better positioned to be partners in building on the successes of existing youth workforce programs.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify and I welcome any questions.