Positive Youth Development State and Local Collaboration Demonstration Projects
Fiscal Year 2005 Highlights: Louisiana

Local community: East Baton Rouge Metro-Council District 7

This urban school district struggles with problems such as poverty, high dropout rates, low graduation rates, and a large number of students who are above the traditional age for their grades.

Led by the Louisiana Workforce Commission and Career Builders, a local nonprofit, the collaborators seek to improve workforce education and training in the district. Partners include schools, businesses, and community organizations. The collaboration’s work builds on the Workforce Commission’s statewide efforts to take a systems-based approach to workforce education and training, coordinating services in order to meet customer needs and produce a world-class workforce for the State.

The Louisiana collaboration also aims to increase the number of youth-serving partners in District 7 and to create a collaborative approach to Positive Youth Development.

Partners:

Louisiana Workforce Commission (grantee agency)
Career Builders (lead local partner)
Youth Oasis and the Baton Rouge Alliance for Transitional Living (Runaway and Homeless Youth grantee)
City of Baton Rouge
The Office of the Honorable Byron Sharper, Councilman, East Baton Rouge City/Parish Metro-Council
Prescott Middle School
Istrouma High School
Baton Rouge Community College
Louisiana Technical College-Baton Rouge Campus
Baton Rouge Parent University
The Martin Luther King Community Center
Young Women’s Christian Association Early Head Start Program
The Youth Capital Area Network Advisory Council
The Future Leaders Exceeding Expectations Foundation
JP Morgan Chase
Exxon/Mobil

In Fiscal Year 2005, the Louisiana project

• Put on a youth-planned event called Summer Heat, which informed youth and their parents about summer camps and programs available to them
  
• Established a strong youth council
  
• Launched a marketing campaign that uses popular Louisiana athletes to promote career coaching for young people

Challenges to the collaboration project’s work include

• Finding funding
  
• Garnering community interest and combating adult apathy
  
• Working with schools to address truancy, overage students, lack of parental involvement, and workforce development