Events & Convenings - Aspen Forum For Community Solutions

The convenings of the Opportunity Youth Forum are a twice yearly highlight for members of our network.

In collaboration with key implementation partner Jobs for the Future, the Opportunity Youth Forum designed and launched a national learning community of grantee partners over 10 years ago, which continue to this day. This learning community engages Opportunity Youth Forum site leads, youth leaders, funders, thought partners, and national leaders across many sectors in two convenings per year: a spring convening, typically hosted by a member community in order to promote learning in local context and lift up promising local practices in reconnecting opportunity youth, and a fall convening, which typically takes place on the Aspen Institute campus in Aspen, Colorado and focuses on national innovations and movement-building efforts.

“We look forward to bringing together leaders from backbone organizations and their collaborative partners, including youth leaders and those representing school systems, institutions of higher education, community-based organizations, foundations, the private sector and government.”

Melody Barnes, Chair, Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions

At Our ConveningS: national Leaders from Across the Field

The Opportunity Youth Forum Bi-Annual Convenings feature dynamic national, state and local leaders, practitioners, and organizers who inspire, influence, and inform our national learning agenda and collective arc to catalyze field-building, policy-change, and spark systems-change for communities & opportunity youth.

OYF CROSS-SITE Gathering Spring 2026 i montgomery, AL

This gathering is part of our program’s 2026 learning arc — a year of healing-centered unconvenings. We begin at the Legacy Sites with collective witnessing and reflection on the histories of colonization and slavery and their ongoing impact. Later in the year, we will continue this arc in Hawai‘i, where we will explore healing, interconnection, and systems rooted in place and culture. Importantly, we will gather Opportunity Youth Forum partners, funders in the Belonging, Meaning, Wellbeing and Purpose Community of Practice, and young leaders, in a shared intergenerational experience rooted in collective healing and transformation.