Nearly one in five 18- to 24-year-olds on Staten Island are out of school and out of work. The North Shore of the island – where almost half all Staten Islanders under 24 years old reside – has a higher rate of out-of-school, out-of-work young adults (just over 24 percent) than does any other borough except for the Bronx. Despite such great need, Staten Island suffers from low levels of public and private investments in workforce services, a lack of viable public transportation, and a scarcity of high-quality jobs.
For 18 months, JobsFirstNYC worked with The Staten Island Foundation and a group of committed local organizational partners to develop an unprecedented borough-wide young adult workforce partnership – the Youth Workforce Initiative of Staten Island, or Youth WINS. Youth WINS is the first formal partnership in the borough to articulate a systemic goal of reducing its overall population of out-of-school and out-of-work 18- to 24-year-olds. The partnership includes a host of Staten Island’s largest education, workforce, and training providers as well as the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce, the borough’s largest business organization.
JobsFirstNYC is pleased to present Developing a Young Adult Workforce Partnership on Staten Island: A JobsFirstNYC Working Paper. This paper includes information on the demographic and economic impetus for YouthWINS and the planning and development of the partnership. It includes an overview of the education and employment conditions of young adults on Staten Island, as well as the business and economic development conditions on the island. It details the process of convening key stakeholders over the course of more than a year to inform and design the Youth WINS model, as well as the partnership’s plans and goals for the pilot phase in the form of its logic and service models.
