Collaboration, a Place-Based Model, and Flexible Funding Strengthen Partnerships and Support Community Well-Being: The Youth Opportunity Hubs Model
By Brandon P. Martinez, Research Associate, and Sara Carrión, Policy Associate
The Youth Opportunity Hubs (YOH) initiative is a group of five organizations in Manhattan funded to provide adolescents and young adults with comprehensive support, improve physical spaces for youth services, establish inter-agency partnerships, and address community needs. Four of the Hubs are neighborhood-based in areas that have experienced disproportionate rates of contact with the criminal-legal system (East Harlem, Central/West Harlem, Washington Heights, and the Lower East Side); the other Hub serves youth from across the city. The five Hub leadership organizations are two settlement houses (Henry Street Settlement and Union Settlement), a major medical center (New York-Presbyterian), a young grassroots organization (Living Redemption), and an existing multi-service youth organization (The Door).
Historically, organizational silos and constraints in funding opportunities have made it harder for organizations to build on and complement each others’ strengths to holistically serve youth in their communities—organizations tended to be funded to provide particular types of services (education, employment, etc.) and compensated based on those services being successfully delivered, not based on comprehensive supports for young people. The YOH initiative was designed to address these constraints and strengthen collaboration through funded partnerships. Accordingly, the initial Youth Opportunity Hubs Request for Proposals required applicants to include direct funding of partner organizations in their proposals. Flexible funding by The Manhattan District Attorney’s Criminal Justice Investment Initiative (CJII) enabled the Hubs to partner with organizations to provide youth with a wider range of services than previously possible. The Hubs’ comprehensive services—including education, employment, prosocial, health, criminal justice, and family services—aim to address risk and protective factors among youth, such as mental health, educational attainment, household income, and connections to school and work. In doing so, the YOH initiative contributes to safer spaces and well-being for youth and communities. (Read more about the Hubs’ impact on youth.)
Recent findings from an independent interim evaluation of the YOH initiative from Westat and Metis Associates highlight three features of the YOH model that affect organizational and community impact:
Shared values and collaborative communications facilitate successful partnerships.
Hub staff, services, and programing positively affect neighborhood perceptions of safety and well-being.
Flexible funding facilitates organizational and community successes.
Shared Values and Collaborative Communication Facilitate Successful Partnerships
Partnerships are a central aspect of the YOH model. Each lead organization functions as a central point through which a broad network of partnerships is developed and maintained. Hub staff remarked that these partnerships worked best when lead and partner organizations held similar values and approaches to providing youth services and engaging with their respective communities.
[The YOH Initiative] did bring the best of all of us because it allowed us to collaborate and to share resources in a way that we hadn’t done before. And ultimately, it made a huge impact in a community… And we want people to stay in Washington Heights and Inwood. Northern Manhattan has a great future. (NewYork-Presbyterian Hub partner)
As a result of implementing the YOH model, both lead and partner organizations began to work together more collaboratively. Lead organizations and partners routinely shared information with one another, which allowed them to learn from each other’s policies and practices and incorporate services and activities in their own models based on learning from each other. For example, working with partners helped The Door
improve its outreach to create new ways to engage youth in services,
consider the advantages of satellite location expansions, and
examine the potential to embed partner staff at The Door.
This approach to partnerships and collaboration not only improved organizational operations, but it also positively supported participants by providing youth and their communities with additional ways to access services.
[Partnerships] move us along progressively… [we can] compare notes on what partners are doing and what we’re doing. We’ve changed policies to be more consistent with some of our other partners. (Henry Street Settlement Hub staff)
The opportunity in general for citywide organizations to connect and build with each other and problem solve together and refer to each other is like just -- it’s beautiful. (The Door Hub staff)
Hubs Support Community Well-Being with Services and Safety
Representatives of the Hubs felt that the model was successful in supporting neighborhoods that have experienced disproportionate rates of involvement in the criminal-legal system by investing in youth and family services, distributing resources, and supporting community well-being. Specifically, the Hubs positively supported their communities with resources such as food distribution events, street outreach and engagement about Hub activities and opportunities in their neighborhoods, and expanded availability of services for youth. The benefits of the Hubs’ presence in the community went far beyond their participants to reach other youth and adults nearby and helped foster a sense of community and identity.
Our community, at least the Hispanic, Latinx community, there's a lot of stigma on mental health and just behavioral health and just well-being in general. I feel that we've kind of hit the nail on the head with our young people with hopes that as they grow older, they'll start to change the mindset that our community has on behavioral health. (NewYork Presbyterian Hub staff)
Hubs were also helpful in improving perceptions of safety and community well-being. Staff attribute this success to the creation of safe spaces for participants, the use of violence interruption strategies, and the presence of Hub staff engaging with young people on the street about Hub activities and opportunities. The Hubs also organized community events, such as sports leagues, fall festivals, and Halloween parties. In doing so, the YOH model helped participants and non-participants alike feel safer in their neighborhoods and strengthened their sense of community.
I think the impact is probably huge... They do violence interruption… [they] make the neighborhood “safer”. They’re providing educational opportunities for the neighborhood. They provide food for the neighborhood. I think they’re having a massive impact on Harlem. (Living Redemption Hub partner)
Flexible Funding is Key
Hubs staff credit their success to the availability of flexible funding, which allowed lead organizations to respond to participant needs and demands by tailoring their partnership and payment approach. This funding flexibility can manifest itself in a variety of ways, but some flexible features that CJII used, and that can be particularly helpful to grantees, include:
Payment advances and a variety of invoice schedule options to maximize cash flow
Ability to move a certain proportion of funds between budget lines without needing approval from funders
Willingness to pay grantees through cost reimbursement, deliverable/milestone payments, or a mix
Willingness to fund a variety of different grantee partnership approaches
These and other flexible funding methods helped many of the Hub grantees. For example, through partnerships, The Door was able to fill service gaps and provide its participants with additional arts programing, substance use services, and fund a benefits specialist. At Henry Street Settlement, the flexibility of funding supported a wide network of settlement houses so that youth could access services beyond the central Hub location.
Funds were also used to directly invest in communities and provided Hubs with dedicated funding for capital improvements. Many of the lead organizations completed upgrades and renovations to existing facilities that improved their:
aesthetics, creating inviting, bright spaces that youth would want to access and spend time in, or
functionality, improving air conditioning or creating spaces so that partners could be co-located at the central Hub.
These improvements supported collaboration between Hubs and their partners, created safe spaces for youth in their neighborhoods, and directly invested in some of Manhattan’s historically marginalized communities.
I think the number one goal would be to create that physical space for the youth of the community to be able to feel like they’re home, a space where they can be their truest and bravest selves, and they can be engaged creatively in different activities, so to foster that sense of community with the youth of the Washington Heights area. (NewYork-Presbyterian Hub partner)
About the Program and Evaluation
Since their inception, Youth Opportunity Hubs have helped youth meet basic needs, provided services across a variety of areas that are important to youth, supported young people’s positive development and provided them with supportive relationships, and given them a greater sense of belonging and hope in their lives and communities—and as a result, Hubs have potentially protected against youth involvement in the criminal legal system. Work on the outcome evaluation and cost study is underway, and those findings will be published in 2023. The mid-evaluation report, including process evaluation findings, is available here.
About the Criminal Justice Investment Initiative
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Criminal Justice Investment Initiative (CJII) focuses on three investment areas—crime prevention, reentry and diversion, and supports for survivors of crime. The Youth Opportunity Hubs are part of the CJII’s crime prevention-focused investments in Youth, Families, and Communities.
The CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance manages and provides technical assistance to CJII contractors, and conducts oversight and performance measurement throughout the lifetime of the initiative.