Youth Opportunity Lessons from US cities on improving young people’s employment prospects Naomi Clayton April 2015 About Centre for Cities Centre for Cities is a research and policy institute, dedicated to improving the economic success of UK cities. We are a charity that works with cities, business and Whitehall to develop and implement policy that supports the performance of urban economies. We do this through impartial research and knowledge exchange. For more information, please visit www.centreforcities.org/about About the authors Naomi Clayton is Senior Analyst at Centre for Cities
[email protected] / 020 7803 4314 Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and the Rank Foundation for their support in making this report possible. This work contains statistical data from ONS which is Crown Copyright. The use of the ONS statistical data in this work does not imply the endorsement of the ONS in relation to the interpretation or analysis of the statistical data. This work uses research datasets which may not exactly reproduce National Statistics aggregates. All views expressed in this report are those of the Centre for Cities. All mistakes are the author’s own. Photo credits All photos by Naomi Clayton. Supported by Youth opportunity • April 2015 Overview The severity of the global recession in 2008-09 and austerity measures that followed have caused policymakers and practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic to think differently about how to address common challenges. All cities have been affected to varying extents by widening economic divides, rising youth unemployment, and an increasingly constrained public funding environment.