Matter Client Advises Senate Finance Committee
Matter client Greg Taylor, W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Vice President for Programs in Youth and Education, presented testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance.Mr. Taylor provided witness statements at the Committee’s “Hearings on Realizing a Competitive Education: Identifying Needs, Partnerships and Resources” with a focus on the SPARK and New Options for Youth initiatives. The following is an excerpt of that testimony, focusing on the project Matter is deeply engaged as innovation and design team lead.
The Kellogg Foundation is engaged in New Options for Youth with an emphasis on ages 16 through 24 and beyond. Our goal is to create a new credentialing system as a valued alternative to the high school diploma and associate degree.
Our New Options Initiative works outside of the current employment and education systems to seek out and partner with innovative community-based organizations, businesses, educational institutions, and municipal governments that want to create a new credentialing system to prepare young people for work or further education. Innovative leaders from these institutions together with the young people they seek to serve are charged with co-creating prototypes and action plans for a new credential that would be valued by employers and young people.
This initiative focuses on out-of-school young people aged 16-24 who have been failed by the traditional school system. Most schools, dropout recovery programs and other social service systems have attempted to help this group by doing something “to” or “for” youth. By contrast, New Options builds its efforts on the passions, strengths and interests of young people themselves. New Options anchors its work around businesses and community-based organizations, in which young people are gaining marketable skills and generating products and services of value to the community.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education, each year since 1985, 4 million young people aged 16-24 are not enrolled in or have failed to complete high school. And many of those who do finish high school report that they are neither motivated to further their learning in formal education environments nor do they feel prepared for jobs and careers that match their passions and interests. Currently, few alternatives exist for those whose learning styles are not suited to the “one-size-fits-all” approach of traditional classroom settings and methods. Through a new credentialing system, New Options
seeks to create legitimate and viable pathways to better jobs and education.We are also exploring a venture capital investment strategy to fund innovation; this would use grants to bring together youth and forward-looking leaders in business, nonprofit organizations, and government to design and employ new credentialing concepts. Co-created ideas from these sites would then be merged and unified into a national prototype. The Phase I goal of New Options is to fund up to 15 prototypes, which could then yield two or three models robust enough to implement, sustain and provide leverage in future phases.
The New Options Initiative is built on several foundational concepts or key features including:
1. Youth Voice and Choice: Many youth-serving organizations try to help out-of-school young people by doing something “to youth” or “for youth.” These deficit approaches attempt to fix youth through a wide range of dropout recovery programs and social service delivery systems. By contrast, New Options takes an asset approach, which builds on the passions, strengths, talents and aspirations of young people and creating opportunities for them to discover their full potential, in which their voices and choices drive decisions for
their future.2. Market-based Approaches: While many nonprofit organizations provide opportunities for out-of-school youth to grow, develop and learn on their own terms, a select group takes this idea one step further. The latter help young people not only to gain marketable skills, but also to generate products and services that the marketplace values. New Options seeks to partner with organizations that have youth-designed products and services that business and municipal governments are buying. Youth-created products and services include designing Web sites, starting recycling programs, producing music, generating radio commentaries, mapping neighborhood assets, and creating public murals.
3. Business Partnerships: To create a new sustainable model for youth workforce development through youth voice and youth choice, market forces must align with youth aspiration. In a time of diminishing commitment to public spending, the private sector must be engaged to connect the dreams of young people with market realities. Further, nonprofit organizations must partner with business beyond traditional charitable connections (e.g., donating, volunteering, sponsoring, etc.) and labor-related relationships (e.g., internships, entry-level jobs). Nonprofit organizations must build private-sector partnerships that can advance a company’s core business and improve that company’s bottom line. New Options will anchor its work in the private sector to harness market forces as drivers of new opportunities.
4. Innovation and Co-creation: New Options will use a venture capital investment strategy to co-create and develop innovative prototypes for a new credential. New Options will not attempt to find, replicate, scale, or sustain existing practices or programs. Nor will New Options seek to make incremental changes in existing workforce or education systems. Instead, New Options will bring together key stakeholders including business leaders, educators, government officials, CBO directors, and young people themselves to co-create new prototypes. New Options recognizes that solutions exist in the community, that multiple perspectives lead to the best answers and innovations take root only when stakeholders have meaningful ways to participate and contribute.
5. National Systemic Change: Early stages of the initiative focus on co-creating prototypes for a new credential in specific local geographic sites. Some prototypes will demonstrate what is possible and emerge as potential national models. Most prototypes will not. By making room for failure in the prototype building process, New Options will move only the most promising examples forward for review and implementation. In the end, the co-creation and innovation process must yield a new credential with national currency. It must be attractive and appealing to young people (labor supply), and it must signal value and quality to business (market demand).
To accomplish this, New Options will follow an intentional innovation process at the national and local level. As the planning phase is now complete, New Options is now developing site criteria for participation. At the end of Phase One, selected sites will be expected to produce a local prototype for a new credential that has been co-created by business, education, government, CBOs and youth leaders.
These local prototypes will be merged and integrated into two, possibly three, national models that can then be launched in Phase Two of the initiative. If there is demonstrable success in one model, New Options will concentrate Phase Three resources on scaling and sustaining that model.
At the local or site level, New Options will make Phase One investments to develop up to 15 prototypes for a new credentialing system. These prototypes will credential the marketable skills young people are gaining through either the products and services they are creating or the content areas where they have demonstrated passion and interest. These include such interest areas as media (film, video, TV, radio, web, print), performing arts (theater, music, dance, poetry), technology (computers, robotics, telecommunications), and community development (neighborhood improvement, environment, landscaping, horticulture).
Sites that are selected for a prototype development grant will bring together business, nonprofit, education, government, and youth leaders to develop concepts for a new credentialing system. Most sites will follow an innovation process and will: 1) create an understanding of their local context, especially regarding what type of credentialing system businesses and young people want; 2) analyze the context to determine where the new opportunities exist; 3) synthesize ideas into several new credentialing concepts; and 4) fashion one of these concepts into a viable prototype.
The complete Senate Finance Committee testimony can be found here