OpportunitySD

Sports always made sense to me. Players and coach know the rules. Game starts. Referees call fouls, arbitrate. Playing field is level. Competitors lay their talents, preparation, strategy and teamwork on the table. Sweat. (Sometimes) blood. Winners. Losers. New opportunity to get better and compete the next day. Growing up where and how I did, I figured life was more or less similar. But I was wrong.

On May 29, the San Diego Workforce Partnership (SDWP) held its second OpportunitySD webinar on the Leaky Education Pipeline. The webinar was part of a quarterly series on opportunity youth (sometimes called disconnected youth)—young adults ages 16-24 who are not in school and not working—in San Diego County and the barriers impacting their everyday lives.

Last year, the San Diego Workforce Partnership (SDWP) launched OpportunitySD, a movement to dramatically reduce the number of opportunity youth (young adults ages 16-24 who are neither in school nor working) in the region. In March of this year, SDWP’s opportunity youth research with Measure of America revealed that San Diego County had the largest Black-White disconnection disparity of any big city in the nation in 2016, the most recent year for which data are available.