YEP believes young people, if they are to attain a self-sufficient adulthood, need to invest significantly in their own education. That investment comes through opportunities to continually learn and thrive, be it through educational support or transformative career opportunities. We work with youth and young adults by incentivizing and reinforcing attitudes and behaviors essential for work and life.

We require all of our youth and young adults enrolled in our job training and internship programs to simultaneously work toward their next educational goal, whether by taking high school credit recovery classes at our training headquarters, a licensing program in their chosen field, or community college courses.

We know that hands-on job training in a living classroom gives youth and young adults a place to practice and further develop their skills and capabilities while working toward outcomes they can see in their future. Plus, participants earn a much-needed paycheck, reinforcing the value of their work and incentivizing their resolve to stay in school and the program.

We maintain a low-overhead structure and retain an agile, experienced staff to allow us to nimbly respond to current business needs with our trainings. We are constantly assessing the economic environment for new career paths and bundled skills we can impart through our training programs to both meet the needs of businesses that employ our participants and improve our clients’ outcomes.

We are a data-driven organization imposing rigorous performance management and impact evaluation for all our programs. Several of our grants only fund us if we meet our performance goals, and we continually work to exceed expectations, inspiring our youth and young adults to do the same.