Vision Statement: The ten-year goal of the New Options Initiative is to create a new credential
that is a valued alternative to the high school diploma and the associates degree.
What
The New Options Initiative will work outside of the current employment and education system to seek out, strengthen, and partner with innovative community-based organizations, businesses, education institutions, and municipal governments that want to create a new credentialing system to prepare young people for work or further education. These innovative community-based organizations and their cross-sector partners --- together with the young people they seek to serve --- will be charged with co-creating prototypes and action plans that result in the development of a new credential that is valued by employers, educators, and young people themselves.
Who
New Options will focus on young people aged 16-24 who have been failed by the traditional school system. The traditional school and other social service systems have attempted to help this group of young people by doing something “to” or “for” youth. By contrast, New Options will build its efforts on the passions, strengths, and interests of young people. New Options will create opportunities for young people to discover their full potential, where their voice and choice drives decisions for their future. New Options will also anchor its work around youth-driven community-based organizations, where young people are gaining marketable skills and generating products and services that the community and the marketplace finds valuable. It’s the innovations that are occurring at these community-based organizations that New Options wants to come along side and harness.
Why
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 failed to complete high school. For those students who do finish high school, many 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 passion and interest. Currently, few alternatives exist for young people with different learning styles who are not suited to the “one size fits all” approach of traditional classroom settings and methods. Through a new credentialing system, New Options will create legitimate and viable pathways to better jobs and education.
How
New Options will use a venture capital investment strategy to fund innovation. New Options will explore credentialing opportunities in both the sciences and the arts. New Options will make grants to bring together innovative community-based organizations, their cross-sector partners, and youth to design, invent, and experiment with new credentialing concepts. Co-created ideas from these sites will then be merged and unified into a national prototype. The Phase I goal of New Options is to develop eight national prototypes, which could then yield two or three models that would be robust enough to test, implement, sustain, and leverage in future phases of the initiative.
The Youth and Education team develops and manages the New Options for Youth initiative, which together with the SPARK initiative will encompass 60 percent of total Youth and Education programming resources. The team is not seeking proposals for these initiatives. However, the team does respond to creative ideas for other grants that support strategies outlined in the Youth and Education program overview.