2024 Annual Report
Letter from the Senior Portfolio Directors
As CTOP approaches the half-way mark in implementing its ten-year social investment strategy, we are taking the opportunity to step back and take stock of our progress to date relative to our three major goals.
Letter from the Community Advisory Group
In this letter, Vanessa Liles of PT Partners, Diego Lopez of COMPASS Youth Collaborative, William Johnson of William Casper Graustein Memorial Fund, and Diondra Robertson of Our Piece of the Pie reflect on their service on the Community Advisory Group to advise on the publication of Community Science's qualitative research, Connecticut's Unspoken Crisis: Elevating the Voice of Young People, in hopes that this model of community engagement in research will be replicated by others.
Performance Report
85% of the young people graduating from our grantee partners’ core programming maintained educational engagement or employment for at least 12 months. All of CTOP’s organizational development work with our grantee partners is in pursuit of our north star, which is to help young people change their lives by successfully reconnecting to education and gainful employment on a pathway to self-sufficiency.
Catalyst CT
Catalyst CT works to ensure the safe and healthy development of youth, young adults, and families by actively engaging organizations, public officials, and community leaders around issues that matter most to the community.
Compass Youth Collaborative
COMPASS Youth Collaborative interrupts violence in the City of Hartford by building transformative relationships with youth at the center of the violence. COMPASS Peacebuilders provide youth the tools to create sustained behavior change and transition successfully to adulthood.
CT Violence Intervention & Prevention
Connecticut Violence Intervention and Prevention (CTVIP) is a group of trusted, trained community members that disrupt, prevent, and stop the spread of violence which results in trauma through crisis intervention and proactive relationships with the highest-risk youths and the institutions that impact their lives in the Greater New Haven area.
Domus Kids
Domus builds loving relationships with young people facing adversity, empowering them to pursue their path to self-sufficiency.
Forge City Works
Forge City Works serves people in the Hartford community who have barriers to employment by providing job training in the food and hospitality industry to help them achieve sustainable careers.
Our Piece of the Pie
Our Piece of the Pie®, Inc. (OPP®) empowers youth with the key competencies needed to overcome barriers and succeed in education and employment.
Roca
Roca’s mission is to be a relentless force in disrupting incarceration, poverty, and racism by engaging the young adults, police, and systems at the center of urban violence in relationships to address trauma, find hope, and drive change.
Pathways to Careers
Through the new Pathways to Careers (P2C) strategy, CTOP facilitates the development of partnerships between two organizations where young people begin their journey with one organization and complete it with another, with the goal that young people experience a seamless delivery of a continuum of programming as each organization delivers the services in which it specializes while coordinating their work together as if they were one. CTOP’s first P2C partners this year were COMPASS Youth Collaborative and Forge City Works, who first engaged in a series of exploratory conversations and site visits to one another’s organizations to ensure there was authentic mutual interest in the partnership, while learning more about each other’s programs. This spring, the two organizations participated in a workshop series facilitated by CTOP to articulate the following core components of their P2C design:
- How will we know young people are ready to be referred into the pathway?
- How will our two organizations work together as one?
- How will we know if we are working together well?
This summer, COMPASS and Forge City Works began operationalizing their P2C design by launching their referral process and case conferencing, with the first COMPASS young people to be enrolled at Forge City Works as part of their P2C partnership in the coming year.
CTOP's Learning Agenda
As part of CTOP’s approach to capacity building, we create and facilitate opportunities for organizational learning across organizations that leverage the expertise that exists within the grantee cohort in furtherance of positive outcomes for severely off-track and disconnected young people. This past year, we hosted our annual grantee partner convening and piloted the Professional Development and Learning Community (PDLC).
Read Connecticut’s Unspoken Crisis Report Series
The Connecticut Opportunity Project and Dalio Education commissioned three research reports to better understand the causes and consequences of disconnection and how to best re-engage young people. The first report analyzed statewide data and found that 1 in 5 young people in Connecticut are at-risk of becoming or are completely disconnected from work and education. The second report looked across the country to identify programs effectively re-engaging this population and understand what practices were working. The third and final report expanded our understanding of the lived experience of young people experiencing disconnection in Connecticut through interviews. Read the full report series to learn more about the problem and how to address it.
Inspiring Change: CTOP's Catalytic Impact
Over the past year, Dalio Education and CTOP have spearheaded a public awareness campaign in response to Connecticut’s Unspoken Crisis, in collaboration with our grantee partners and other stakeholders across the state. Our efforts to raise awareness ran parallel to a growing coalition committed to re-engaging Connecticut’s young people, that inspired real progress toward creating an ecosystem where every young person can thrive.
The year ahead
In the year ahead, the Connecticut Opportunity Project will continue advancing its core capacity-building work with grantee partners while expanding key strategic initiatives:
Learning Agenda
In addition to hosting another convening in 2025 and continuing the Professional Development and Learning Community launched this past year, CTOP will train and certify its staff in cognitive-behavioral skills so that CTOP can launch its own training and coaching program for grantee partners. This will support their teams in cultivating and deploying these skills with young people in furtherance of their progression toward outcomes.
Pathways to Careers
In addition to supporting COMPASS and Forge City Works in launching their first cohort of youth in January 2025, CTOP will facilitate the development of a formal partnership between Roca Hartford and Forge City Works via CTOP’s design workshop series so that in 2025 a second pathway can be activated in Hartford that will enable youth who are initially severely disconnected to become employed on a career path that leads to upward mobility.
Data Refresh
To support the state in delivering on its mandate in HB5437 to annually report on disconnected youth to the legislature using specified data, Dalio Education and the Connecticut Opportunity Project have engaged Boston Consulting Group to support P20WIN, the state’s longitudinal data system, in refreshing for publication in 2025 key data from the report Connecticut’s Unspoken Crisis: Getting Young People Back on Track, while also refining the playbook that will enable the P20WIN team to re-create the analysis in future years.
