2025 Annual Report

Over the past year, as CTOP’s work has continued to expand, we are now starting to see the years of hard work our partners have been investing in building their organizational capacity yield results for young people that are not only being sustained but also validated through external evaluation.

Adhlere Coffy

Amanda Olberg

Letter from the CBIA

There is no greater threat to Connecticut’s long-term economic prosperity than the state’s labor shortage. Over three-quarters of employers told CBIA’s 2025 business survey that it was difficult to find and retain workers, with 27% — a plurality — saying the lack of skilled job applicants was the greatest barrier to growth.

86% of the young people graduating from our grantee partners’ core programming maintained educational engagement or employment for at least 12 months. In CTOP’s organizational development work with our grantee partners, our north star is to help young people change their lives by successfully reconnecting to education and gainful employment on a pathway to self-sufficiency.

Catalyst CT's StreetSafe Bridgeport

With an emphasis on safety, StreetSafe professionals with lived experience guide young adults in Bridgeport to improve emotional regulation and prosocial skills to attain self-sufficiency through education, trades, and career development.

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, employment, and life.

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.

Learning Agenda

A continued strength of CTOP’s approach to capacity building is its practice of leveraging the expertise of our community network to support the development of new skills and competencies for grantee partners’ staff. Over the last year, CTOP hosted the annual Grantee Partner Convening and organized three other different cross-cohort workshop series.

Last year, CTOP launched Pathways to Careers (P2C) — a new strategic framework designed to help young people who are severely disconnected from education and employment reconnect not just to jobs, but to meaningful career paths that promise upward mobility for themselves and their families.

Workforce Partnerships

This year, Dalio Education and Nuvance Health, part of Northwell Health, partnered to launch the Academy for Career Readiness, a new initiative designed to prepare young people experiencing disconnection in Norwalk for meaningful careers in healthcare.

New Haven Gun Violence Problem Analysis

In furtherance of our research agenda, CTOP has been providing capacity building support to Connecticut municipalities to analyze gun violence data in support of strengthening their Offices of Violence Prevention (OVPs) and creating operational plans to reduce the gun violence that impacts CTOP’s target population in their cities.

DataLinkCT’s Update to Connecticut’s Unspoken Crisis

Last year, the Connecticut Legislature passed HB5437, which mandated the state to annually report on youth experiencing disconnection to the legislature.

A New Partnership with MATCH

Through CTOP, Dalio Education will invest in MATCH in New Haven to build out its workforce training program and create stronger career pathways in manufacturing for young people in CTOP’s target population.

The year ahead

Next year, the Connecticut Opportunity Project will continue our core capacity building work with grantees, as well as engage key workforce partners and municipalities to build programs that create more pathways to self-sufficiency for young people who are severely off-track and experiencing disconnection in our state.

CBT with Community Psychiatry PRIDE

Next year, CTOP will be partnering with clinicians at Community Psychiatry PRIDE team at Massachusetts General Hospital to train our team and grantee partners’ staff in the Thoughts, Emotions, and Behaviors (TEB) curriculum. This cognitive behavioral skill curriculum was developed for non-clinicians to teach young people the skills needed to better regulate their emotions, build resiliency, and interrupt negative thought and behavior cycles. By the end of the 10-month training and coaching series, each organization will have the internal capacity to deliver the TEB curriculum with fidelity. And in parallel to the training and coaching program, select members from each organization will become certified to coach and develop staff to deliver TEB continuously.

Gun Violence Problem Analyses

To expand on the New Haven Gun Violence Problem Analysis work, CTOP and Boston Consulting Group will provide technical assistance and capacity building support to Hartford and Bridgeport to support those municipal governments and police departments in analyzing their gun violence data and using it to build out the infrastructure of their respective Offices of Violence Prevention, reduce gun violence in their cities, and provide coordinated services for victims. The resulting strategic plans will be developed and published in 2026.