Stepping Stones to Reconnecting 1 Million Young People: Ideas from the Reconnecting Youth Campaign
The Reconnecting Youth Campaign (RYC) began in 2017 with a bold, clear goal: Reconnect 1 million young people each year to education and employment through increased federal investments.
In the years since 2017, RYC has focused on increasing federal appropriations for a discrete set of federal programs that were judged most directly related to Opportunity Youth (OY). With Opportunity Youth, service providers, employers, and advocates, RYC has hosted briefings and organized days of action, during which we’ve met with dozens of congressional offices at a time. Federal investments have ticked upward, and youth disconnection rates have ticked down, but we are still far from 1 million opportunities for reconnection. As of 2024, federal funding supported fewer than 400,000 opportunities.
In this tumultuous time, hoping to reach 1 million opportunities through the traditional federal appropriations process alone is naive. RYC must consider additional means of driving federal resources toward OY. Appropriations for existing federal programs will remain RYC’s primary focus, but changes to policies related to workforce development, higher education, labor, and tax policy may all prove fruitful ways to unlock more opportunities.
During a strategy session in September 2025, RYC partners developed more than 60 ideas that could advance RYC’s ultimate aim of reconnecting 1 million young people per year. These are a few of the most popular “stepping stones” to reach our ultimate goal. They span appropriations (RYC’s primary focus), apprenticeship, career navigation, wages, and other ideas, as well as some cross-cutting considerations.
Appropriations
Reconnecting 1 million young people per year requires a big increase in appropriations for existing OY-focused programs, including the WIOA Youth formula program, YouthBuild, Reentry Employment Opportunities, AmeriCorps State and National, and the other programs called out in the RYC sign-on letter for fiscal year 2026.
First, we will make specific funding asks for each RYC line item. To create 1 million opportunities annually requires tripling current funding. This could be achieved with four consecutive years of 30 percent increases. Thus, we will ask for increases of at least 30 percent for each line item.
Second, we will coordinate on programmatic funding requests. These are requests made to individual congressional offices, formally expressing support for existing federal programs. RYC will focus on organizing constituents to put in requests for WIOA Youth funding. WIOA Youth is a funding stream critical for OY - it serves the entire nation, it funds a wide array of services, and supports youth-serving nonprofits in hundreds of local workforce areas - but no coalition currently organizes programmatic funding requests related to it.
Third, we will advocate for demonstration programs that could be funded through report language, such as partnerships between OY providers and industry associations or employers, or providing digital skill training grants.
Apprenticeships
To expand access to apprenticeship opportunities for OY, we will advocate for a youth-focused apprenticeship program. This could be based on Youth Apprenticeship Readiness Grants, which the bipartisan Stronger Workforce for America Act (WIOA reauthorization bill) would codify; the bipartisan Apprenticeship Advancement Act; or a new legislative vehicle. This could take the form of a competitive or formula grant, or an entitlement, depending on which is feasible. Any youth apprenticeship effort should include:
Support for high-quality pre-apprenticeship, paid whenever possible;
Expansion of youth apprenticeship across sectors (such as healthcare and public health, K-12 education, early childhood education, and vehicle repair) with a focus on roles with advancement potential; and
Supportive services.
We will also continue to advocate for making traditional registered apprenticeships (RAPs) more accessible to young people, especially in places where youth apprenticeships may struggle to take off (rural, remote, tribal areas, e.g.).
Navigation
Opportunity Youth (and other young adults) often struggle to identify - and choose among - the postsecondary options available in their communities and beyond. Improving access to career-navigation services, and the quality of these services, is one way to make these options more legible. Career navigation services help young people explore different careers, improve their employability skills, and find employment with the help of customized guidance. We are flexible in how this expansion might happen: new federal legislation, competitive grant priorities, or guidance might all play a part. The goal is to ensure that:
All Opportunity Youth have access to high-quality career navigation. This includes a shared definition of navigation, dedicated funding for a pipeline of navigators, dedicated funding for upskilling current navigator-type professionals and cohering navigation ecosystems, and funding for all partners that are part of these ecosystems.
OY and providers have access to high-quality labor market information, such as Wagner-Peyser amendments to expand state incentives; and
Young people engage directly with, and acquire skills from, employers and throughout secondary education, postsecondary education, and workforce development experiences.
Wages
Appealing, well-paid work opportunities ultimately empower young people to chart their own course. Increasing wages for young people will draw more young people into wage-based jobs - and away from more precarious situations like gig work - and enable them to achieve economic self-sufficiency. We are supportive of approaches including:
Increasing the federal minimum wage for all workers, including abolishing youth minimum wages, and subminimum wages for people with disabilities;
Ensuring employment protection for young workers, including access to unemployment benefits;
Increasing the AmeriCorps stipend to a living wage, and making the education award tax-free; and
Tax credits that increase wages, such as the Young Adult Tax Credit (a universal payment to 18-24 year olds) and an extension of the Work Opportunity Tax Credits that incentivizes the hiring of OY, justice-impacted youth, or other key subgroups.
Other Ideas: There Are Lots of Ways RYC Can Make a Difference
We are supportive of other ways to drive more federal funds toward Opportunity Youth, such as:
Ensuring OY can access short-term postsecondary programs funded by new Workforce Pell Grants. Providing supportive services is a key way to help OY benefit from these new grants. These services could be provided through required partnerships between Workforce Pell-eligible programs and community-based organizations.
Free community college efforts, modeled on America’s College Promise.
Federal support for entrepreneurship training, for young entrepreneurs, and for helping young workers establish worker-owned businesses or co-ops.
Cross-Cutting Considerations: We Need to Include More People and Update Our Data
Our strategy session revealed several cross-cutting needs that RYC must consider as we move forward.
We need to test our ideas with rural, remote, and tribal communities, to learn how our ideas would work in those places.
We need to build in more co-design opportunities across policy and advocacy processes - more opportunities for young people to lead conversations.
We need to increase the salience of Opportunity Youth in other spaces. This includes making OY issues prominent for more coalitions, in more policymakers’ agendas, and through new and traditional media.
We need to update and improve our return-on-investment data, ideally including state- and congressional district-level estimates. To avoid harmful unintended consequences, we need to be careful about how those data are generated, framed, and used.
