Motton Selected to Speak at National Workforce Convention
Apr 1, 2022
Angelica Motton, Workforce and Special Program Coordinator for the Washington County Economic Alliance, has been invited to attend The Aspen Institute Opportunity Youth Forum in Bay Area, CA, from May 23-25, 2022.
The Opportunity Youth Forum is comprised of a network of over three dozen urban, rural, and tribal communities seeking to scale multiple reconnection pathways that achieve better outcomes in education and employment for opportunity youth. Together, over half a million opportunity youth in the U.S. live in the areas in and around Opportunity Youth Forum communities. The communities reach from Seattle to Atlanta, from Hopi to Greenville and from Southern Maine to San Francisco. In total, this network works on creating systems-wide and community level changes. Since the network launched, thanks to the efforts of many organizations, leaders and young people, the number of opportunity youth has dropped by over 1 million nationally.
“I am honored to have been selected to attend The Aspen Institute’s Opportunity Youth Forum,” said Motton. “I am appreciative of this opportunity from Rural LISC to tell our story, and I look forward to learning new ideas from my fellow peers that will help support new work that inspires our community.”
Opportunity youth are among the hardest-to-reach youth in our communities, as there is no system or single point of contact through which opportunity youth are engaged, and through which progress and outcomes are measured. Rather, opportunity youth, if connected at all, float among service providers, in and out of school, and between jobs. The Washington County Economic Alliance developed it’s Opportunity Youth Training Program as part of a Building Sustainable Communities Strategy. Specifically, this program is being used to support the Washington County Economic Alliance’s capacity to provide job creation and employment training to youth ages 16-24 who have been disconnected from school or work for an extended period and face significant barriers to training and employment.
The Opportunity Youth Forum was launched in 2012 (as the “Opportunity Youth Incentive Fund”) to leverage momentum of the opportunity youth movement, including the call for community-based solutions, coming out of the White House Council on Community Solutions. The White House Council called for innovative, place-based, collaborative solutions to reconnect the 6.7 million opportunity youth – 16- to 24-year-olds who were out of work and school – in the United States at that time.
The Forum for Community Solutions launched the Opportunity Youth Forum because investing in these young people will have a ripple effect on future generations of low-income children and families.
To learn more about the Opportunity Youth Forum, please visit https://www.aspencommunitysolutions.org/opportunity-youth-forum/
To learn more about the WCEA’s Opportunity Youth Scholarships, please visit https://wceams.com/jobs/opportunity-youth-scholarship/
Contact:
Angelica Motton
amotton@wceams.com
662.378.3141