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On May 22-25, the Aspen Forum for Community Solutions (AFCS) gathered its Opportunity Youth Incentive Fund (OYIF) grantees and partners in Boston, Massachusetts to share the latest place-based strategies in reconnecting opportunity youth to education and employment through collective impact. Attendees included leaders from backbone organizations and their collaborative partners representing school systems, institutions of higher education, community-based organizations, foundations, the private sector, and youth leaders. We also partnered with the Collective Impact Forum, an initiative of FSG and the Aspen Forum for Community Solutions, to create a day that bridged the OYIF Convening and the 2017 Collective Impact Convening. The convening brought together over 300 people from across the country and provided participants with the space to learn from leaders in the opportunity youth field who are committed to improving outcomes for opportunity youth. We heard the story of how Boston’s collective impact efforts, taken together, have advanced large numbers of opportunity youth through education and careers pathways. We also heard a national call to action from Patrick McCarthy, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, urging us to help close every youth prison in the United States. Additionally, leaders like Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh, Marshall Ganz, Patrick Gaspard, and Broderick Johnson led discussions about community organizing, and the role youth and adult grassroots and community leaders play in this movement. We also collectively lifted up strategies for remaining hopeful and moving our work forward in these uncertain times. We are excited to share videos from these sessions, as well as from the funder roundtable on youth organizing, hosted by AFCS and the Hyams Foundation on May 22nd that lifted up models of youth-led organizing and exemplars of authentic youth-adult partnerships in the work for social change. You can also read about this year’s convening via Storify, which incorporates attendee’s reactions and reflections. If you would like to learn more about the OYIF convenings please contact Monique Miles (Monique.Miles@aspeninst.org) or Yelena Nemoy (Yelena.Nemoy@aspeninst.org). OYIF Spring 2017 Convening VideosMonday, May 22nd Funder Roundtable: Radical Possibilities: The Power of Youth in the Fight for Social Justice Tuesday, May 23rd Opportunity Youth Movement: Reflections and Strategies for Leading a Social Justice Agenda The Boston Story: Multiple Waves of Collective Impact Social Enterprise as an Economic and Community-Based Organization Development Strategy Wednesday, May 24th |