Youth Opportunity Portal
Project Overview:
The Youth Opportunity Portal seeks to create a central online website to youth programs with a centralized application, making it easy for young people ages 12-24 to access jobs and skill building opportunities, to develop those skills overtime, and to plan for an economically secure and personally empowering career. This project aims to improve city programs by ensuring our youth programming is accessible, impactful, and relevant.
Project Background:
The City is moving all of its youth-serving programming from siloed departmental efforts to a unified citywide youth development program. Uniting the City’s program offerings in one place is a critical step in that transformation, and will make it easier for young people, counselors, and caregivers to understand what programs already exist to support youth development. Having a single application system will also allow the City to collect basic, aggregated data, so we can better understand how our programs are serving Seattle youth.
The project team will immediately work towards creating a web-based portal where young people can find programs based on their interests/skills/age and use a single application to apply for the programs. Future functions we hope to add to the youth portal include: access a jobs board with external youth employment and training opportunities; locate non-employment youth services in their area; create a profile with a resume and skills bank; and create education and employment plans using labor market data.
Project Team:
- Technology Access Foundation
- Microsoft
- Mayor's Office Policy Team
- Innovation & Performance
- Office of Economic Development
- Human Services Department
- Parks & Recreation
Contact: Erica Johnson, erica.johnson@seattle.gov