Turning Points: How Young People in Four Career Pathways Programs Describe the Relationships that Shape Their Lives

As a follow up study to Relationships Come First: How Four Career Development and Workforce Readiness Programs Prepare Young People for Work and Life, the Center for Promise presents Turning Points: How Young People in Four Career Pathways Programs Describe the Relationships that Shape Their Lives.

Turning Points builds on the programmatic insights from Relationships Come First by asking young people enrolled in career pathways programs in four cities – Café Momentum in Dallas; Per Scholas in the Bronx, Urban Alliance in Washington, DC, and Year Up in the Bay Area – to  describe how the relationships in their lives shape their development.

Through young people’s stories and pictures, the report offers a closer look at webs of support, systems of relationships that help young people achieve success, and cores, or clusters of relationships, such as those in a career pathways program.

Three findings emerged from this research:

Finding 1. Young people’s webs of support show four distinct cores of relationships: family, community, institution, and the career pathways program. Each provides important social support. The Career Pathways Core is unique among them because it offers four different types of support.

Finding 2 . A young person’s web of support is a dynamic system. Young people access different cores at different times according to the individual’s changing needs and the degree to which a given core is responsive to those needs.

Finding 3. The Career Pathways Core appears to be responsive and integrated into the web of support, acting as a scaffold for young people’s positive development and for a wide range of supportive relationships that enables success in work and life.

This research study is part of the Youth Opportunity Fund initiative. The Youth Opportunity Fund, led by the Citi Foundation and America’s Promise Alliance, provides grants to nonprofits working in innovative ways to place low-income young adults on a path toward college and career success in 10 cities across the United States.