Letter from Our 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.
CTOP’s first strategic goal is to increase across its grantee partners the number of active program slots being delivered, which is a metric defined to mean that young people who are severely off-track from high school graduation or disconnected from education and the workforce are receiving the kinds and levels of support required to ultimately achieve long-term outcomes. Specifically, from a baseline of 0 in 2019, our target has been to increase the number of active slots to 1,080 by 2024 and to 2,500 by 2029. We are pleased to report that we have surpassed our target for 2024, with our grantee partners delivering 1,147 active slots this year, up from 925 in 2023. This increase represents another year of incredibly hard work on the part of CTOP’s grantee partners, with our team’s support, to build their organizational capacities and competencies to deliver transformative outcomes to the young people they serve.
CTOP’s theory behind the active slot metric is that it serves as our early indicator of the number of young people likely to achieve intended outcomes of reconnecting to school or employment, and ultimately achieving self-sufficiency, which is our definitive measure of the social value that grantee partners will produce, with CTOP’s support. This year delivered the strongest confirmation yet of this underlying theory, with the number of young people across our grantee partners maintaining education and employment at the 12-month mark following their program graduation rising to 178 in 2024 – a number that represents 85% of young people who had graduated from their programs in the previous year. With these results in hand, we can feel confident in the progress we are making relative to our second strategic goal – measurable improvements in young people’s lives and prospects through sustained participation in a pathway to gainful employment.
Over the last few years, we have seen an accelerated trajectory in our third strategic goal to advance ethnic and racial equity by working to address systemic racism and structural dynamics that intensify challenges for severely off-track and disconnected young people who identify as Black and/or Latino/a. We started with an intentional shift in our decision-making around new partnerships, prioritizing the selection of those organizations run by and/or predominantly staffed by people of color – reflecting the population we support. We also designed and launched a multi-pronged, multi-year research initiative that complemented quantitative analysis of disparities in Connecticut with a qualitative analysis to bring forth the human experiences of the young people impacted by those disparities – particularly those who are Black and Brown. For the qualitative analysis, we sought out a research firm with experiential knowledge as well as methodological rigor, leading us to partner with Community Science, a research firm based out of Maryland that attributes their effectiveness to their diversity, cultural competence, and value of lived experience.
The development and publication of Dalio Education’s research agenda over the last two years and accompanying public awareness campaign has provided a counternarrative to the often-negative representations of our target population of young people, generating a public conversation around their needs and opportunities for their futures. The catalytic impact of this research agenda, discussed further in this Annual Report, represents perhaps our team’s greatest progress to date in working to elevate and address the systemic inequities that exacerbate challenges for the young people to whom we are dedicated. At the same time, as CTOP continues to evolve in response to the growing conversation spurred by our research, we remain committed to actively seeking new opportunities to advance our strategic goal around ethnic and racial equity through engagements aligned with our mission to support young people experiencing or at risk of disconnection across the state.
Our team looks forward with great excitement to continuing to build upon and accelerate our progress in these areas in the years ahead. We invite you to stay updated on our efforts through our website ctopportunityproject.org and by following us at @ctopportunity on X (formerly Twitter).
Sincerely,
Adhlere Coffy & Amanda Olberg
Senior Portfolio Directors