Youth employment groups take aim at mental health crisis

How workforce development programs are going beyond the workplace to address troubling wellness trends.

Mary Ann Haley, executive director of the National Youth Employment Coalition (left), and Missy Toms, vice president of development and communications for Cleveland-based Youth Opportunities Unlimited (right), both highlight the need to materially address the growing mental health crisis among youth - particularly those in minority ethnic groups.

Youth employment initiatives have traditionally been viewed through social and economic lenses.

Intervening early to enable at-risk young people to transition into meaningful, sustainable work helps fuel the economy by filling job openings, making companies more profitable, bolstering the tax base and even driving consumer spending. It also holds the promise of reducing poverty and reliance on assistance programs.

There’s a growing interest in the potential health payoff as well.

Young people who learn the skills to earn a livable wage are less likely to fall victim to the poor health outcomes that plague low-income adults, including higher rates of disease and mental illness.

“Employment is a well-established social determinant of health,” said Missy Toms, vice president of development and communications for Cleveland-based Youth Opportunities Unlimited (Y.O.U.). “It starts obviously with having the money for food, but also, if you have a job, you are more likely to be in a routine and doing a lot of the things that support wellness like sleeping better and eating better and you may be less anxious about paying bills or where your next meal is going to come from.”

Additionally, employment provides a bridge to medical insurance and quality health care, housing and transportation affordability as well as a sense of purpose, according to Mary Ann Haley, executive director of the National Youth Employment Coalition, a Washington D.C. nonprofit.

Underserved teens and young adults in career development programs also get the added benefit of cultivating professional networks and social capital – the kind of connections that can led to family-sustaining wages, these experts said.

“And, I hate to say it but, it often protects them against violence, particularly gun violence,” Toms added. “The youth who go through our summer jobs program are more likely to attend school, have higher graduation rates than their peers and are less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system, especially in violent crime. They are staying off the streets and out of dangerous situations.”

Of course, the link between employment and health is something of a chicken-and-egg scenario. Gainful employment may contribute to good health, but it also relies on it. Chronically ill individuals at any age tend to be less productive. Many are unable to work, and there is no more pressing health issue when it comes to youth than mental illness.

“Between 2009 to 2019, before COVID-19, the share of high school students who reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%,” Haley said, citing a 2021 U.S. Surgeon General study. “Over that decade, the share of high school students seriously considering attempting suicide increased by 36% and the share creating a suicide plan increased by 44%. The report also found that suicide rates for young people ages 10 to 24 increased by 57% in about the same time period.”

Haley said the pandemic “exacerbated” these troubling trends as teens struggled with isolation, were displaced from school and extracurricular activities and had limited access to medical and social services. The result has been especially deleterious to black youths, she explained, who the Surgeon General’s report noted are “twice as likely to die by suicide that white children.”

“The focus of our organization is those disconnected youth who are out of work and out of school, which are predominantly black and brown youth,” Haley said. “So, the report was truly just heartbreaking and shocking.”

It was also a wakeup call, inspiring Haley and her colleagues to explore how youth employment programs across the country are addressing the crisis. The findings suggest there’s work to be done.

According to NYEC’s survey of 550 organizations in 49 states:

• 64% of the responding organizations did not have a process for screening and/or monitoring youth for mental health needs. Meanwhile, 60% of these respondents estimated that more than half of their youth participants need mental health support.

• 89% of respondents indicated they did not have sufficient resources to deliver quality mental health training to staff.

• Of the organizations that have screening or referral resources, 72% do not track if youth actually receive needed mental services.

Haley believes mental health screening is one area where youth employment agencies could help stem the mental illness tide.

“So many of our programs are working with those young people that don’t necessarily have another caring adult in their lives. Their connection to an employment program might be the one caring adult that is in their lives; Think of what a difference in these cases it can make if those adults can do a non-clinical assessment and pick up on when someone is clinically depressed versus just sad,” she said.

Beyond non-clinical screening, Haley said NYEC is working to help youth employment leaders understand how they might be able to hire in-house mental health providers for professional assessments and services – using Medicaid reimbursement, where allowable – and/or capitalize on peer mentoring and peer counseling opportunities.

“But it’s also about social justice and trying to identify those elements that are causing some of the mental health issues that we might be seeing,” she said. “It’s about race and gender and all kinds of things that are related to a young person’s life and what’s happening to them in their communities.”

Toms said that Y.O.U. assigns a case manager, or “coach,” to each youth in its summer jobs program and assists in eliminating the barriers – social, emotional or otherwise – that might impede their success in the program and beyond.

“We also started a survey of our youth to get their feedback not only on our programming but how our partner employers can create healthier workplaces for young adults of color, and that is all around mental health so we can use that information to better train employers,” Toms said.

Along with better mental health provisions, she hopes such a process will impart the importance of “being your own advocate” to the young workers.