Latin American Youth Center

Good afternoon, Chairman Wells and members of the D.C. City Council. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today at this Public Oversight hearing on the DC Children and Youth Investment Trust Corporation (CYITC).

I’m here today in my capacity as Executive Director of the Latin American Youth Center and as a founding Board member of DC Alliance of Youth Advocates (DCAYA), a coalition of more than 50 youth-serving organizations.

Today, I’d like to share with you a little information about the Latin American Youth Center and then offer a few observations about the important work that the Children and Youth Investment Trust is doing in our city.

First, let me give you a little background on the Latin American Youth Center (LAYC). LAYC is a network of youth centers, charter schools, and social enterprises with a shared commitment to helping youth become successful and happy young adults.

Our anchor site in the Columbia Heights neighborhood is a community-based, multi-cultural youth and family development organization founded in the late 1960s and incorporated in 1974 as a non-profit organization. We work with more than 3,000 young people each year, ages 5-24, primarily from the Latino, African-American, African and Caribbean communities. We provide critical social services and numerous education and employment programs, working with both in-school and out-of-school youth. In the past decade, we have also founded three public charter schools, YouthBuild, The Next Step and Latin American Montessori Bilingual (LAMB).

Now, I want to turn to CYITC.

CYITC is such an important piece of our community’s efforts to support children, youth and families that it it’s easy to forget they’ve only been around since 1999. In just eight years, they’ve become part of the fabric of our community.

I was fortunate to be part of the early planning and visioning that eventually framed CYITC. From our vantage point at LAYC, CYITC has played many important roles and I will emphasize several:

They’ve helped to shine a spotlight on the need for quality youth programming and the importance of evaluating that programming.

They’ve reinforced the benefit of the public and private sectors working together to serve young people.

They’ve acted as a convener of youth-serving entities, bringing together large and small organizations from each of the city’s wards.

They’ve focused on out-of-school youth and out-of-school time programs.

They’ve been a leader championing the power of partnerships between the schools and non-profit providers.

And very importantly, CYITC has served as an intermediary to bring new money, resources and youth programming vision into our city.

Those are all important contributions. Of course, CYITC has also funded many organizations and programs, including some of our work at the Latin American Youth Center.

For example, CYITC has helped us to offer our summer enrichment camp, which, last year, had 185 elementary-school children participate in Wards I and IV.

They’ve supported our Workforce Investment and Social Enterprise programs, which offer job readiness and life skills training, job placement services, computer instruction and GED preparation for out-of-school youth.

LAYC is also involved with the pilot of CYITC’s Project My Time – which focuses on providing after-school academic and enrichment activities to middle-school youth at three of the city’s middle schools.

As part of the pilot, twenty students from Lincoln Middle School are taking radio and mixed media classes at LAYC’s Art & Media House. Just a few weeks ago, the students created their first Web radio show.

It’s my sense that Project My Time has not been without challenges for CYITC. Connecting non-profits and the schools is important, but because it’s still relatively new in DC, there have been a few hiccups along the way. For example, DCPS has had tutoring programs in place that they are reluctant to abandon or to see replaced by a non-profit provider. Coordinating the activities of the schools and non-profits will take some time, particularly on the academic component of the program.

Finally, CYITC has helped the community better understand that there is a shortage of local organizations that have the skills and capacity needed to effectively serve youth.

Taking successful programs and scaling them so that they’re able to reach larger populations is hard work and requires commitment and expertise in both the private and public sectors.

CYITC deserves credit for focusing attention and resources on the capacity issue and for taking steps to expand youth-serving capacity in the city, particularly East of the River. This is an issue that’s not going away and is one we all need to think through and figure out.

CYITC is doing important work. They’ve quickly taken on a leadership role in our city, as a thought-leader, funder and convener on youth-related issues. Our young people are better off because of the work that CYITC enables.

But CYITC’s impact could be bigger. What do I mean?

The City Council and the community must decide if we will significantly invest in CYITC to fully establish it as our intermediary to consolidate and coordinate youth programming.

There is an opportunity for CYITC to do more in each of the areas it has already contributed in – serving as a convener, providing technical assistance to support existing organizations and build new capacity, piloting new models, and consolidating existing work through robust partnerships rather than continuing with many disparate efforts and pieces.

I would add one other area of potential focus that would benefit youth. That’s looking at best practices in youth development to better understand what has worked in other cities to see if those practices, lessons and models can be applied here.

Put simply, the City must decide how it wants to use CYITC.

Just as District leaders have visited and studied other cities to more fully understand school governance issues, perhaps we should look around the country to see how youth programming intermediaries are valued, resourced and empowered to lead the way.

I very much appreciate the opportunity to testify here today and am happy to take any questions.