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Webinar 2: Tool and Example Pilots

Scott: Hello, my name is Scott Stump, and I'm the Assistant Secretary for Career, Technical, 

and Adult Education at the United States Department of Education. Under the 

leadership of President Trump, the federal government has launched one of the most 

far-reaching regulatory reform agendas in American history. To provide greater freedom 

and opportunity to Americans, federal agencies across the government have been 

scrutinizing federal regulations, related non-regulatory guidance, data collections, and 

other burdensome requirements and removing those that are unnecessary.

Scott: Consistent with that agenda, Performance Partnership Pilots for Disconnected Youth, or 

P3, offers states, tribes, and local governments greater freedom to innovate in how they 

deliver services to the neediest youth. P3 enables the U.S. Department of Education and 

six other federal agencies to waive not just regulations, but also statutory requirements 

that are impeding effective service delivery. Stakeholders on the front lines who work 

directly with disconnected youth have let us know that they believe they could achieve 

better outcomes if they were given greater freedom and the flexibility to better align 

the multiple systems that serve youth.

Scott: P3 responds to those on the ground challenges by offering broad flexibility in exchange 

for better outcomes. P3 is the unique opportunity to dismantle program silos and to 

make big and bold reforms in how we address the needs of some of the most 

disadvantaged young people in our country. I encourage you to explore how you can 

take advantage of this opportunity to improve the lives and outcomes of these youth. 

Michelle: Thank you, Scott. Welcome to this technical assistance webinar on P3. We're very 

excited that you're interested in P3 and able to listen. This webinar is being hosted by 

the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Youth.gov on behalf of and in 

collaboration with the seven federal partners involved with P3, specifically the U.S. 

Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban 

Development, Justice and Labor, as well as the Corporation for National and Community 

Service and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Michelle: My name is Michelle Boyd and I work for the U.S. Department of Health and Human 

Services, and I'll be introducing this webinar. You're going to first hear from one of the 

P3 technical assistance providers, Jobs for the Future. Then you’ll hear from two Round 

1 P3 pilot sites – the City of Los Angeles and the Chicago Department of Family and 

Support Services.

Michelle: I'll now turn it over to Larry Pasti from Jobs for the Future. Jobs for the Future is a 

technical assistance provider for the P3 initiative. In this portion of the presentation, 

they are going to present on a tool they developed. This tool is going to help 

communities be able to better identify, align, integrate the different resources in their 

community so they can better strengthen the systems and partnerships that they have 

to support opportunity youth.
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Larry: Thank you, Michelle, for leading us into this. It's a pleasure to be talking about this new 

tool about identifying and addressing barriers to program implementation. It's been a 

pleasure working not only with Jobs for the Future, the technical assistance partner, but 

all of the federal agencies that have participated in this exciting project.

Larry: Fundamentally, what we were asked to do and what we hopefully did was develop a 

series of questions that can lead other communities through the process of defining 

whether or not they need to actually get a waiver for some of the restrictions they 

might feel on their implementation plans versus actually being able to do it anyway. 

Hopefully as you hear from communities in the future on this webinar, you'll hear some 

examples of how they went through this process, but I want to start with this overall 

perspective on what we tried to do.

Larry: If you look at this progression, we always feel it's important to start with what do you 

want to do for whom? Right? The goal setting, the target population, the overall goals. 

We know you're working with opportunity youth, but that's a broad category, so are 

there specific populations within that? But fundamentally, this tool helps walk you 

through these steps where you can start with here's the population, and you'll hear 

further from our partners on the phone, giving their examples of how they narrowed 

that perspective down. And then what do they want to do for them? So goal setting we 

feel is important and instrumental in starting, but secondly, the partnerships.

Larry: Too often, we hear that organizations or agencies have started this work by themselves 

and they don't actually stop and reach out not only to the partners that they're used to 

working with, but my term, unsuspecting partners. Who are those other partners who 

they might not usually work with but in fact might contribute to this effort? This helps 

reduce not only duplications, but creates an opportunity because you have new voices 

at the table, you have new opportunities to leverage resources that you may or may not 

have known about before.

Larry: And so as you listen to the descriptions of the efforts of the P3 sites that are coming 

forward, pay close attention to how they reached out to a new variety of partners, 

maybe not the same old that showed up in the room in the past. And secondly, what are 

some of the resources or programs or opportunities that could be leveraged by bringing 

those partners into the room for the conversation about this population that is so 

important to you. So partnership is just not about people, but it's about their systems 

they represent and the resources that they might bring to bear that can be leveraged 

against those that you might have in your source.

Larry: Again, as we move forward through this, you need to identify your strategies, figure out 

what's currently being done versus what new you want to do. But when you get to the 

barrier identification, and to some, this is the core of P3, and that is are there 

regulations, statutes, et cetera, that get in the way of what you're trying to do? A 

learning from many communities, some of the barriers are at various levels. Some are 

created within the federal funding or statutes or requirements that are passed down, 

but within those, often, county government, city government, other organizations 

below them have the opportunity to take the flexibility which the federal government 
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rightly allowed and make either more restrictive or more potentially similar variations 

on what's expected.

Larry: What we find is that when local groups start to identify barriers, two or three things 

happen. One is when they stop and try and really narrowly define the barrier, they find 

that maybe it's not really a barrier at all. It's been someone's previous misinterpretation 

and it's the way we've always done business. Secondly, it appeared to be a barrier, but 

in fact, when they looked at it, locally, they could make the decision to eliminate the 

barrier. So the level of discretion was at the local level, not the county, state, or federal 

level. Or lastly, that it might still be a barrier and they need to go back to the original 

source to ask for a waiver.

Larry: So that's part of what makes this P3 effort exciting, is once you've gone through this 

process of trying to analyze where the barriers are from, there may be a pathway to 

either ask for a waiver, to see if that can help you move forward in doing it. So if we look 

at step six to seven, this refers back to step two, partnerships. So if you have a wide 

variety of partners at the table, they often are bound by different sets of regulations and 

barriers. So step back and think, "I want to engage a young person, in a program, my 

system says they have these eligibility requirements." You go over to another system 

and they have a different set of eligibility requirements. Maybe the young person fits 

Option B, not Option A.

Larry: So this reinforces that you identify solutions that having multiple partners at the table 

gives you access to different opportunities to leverage different eligibility requirements, 

different funding definitions about what counts as counseling services, educational 

services, training services, administrative services, et cetera, and so that by having 

partners at the table, you often can identify solutions at the local level that don't always 

need federal approval or a waiver process such as is embedded in the performance pilot 

partnerships.

Larry: So we developed this tool to help communities walk through this. How do you start with 

your goals and go through the process of saying who's at the table, what are we doing, 

what do we need to do, strategy identification, if you will, what's currently happening, 

and what's in the way? And so you get to step five through seven, it's what really is in 

the way? Do we know it's in the way? What's the source of the thing in the way? Who's 

making the decision at what level, meaning again, from program, state, city, county, 

federal, who's making it? And then what are the options that might make us be more 

successful? So this tool is going to be online, we hope that it helps future communities 

look through this lens of thinking about what really get in the way of us and is it real? 

Larry: We now want to turn it over to Robert Sainz from a Los Angeles P3 site that will explain 

what he has done in his community around systems change, followed by Beth Stover

from Chicago. So listen to the themes as they talk and see how the tool might help you 

in your work going forward.

Robert: To give everyone a sense of the scope of the problem that we're dealing with in the city 

of Los Angeles, approximately 10 years ago, we did one of the first studies that digged 
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deep on who is this disconnected population? We had a mayor at the time that really 

identified disconnected youth as a major priority, we had a school district that also had 

identified it as a major priority, but they couldn't agree on the numbers. The mayor was 

talking about 50% dropout rates, our school district was talking about 10% dropout 

rates, and we had a bunch of other voices and no one really had a sense of definition in 

who these young people were.

Robert: So Dr. Paul Harrington did the first study for us and identified that there was 

approximately 100,000 young people out of school and out of work in the city of Los 

Angeles, and that's a population out of approximately 500,000. So one out of five. And 

we talk about a city of Los Angeles, of having nearly 100,000 young people 

disconnected, it wasn't that it was evenly spread throughout the city, it was highly 

concentrated in our lower economic areas, highly concentrated in our inner cities, and 

in some of our zip codes it was one out of three, and in a couple of our zip codes, was 

nearly one out of two.

Robert: So when we talk about the issue of having a systemic problem, this was really the 

landmark study for the city to say, "Yes, we do have a problem and this is the scope of it. 

We're not going to program our way out of this, we need to be able to have system 

reform." So over the last 10 years, we've been working on this population and to be able 

to reduce these numbers. The Performance Pilot Partnership was a key piece of this 

greater puzzle. Just to give you a sense of that in that disconnected population, we also 

had nearly 14,000 homeless youth, over 8,000 young people in the foster care system 

between the ages of 16 and 18, and nearly 7,000 who annually dropped out of school 

from LAUSD.

Robert: Our history did not start with LA P3 and nor should it start in any community. You 

should build upon the efforts that have been happening in your local community. As we 

mentioned, we started with the data in 2008 and with that data, we were able to 

actually make some major policy changes, one of them was moving our WIA , at the 

time, youth resources from the minimum 30% the Department of Labor identified in the 

grants to 70%. We were one of the few folks around the country that actually on a local 

level moved it to 70% of our funds to be expended on disconnected youth.

Robert: But more importantly, is that we revamped our system and we entered into a 

partnership with our school district, where four years later, we were blaming and 

accusing each other of who was the cause of the problem, we actually started a 

partnership and Dr. Debra Duardo, who is now the county superintendent of schools, 

was my partner in this effort. We worked diligently bringing our elected leaders, our 

policy makers together, that we could actually have a systems approach to addressing 

this issue.

Robert: One of those key efforts was actually having LA school personnel inside of our resource 

center placements. So with our federal dollars, with WIA at the time, we opened 14 

centers across the city in the areas where the data had said that had the highest 

dropout rates. In each one of those centers, we had a LAUSD counselor that was a 

dropout prevention specialist. In their scope of work, they brought and enriched the 
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work. Between education and workforce, we were able now to be able to offer true 

resources for the young individual that was getting back to school. We developed a 

shared vision and values as well as data and assessments.

Robert: So that's where we had started, and as you can see on the next slide, that LAUSD is a 

major, major bureaucracy and an organization with nearly 580,000 folks enrolled. But 

importantly, was bringing back that nearly 20,000 young people who were chronically 

truant and on the verge of dropping out. So our target for our YouthSource centers had 

been the individuals that were for all intents and purposes, had dropped out of LAUSD. 

They might not have been officially, but they were high and chronic truants, and those 

individuals who had dropped out. With the change in the WIA legislation to WIOA we 

were able to identify 16 to 24 as our target population. And then in that role, we were 

able to actually bring in our various funding sources to be able to operate these centers.

Robert: So what is our LA P3? When the opportunity came for the Partnership Pilots what it did 

for us was actually gave us a larger framework for our systems work. We consciously did 

not choose to just do a program. We had already had a basis of our programmatic 

efforts working together but it was really the intent when we applied for our P3 model, 

was to look at all the opportunities that the pilot was going to be able to present to us. 

We knew who our disconnected youth population and through our continued reports 

that Dr. Harrington has done for us over the past decade, the new work that's come out 

from Measure of America and the really great research now on this population, there's 

no excuse from anywhere in the country to say, "We don't know who this population 

is." And to actually know your own scope of the problem.

Robert: But what the P3 allowed us to do was to braid funding in a more concrete way, was 

actually to ask for federal waivers that were very specific to our grants and our 

operations. And then to coordinate our tracking, which was really critical and I think it's 

something that we are still working on, that each of our federal grants as well as our 

state dollars and even our local dollars oftentimes come with different data sets, 

different ways to be able to coordinate and track. And this gave us at least the impetus 

to start coordinating between that. Then lastly, it was bridging that communication 

between the federal that enhanced many of these grants and our state and local efforts 

that were happening. And being able to have a platform that we could communicate to 

all of our partners of what we were doing, where we were focusing, and what our 

outcomes could be.

Robert: Then the true expansion from our previous city focused effort was to truly bring in not 

just our city agencies and school district, but to our county agencies. So in California, our 

county system actually does the vast majority of our youth and social services 

programming. So foster youth money, homeless youth money, probation resources, 

social service dollars, healthcare, is all done at the county level. So between the city and 

school partnership that we had established, that was great, but the true resources and 

the agencies responsible for these various pieces of the puzzle were at the county level. 

By having the pilot, we were able to now invite the county down and to participate with 

us. Our first conversations that we had with the county was, "Well, why do we need to 

do this? We don't need the federal government, we don't need to apply for the 
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partnership model. We can do it on our own." And I simply responded is that, "Well, for 

50 years, we haven't done it and so what makes you think it's going to happen without 

us applying?"

Robert: And secondly, that we didn't have a framework to be able to coordinate and integrate 

the resources. And thirdly, we weren't communicating back to the federal government 

in a coordinated way with any of our resources. So being able to have the city, the 

county, and the school district working together, it was really the key of our systems 

reform. And of course, our community based organizations which are critical and do the 

bulk of our service delivery, we had to also give them a framework of what we were 

doing and rather than just them chasing grants from each of our various systems and 

them trying to coordinate the partnerships at a very very micro level, it was our 

responsibility within the public sector and within our public leadership to coordinate, to 

be able to give them a clearer roadmap of how to do the services and make it easier for 

them to take our money and to be able to apply it without all of their duplicate 

assessments and duplicate reporting requirements and contracts and so forth. So that is 

actually the proof in the pudding, as they say, about being able to be more efficient in 

our actual delivery of services.

Robert: And of course, by showing across communities who, in Los Angeles, it does invest quite 

extensively especially in our foster and probation youth populations, and oftentimes 

they were not connected to us in the public sector. So while we were funding workforce 

and had this very elaborate system, they were funding their own workforce programs

with other agencies then oftentimes were not connected to the larger system. Also, the 

resources that they were putting in, investing, were actually much smaller than our 

investments, so as a city, we're putting 15 million dollars directly invested into our 

resource system just as a city, many of the philanthropy communities were putting out 

100, 200, 300,000 dollar grants, which are great for the agencies, but they were often, 

as they were, being disconnected actually of the requirements. So we've been working 

with them to ... for them to coordinate their investments with us and then their dollars 

are much much more flexible and actually give greater leverage for our community 

agencies to implement.

Robert: So all of this is not important if we're not enhancing the outcomes. If we're not 

increasing the outcomes of education, employment, social and health, wellbeing, and 

the social and health/wellbeing was new to us as a workforce system, but we thought it 

was important that we were looking at the whole person and not just talking about 

education and labor or career and opportunities. The social and health/wellbeing that 

we were able to implement a mental health assessment as a part of our intake, so when 

young people are now doing their educational assessment to know exactly where 

they're at and where they're going, our counselors are actually Masters levels 

counselors through LAUSD, are implementing or conducting a mental health 

assessment.

Robert: The mental health assessment was approved by the county mental health agency and if 

a young person shows high mental health needs, they have a direct contact to our 

mental health navigators and that could prioritize these young people for services. This 
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is the first time that we've actually connected to the county mental health agency and 

they've been a wonderful, wonderful partner. And just recently, we have implemented a 

housing assessment to actually make sure that the young people have stable housing. 

Homelessness amongst our young adult population in Los Angeles has actually increased 

over the last three years because of the housing squeeze, so now in much the same 

way, we're doing a housing assessment as a part of our intake and then we're 

connecting them to our housing navigators.

Robert: These have all led to not just increased outcomes, but also increased amount of 

services. Under our WIOA dollars, if we were just running the straight WIOA program, 

we're funded at about 2,300 individuals that we would've been able to serve. Our goal is 

to get our capacity to 8,000. I think this last year, or I should say in this last year, we are 

surpassing 7,000 young people. So, the power of the systemic partnerships, the 

integration, and the flexibility that we've been able to receive has really allowed us to 

increase the outcomes for the folks that we're serving, but to almost dramatically 

increase the number of folks that we're serving. 

Robert: So the key component was the waivers, and when we first did the application for the 

waivers, we sat around And most folks were all, "What does this mean?" So actually 

digging down and frankly, we came up with a wishlist of things that we wanted to see. 

We ended up with about 27, 28 different possibilities and one of the things that actually 

came out of that was probably about seven or eight of them were things that were 

locally controlled, that had nothing to do with the federal grants and federal 

regulations. It was either self-imposed regulations or bad practices. We were able to go 

through this process, we were able to identify several changes that we were able to 

immediately do on the local level.

Robert: As a matter of fact, two or three were under my department or my responsibility. I said, 

"Okay, these are no-brainers, we can change this." Having that discussion helps very 

specifically with that. But the two waivers that we were able to get approved But the 

one waiver that had the greatest impact was actually counting our justice involved, 

foster youth, homeless youth, and runaway youth as in school versus out of school. In 

terms of for the Department of Labor, and at a local level, that really means that we 

could reach these foster and primarily justice youth who are in school and because of 

the change of the WIOA legislation, we had a more limited pot of funding. Now we have 

a greater pot of funding to be able to categorize and serve them.

Robert: So that simple waiver itself really bought in many of our community advocates who saw 

this as a great way to prevent young people from dropping out and also, it was a way 

that we can match in school dollars that were designated for foster and probation 

youth. We've been able to expand this waiver through the county effort and that has 

allowed us to actually not have the waiver just for the city, but really for the whole 

county, which was seven workforce development boards. This waiver has allowed us to 

also develop an MOU between probation and our Department of Children and Family 

Services and the seven workforce boards to actually have a process of how we're 

coordinating services and building the work.
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Robert: This really was an important marker for all of us to actually do that intergovernmental 

sector work that is going to increase the number of folks being served and actually being 

served better. Then our second one was a very small program that was through the 

Health and Human Services, operated by one of our partners, the LA LGBT Center. And 

by allowing them to increase the age from 21 to 24 gave them greater flexibility for 

services, but more importantly than just receiving the waiver, it actually brought in the 

LGBT Center into a greater partnership for us to understand the very, very specific needs 

that this community had and also to understand that many of our foster youth and 

runaway youth were from the LGBT community.

Robert: But having that understanding of being able to meet their very specific needs was a 

great, great asset for us. So getting this waiver bought them into our partnership and 

we've been able and just in our LA LGBT Center, we went from having maybe a few 

internships and work experience opportunities to this last year that we've got close to 

130 individuals being served from the LGBT Center and they've graduated. We helped 

them bring a charter high school, they have graduated less than a half a dozen in 

previous years, this last year, they graduated over 30 with a high school diploma. So it's 

just another marker of success that when you talk about the possibility of what can be 

done and what waivers can happen, it really is your imagination at a local level. This is 

one of the greatest pieces of being a P3 pilot.

Robert: So LA P3, as I've said, is not a programmatic effort. It was intentionally as the systematic 

effort and the system changes are difficult when you're dealing with large bureaucracies 

as a place like Los Angeles. It's also even a little bit more difficult when you're talking 

about independent elected bodies. So we have a city government that's run by a mayor 

in 15 council districts. We have a county government run by five supervisors. We have 

an independent school district that has an independent board and superintendents and 

then we have a local community college district that is independently elected. So just at 

the four major service levels, all having different reporting structures and governance, 

saying that we're going to make systems changes along all four really does mean that 

we have to have cooperation and we actually have to have a very conscious effort of 

making sure that all four entities are on board and are supporting.

Robert: So one of the major changes was utilizing our state WIOA data collection system for all 

of our participants coming through our YouthSource Center system. a good number are 

WIOA participants, so we have to collect that data in this system. But the other folks 

that are non-WIOA we are actually collecting in our system. And we actually provided 

access for our partners, so our school district now has access to the data collection 

system and our case management system. Our community college partners that are 

relevant and that we're working with. We have two of our centers on community 

colleges, have access, allowed access for some of our DCFS case managers, Department 

of Children and Family Services case managers for our foster youth. So by providing 

access to one data system, we can now better serve individuals.

Robert: I did talk about the implementation of the waiver authorities, which has been a major 

systems change for us. But the focus on our special populations, when we talked about 

20% of young people being out of school and out of work in Los Angeles, when you talk 
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about foster youth, those numbers almost nearly doubled. The same is true for 

probation youth and homeless youth even has a much higher number. We also know 

that many of our young people were in several different systems. They could be a 

probation, foster youth, be homeless, and also be in our workforce. So how do you bring 

a focus on the special populations, but also tie it together with all the various 

departments that are being served? Then that really leads to the integration of partners 

and coordination.

Robert: What we have implemented is 14 regional meetings. So Los Angeles area is 400 square 

miles, so having one P3 meeting and trying to be across our systems is just not feasible. 

So we've implemented a localized regional meetings that are co-hosted by our city 

workforce center and LAUSD partner, but we invite all of the various entities that we've 

been working with at the policy level to actually implement at a local level. We actually 

have a facilitator that we use P3 dollars to implement these regional P3 meetings and 

they happen monthly and we've over this last year, they've been happening religiously. 

So that has been a very big asset for those attending and believe it or not, a lot of folks 

don't know each other. I've been working in the foster care system on this grant and I've 

been working on homeless with this grant, and not having that opportunity to actually 

meet and connect together. So those have been some of the highlights of our major 

systems changes.

Robert: So to implement our P3, we started with these six committees, they have morphed over 

the last two years and we did combine a couple of the committees, but we really do 

keep our steering committee and partnership committee, which we have combined, as 

the lead entity. We purposefully didn't formalize it in every Tuesday ... first Tuesday of 

the month, we're meeting in this location. We have kept that fairly flexible and we've 

been actually implementing quarterly meetings that bring everybody together. Then the 

operations committee is one that does meet on a regular monthly timeframe. Our 

strategic plan committee actually just completed our strategic plan last year and now 

has moved on to another effort that we're developing called RELAY, Reconnecting LA's 

Youth, and this RELAY Institute is going to be at our Cal State system and it's going to be 

the host of all of our work, including other efforts like My Brother's Keeper and other 

strategic efforts for this population will be tracked there.

Robert: I really want to show you the number of partners and the variety of partners. It really 

couldn't be done without that coalition of the willing. There's always naysayers, and I 

say let the naysayers be the naysayers, but if in Los Angeles, we could bring together 

these vast groups of individuals under that coalition, I would say it can be done in your 

local community. 

Robert: As I mentioned, we have a major focus on increasing the educational levels of our 

participants. So the vast majority of our disconnected youth, who are out of school and 

out of work, approximately 60 to 65% do come in without a high school diploma. So the 

effort is, and number one priority, is to get them their high school diploma.

Robert: The 30 plus percent that do come in with a high school diploma who are not working 

and not re-enrolled in school, the focus is to get them into a credential program, a 
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community college program, an adult ED program, to be able to get them their next 

level of skill. We all know that the future of our economy is going to be highly 

dependent on having that credential and middle skill ability. And if these young people 

don't have a high school diploma or are only stopping at a high school diploma, we 

know that they're not going to be able to actively participate in the future progress of 

our economy.

Robert: So that is our number one priority, and then following that, of course, is employment 

and an engagement in work experience. It's not uncommon that we do have a 20 year 

old, 21 year old who comes in who has never actively engaged in formal employment. 

So they might've worked in the cash economy, they might've worked for an uncle, but 

it's not uncommon. So one of the big areas that we do is subsidized employment, and 

that actually gets them into the formal economy, but in the formal workplace. One 

major point that I do want to stress is that it's really all about social capital. When we 

are able to get our young people into the workforce and to be able to see the workforce 

and the expectations and ... but more importantly is to meet other people and to see a 

way for them to actually be self-sufficient. That social capital goes a very long way. So 

we have a host of employment indicators that we're focused on. 

Robert: The wellbeing of social, mental, and emotional, we're looking at the number of 

individuals that we were referring to agencies. But we're also looking, and we haven't 

fully implemented this, it's about the number of young people that have health 

insurance and that are accessing their healthcare. So that one has been a little bit 

slower and a full implementation but our intent is every young person who is eligible for 

a healthcare program is actually fully enrolled and then engaging.

Robert: Then lastly, I mentioned about our stabilized housing and making sure that every one of 

our young people have a stabilized housing option.

Robert: So our technical assistance we have here listed as to be developed, but it really should 

be that has been implemented and to be developed. With the development of a 

strategic plan. So last year, we developed a strategic plan that we were able to get 

approved by the city council, by the mayor, by the county board of supervisors, by 

community college district, our school district, and had the support of the Chamber and 

many of our other partners. That is available as a resource for all of you to see as a 

model. We laid out several major goals and objectives in there and truthfully, we're 

halfway through or a third to a halfway of full implementation on some of the goals, 

what they tend to fully implement the strategic plan, but it is a heck of a lot farther than 

if we didn't have one. So that document has been our guiding document over this last 

year of us working together. We're in the process of doing the asset and fiscal map for 

our services.

Robert: This project has been undertaken through assistance with JFF and a few of our other 

partners. But we should be rolling that out the first of the year and we did this in a way 

that we want it to be non-threatening to our public leaders. What we wanted to do was 

actually to talk about where the resources are and how we integrate. So we're not 

entertaining about how we transfer or how we move, but really about how do we 
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integrate the resources that are in the various county departments, city departments, 

and its focus on who we're trying to service.

Robert: As a part of our work, as I mentioned, the RELAY institutes that we are developing a web 

portal that is going to be available to the general public. It'll be focused for case 

managers as well as young people to actually receive the services that they need. There 

are several of that type of service referrals already, so we don't want to duplicate, but 

we want it to be very very focused on our disconnected/opportunity youth population. 

So that's also going to be one of our five pillars of our RELAY institute and we're 

expecting that to be done in the fall.

Robert: So I thank you for giving me this opportunity to present. As I mentioned, I'm speaking on 

behalf of a team of individuals who have provided the leadership and the strength to 

continue this program. wherever you're at in your development, I do think it is key that 

you have folks working together, you're bringing the resources together, that you're 

actually having an impact on the outcomes of the services that you're attempting to 

provide. So thank you.

Beth: Thanks, Robert. My name is Beth Stover from the Chicago Department of Family and 

Support Services and I'm here to discuss Chicago's P3 program. Our program was a 

programmatic effort that looked at a particular population and I want to thank the 

federal agencies for this opportunity to talk about our program and how we worked 

with the P3 model to try to bring innovative services to young parents, especially young 

ladies. there'll be slides up as we go that sometimes don't coordinate exactly with what 

I'm saying but give you a better overview of the program, so I don't have to go into 

detail about that during this presentation.

Beth: First, I'm going to talk a little bit about the genesis of our P3 program, the Chicago Young 

Parents Program, and how it developed to meet a need in the community and 

ultimately brought together three social service areas which, at least in our experience 

here in Chicago, are often siloed. The Chicago Department of Family and Support 

Services, or DFSS, is the city department that administers publicly funded programs for 

Chicago residents who are vulnerable or at risk or otherwise need support as you can 

tell by this representation on the screen. This includes programs for seniors, for 

residents experiencing homelessness, residents who need emergency support, survivors 

of domestic violence, youth and children and families.

Beth: Even though we're under one department, often all work as siloed despite being in the 

same building. About children and youth in particular, DFSS uses corporate or local 

revenue dollars to support programs for youth, including out of school time programs, 

mentoring, summer jobs, and justice system diversion programs. And for children and 

families, we are the nation's largest Headstart grantee and we administer also state preK dollars and we do those through a network of community based agencies in Chicago. 

About 34 delegate agencies, Headstart delegate agencies at over 300 sites in the city.

Beth: The genesis of our P3 program, the Chicago Young Parents Program, was a summer pilot 

program that was the brainchild of the Youth and Children's Services division and really 
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came out of an attempt to not be siloed and to work together and to find some way to 

work together more closely. So the city had sponsored summer job programs for youth 

for a very long time, and this goes back to the previous administration, but in the early 

'10s, the city launched the One Summer Chicago Plus. The One Summer Chicago was a 

summer jobs program and the Plus was this extra piece of mentoring and group work 

with a social emotional focus.

Beth: This program, One Summer Chicago Plus, targeted young men from at risk communities 

and those communities were determined to be at risk due to levels of violence and 

school dropout rates. So this program worked in such a way that these youth had jobs 

but also they had mentors, paid mentors, and they met for six hours every Friday during 

the summer to engage in peer to peer support and work through a social emotional 

learning curriculum. So as part of this One Summer Chicago Plus, the city worked with 

the crime lab at the University of Chicago and it did indeed show that the program had 

been effective at reducing summer gun violence and also keeping youth in those 

communities enrolled in school.

Beth: So when our Children and Youth departments got together, we talked about how our 

objectives aligned and there was a gap in programs for young women, we determined, 

who might need extra support, especially due to parenting. And it's with a population 

that DFSS Children Services division engages with through our Headstart and Early 

Headstart programming. There's a lot of young parents enrolled, and that the youth 

division engages with as well, through summer jobs and through some of these out of 

school time programming and the like.

Beth: So this would be 2014, and we ran this Teen Mom Summer Jobs program, which 

basically functioned the same way as One Summer Chicago Plus did, except for the fact 

that the focus population was young ladies, they were all under 18 at the time, who 

were pregnant or parenting. The program hired parenting teens and gave them summer 

jobs as literacy coaches in our Headstart centers. These Headstart centers served 

children under age five. So our Headstart program had a longstanding relationship with 

Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, so we conducted a small evaluation of the 

program and we especially focused on the program's impact on the young moms and as 

opposed to the impact on the children.

Beth: We found that even the short three month dosage of the program really helped with 

these young ladies to build their sense of self-efficacy, their parenting skills, and their 

parenting confidence. We also found that through these peer to peer Friday supports, 

the young ladies had started to form play groups and the like. So it was really inspiring 

and we thought let's see if we can find a way to extend the program, to make it longer, 

to use some of the resources we had in the city to keep working with these young 

parents because of the importance of working with young people, working with people 

with children is to establish a relationship where they trust you and they'll be able to 

confide in you about what supports they need. They trust you to provide them supports 

that are really going to help them.
Page 13 of 16

Beth: So when the P3 announcement was released, we were already working with our 

partners to think about how this summer program could be expanded to have a greater 

impact and really support their transition from adolescence to adulthood, both as young 

women and as mothers. Headstart and Early Headstart often focuses on the parent first 

and not a person, but we wanted to make sure that the personhood of these young 

parents was supported as well. We wanted to do that, we felt that that aligned 

especially with Headstart because we know from Headstart that parents are children's 

first teachers and if we support parents, we support children. If we support their own 

self-efficacy and the like, that that will have repercussions about how they are working 

with their children.

Beth: Our program CYPP is based on this Headstart two generational model of working with 

parents and children and is designed to provide young parents and during the first two 

years we work mostly with moms under age 24. We extended the age to 24. Mostly 

moms, but actually in the third year, we expanded to include young dads. We've had 

five young dads in the program in the last year and we wanted to continue to provide 

this intensive support that we were providing under the teen mom summer job 

program, which included an array of services that I'll get to.

Beth: So but as you can see here that our partners really include ourselves, the Chicago 

Department of Family and Support Services, where we have Headstart, Early Headstart, 

and childcare partnership and we continue to work with the youth division. Then we 

also reached out, I said that there were three areas, we have the youth, we have the 

children's services, and then we had workforce. So we reached out to our partners at 

the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership, who receive federal WIOA dollars. 

Beth: Then we worked with one of our key providers, SGA Youth and Family Services who 

have a history of working with youth, working with children, and working with mental 

health supports for those populations. We work with Chapin Hall to conduct the 

evaluation, and then we also had what was critical was our network of delegate 

agencies, 34 throughout the city like I said. 300 sites, and they provided both work sites, 

they recruited our participants, they provided the work sites, and also they provided the 

extra supports that these young people needed to succeed in their work endeavors.

Beth: So for this program, we combine Headstart dollars, Headstart, Early Headstart, Early 

Headstart childcare partnership dollars from HHS and WIOA youth dollars from the 

Department of Labor that runs through the state and goes to the workforce partnership. 

And we've also contributed some local dollars to the program as well, as we've gone 

along. As far as the waivers are concerned, we had a waiver from HHS for redetermining 

eligibility of children between Early Headstart and Headstart. Typically, a child’s family’s

eligibility needs to be redetermined when they transition from the Early Headstart, from 

zero to three year olds to Headstart, for four year olds. But we actually didn't need to 

leverage this waiver too much.

Beth: However, and I want to say that this was really the key with the HHS and the Office of 

Headstart and Headstart, it allowed us to use our Headstart funds to provide what I've 

described often as a kind of Headstart on steroids to try to support these young parents 
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who were enrolled in the program. So in addition to having their children enrolled in the 

center based Headstart program or Early Headstart program, and receiving the full set 

of comprehensive Headstart services via the center, which had a medical component, 

dental component, mental health component, has a family service support component 

as well as the education component that the development of children and the like.

Beth: In addition to getting that, they got also a modified version of a different Headstart 

model, a home based model. So in addition to having their children enrolled, they 

received twice monthly home visits from their mentors which focused first on the 

wellbeing of the young parent and what she needed at the time, whether it was 

housing, whether it was signing up for some sort of benefits, whether it was just how to 

deal with her partner, she was having arguments with her family, it kind of really ran the 

gamut.

Beth: Second, focusing on parenting, and we have a curriculum from that we typically use in 

our Headstart home based program. So they receive that and then on top of that, they 

have monthly group socializations, which is part of the Headstart home based 

component, where the parent is receiving home visits from a home visitor and then 

once a month, all the parents in that home visitor's cohort and the children get together 

for a very large play date, which is focused on children's social emotional interaction and 

helping children learn how to be together and the like. And also, helping the parent to 

parent in those circumstances.

Beth: So in addition to receiving the twice monthly home visits from their mentors and having 

these socializations, all the young ladies were visited weekly at their work sites. They 

worked four days a week, three and a half hours at a Headstart site as a literacy coach. 

Then they got also paid for six hours on Fridays to have group work and the like, which 

was based on social emotional learning and covering a whole gamut of topics, 

everything from financial literacy, dealing with emotional management, peer to peer 

learning, and the like.

Beth: But getting back to the waiver and working with the office of Headstart, I think that 

having Headstart involved, and even though there wasn't a technical waiver needed for 

that kind of double dosage, we got the blessing we needed to be able to pilot this 

program and see if the sorts of outcomes for these young parents, what they'd looked 

like. 

Beth: For WIOA, that was our large waiver or our kind of our ... the waiver that we got for 

WIOA basically it let us take the dollars that we had from the partnership and support 

the program and the outcomes were the CYPP outcomes and we were able to use those 

WIOA dollars to support the wages for the participants, because that was quite a hefty 

cost, especially because the minimum wage in Chicago has been going up over the past 

few years. We decided to pay them at that high minimum wage rate as opposed to 

getting a waiver for that because these were young moms and they needed as much 

income as they could get.
Page 15 of 16

Beth: So we had the waiver from WIOA] that allowed us to pay these wages, use the CYPP for 

the outcomes that were organic to the program, and also all the ladies we served, and 

now some young men, count as out of school youth for the WIOA requirements. I would 

say that 3/4 of the parents we've served have been out of school youth, but about a 

fourth of them are in high school. We had one cohort that they were all high school 

young ladies who are still with us because they either haven't graduated or they're still 

eligible for the program.

Beth: so we counted these young ladies as out of school youth and we used that funding to 

pay for their wages. The parents, like I said, worked about 20, 25 hours a week, which 

included part time work at the Headstart Center as a literacy coach, as well as six hours 

of group time on Friday. Fridays also involved training in early literacy, child 

development, personal growth, emotional management, peer to peer support, we had 

extra as well, we brought in trainers from UIC Center for Family Literacy on best 

practices in the classroom and the like. And of course, one of the main objectives of this 

was the cross-fertilization of what you were doing for your work experience and your 

personal experience as a parent.

Beth: As to what were the biggest challenges with this portion is definitely getting our waiver 

for the WIOA funds finalized. Especially as it involved not only working with our federal 

partners, but also our state partners. So we had four governmental or quasigovernmental agencies trying to hammer out an agreement and all of us who work in 

government know that the nature of bureaucracy is these things take a lot of time, and 

they did. But I do want to say that was totally worth it because it gave us the resources 

we needed to really serve this population and pay their wages. The wages were like the 

carrot that drew them in and then in order to have the job as a literacy coach, you had 

to take the home visits and participate in Friday socializations and the like.

Beth: One of the really fantastic outcomes we had is we have over an 80% uptake of home 

visiting and traditionally, it's hard to get people to invite you into their homes and share 

with you and the like, and we've been really successful with that because one of the 

benefits of the program is there's a really really small caseload for these mentors 

because about one mentor for 7 to 10 young parents

Beth: I think the second challenge we really had with this program, which is the clientele, and 

many of these clientele, the young ladies, especially that we served during the first two 

years have many many challenges. They're all under 24, many have more than one 

children. Many have experienced insecure housing, they've had falling outs with their 

families, with their friends and the like. Many have to build emotional management 

skills, they have to return, get reestablished on education tracks, whether it's getting 

their high school equivalency or it's returning after dropping out of college after a 

semester and trying to negotiate unpaid debt and the like that might have built up from 

that.

Beth: Our mentors have a really small caseload, which has allowed them over time to build a 

really strong and supportive relationship with our young parents. That home visiting 

rate I talked about speaks to it, how strong that relationship is. And the mentors work 
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with the Headstart Center staff and they create a whole circle of support for these 

young ladies. When the young lady is weathering a personal crisis or a family crisis or 

the like, she's able to go to her mentor, she's able to go to her work site mentors, she's 

able to go to her peers through the peer to peer support that's on Friday. So there's 

really trying to create for these young people, a network that they can go to.

Beth: Mentors have helped all of them have to enroll in the education programs, that we have 

young ladies who are still in high school, we have young ladies who are getting their 

high school equivalency or have, we have ladies who are on track to get certificates that 

they need for working in a Headstart center full time as a teaching assistant or are on 

track for other college courses. Because of course, one thing that happens in this 

program is you realize pretty quickly whether or not you want to work with children or 

not. So for those young ladies, and now young dads, who may not want to work with 

children, the mentors work with them to access other resources, to go into other 

certificate programs.

Beth: So over the course of the three years, we've had about 250 parents participate as 

literacy coaches. 59 of them have moved on to full time employment. there's been 

some attrition and 22 of those at last count, and we're still adding this up, have been 

hired in early learning centers, in our early learning centers. So one of the things that 

we're doing as well is we're creating a pipeline to staff our own programs, which for 

early learning, for early childhood centers, there is actually a great need for those kinds 

of teachers. So the P3 program really let us do some innovative things with federal 

blessing. Not always needing exact waivers for both, but nonetheless giving oversight 

and support and helping to develop this program into something that was really 

impactful for the young ladies and now the young men who have participated in it.

Michelle: Thank you, Beth. This now concludes our technical assistance webinar on P3. The tool 

that Larry discussed and information on past and current pilot sites can be found on 

youth.gov/P3. On behalf of the seven federal agency partners, the U.S. Department of 

Health and Human Services and youth.gov would like to thank you for listening to this 

webinar.