CareerSource sets Opportunity Youth Workforce Summit
CareerSource Hillsborough Pinellas, the newly merged workforce development agency for the Tampa Bay area, will convene the region’s first Opportunity Youth Workforce Summit.
The summit, scheduled for Oct. 1 at the Tampa Marriott Water Street, was created to address the challenges faced by “opportunity youth” disconnected from employment and education in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties.
Federal agencies define opportunity youth as people between 16 and 24 who are not working or in school. CareerSource Hillsborough Pinellas conducted research in 2023 and found 26,100 young people who meet this criteria. Beyond the consequences for them individually, young people who are disconnected from employment and education “also represent a loss of human capital, with high social and economic costs.”
“By 2030, all Baby Boomers will have reached retirement age, and [in] the US population, there are more people leaving the workforce than entering the workforce,” said Steve Meier, co-interim CEO of CareerSource Hillsborough Pinellas. “The labor force participation rate also took a hit after the pandemic (with) a loss of 5 million people in the labor force, so in order for the United States to fill these jobs that are open, we need to look at the folks that want a job but aren’t working for one reason or another, and the opportunity youth is just one of those demographics that’s important to really get into the workforce.”
Michelle Zieziula, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of CareerSource Hillsborough Pinellas, spearheaded the summit’s creation after attending a similar event in San Diego. The summit will bring together education, business and nonprofit leaders to develop strategies for reengaging young individuals who are neither in school nor employed. The goal is to to address youth disengagement and find collaborative, regional solutions.
“We’re just one piece of a much larger, impactful system that can make a difference,” Zieziula said. “So the thought process with the summit was to look at the data over time, looking at the existing disconnection rates and then coming back year after year and measuring whether or not we’re having an impact on reducing those numbers, but that requires everyone to join in. We cannot possibly be everything that our youth need. We need a community behind us.”
CareerSource Hillsborough Pinellas has identified five “youth success factors” that leadership plans to focus on as defining ways to enable young adults to enter and remain in the workforce. Screengrab: CareerSource document, “Youth and Opportunity in the Greater Tampa Bay Region.”
Gary Hartfield, CareerSource Hillsborough Pinellas board treasurer, will emcee the event. Keynote speakers include Nate Howard of Movement BE, Curtis Campogni, CEO of Speak4MC and NBA All-Star Jayson Williams. Zieziula also noted that young adults have been invited to moderate panels and present on stage, sharing their personal stories about how they became “disconnected” and leading the charge in finding solutions for the future.
This initiative comes after the merger of workforce development services for Hillsborough and Pinellas counties earlier this year. The summit represents CareerSource Hillsborough Pinellas’ first major effort to address community challenges with its combined resources.
SailFuture, a foster care agency and private school in St. Petersburg and CareerSource Hillsborough Pinellas’ youth services program provider in Pinellas County, has become a local case study for how to reach opportunity youth. However, SailFuture executive director Mike Long stressed the complexity of challenges facing this demographic, noting he’s seen teens and young adults “so overwhelmed with barriers” that they stay out of continuing education and the workforce.
“Everyone wants to be able to solve this problem, to eliminate those barriers so that our kids can self-actualize and become fulfilled, happy members of their communities, but what we see is that there’s no silver bullet and or magic wand,” Long said. “There are so many compounding challenges that create this overwhelming sense of unease and difficulty for kids that are what we would call disconnected, so what we have found at SailFuture is that we have to support as many of those different verticals and challenges as we can.”
SailFuture takes a holistic approach to teaching disadvantaged youth life skills, including providing classroom education, mental health services, one-on-one coaching, mentorship and more. Long will be sharing his insights at the Opportunity Youth Workforce Summit, demonstrating how progress can be made with opportunity youth by addressing multiple needs simultaneously.
Doug Tobin, Vice President of Marketing and Public Relations for CareerSource Hillsborough Pinellas, noted that CareerSource’s data shows 62% of the more than 27,000 opportunity youth in the greater Tampa Bay area have a high school diploma or GED.
“I didn’t realize it was going to be that high; So now we know the disconnection rate rises sharply as youth leave high school and struggle,” Tobin said. “As a father myself, I remember my children coming out of high school and if they didn’t have that mentorship or that partnership, I think they would have been lost, too. So it’s about providing those resources for children. How can we get a mentor for them if they don’t have parental support? Those are the things that we hope to do a report on coming out of this, to take it to the next step.”
The Opportunity Youth Workforce Summit will run from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tickets to the event cost $75 and those interested in attending can register online here.
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