Letter from the Senior Portfolio Directors
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.
In 2024-25, 277 young people who were previously experiencing disconnection from school and work, or who were at the greatest risk of it, graduated from the programs of our grantee partner organizations, meaning that they had been successfully reconnected to education and employment. And our grantee partners maintained impressive long-term outcomes for young people this year, with 86% of young people who had graduated in the previous year maintaining education and employment at the 12-month mark following their program graduation.
With CTOP’s support, two of our grantee partners with the most developed organizational capacities, Domus Kids and Our Piece of the Pie, engaged Child Trends to conduct implementation and outcomes evaluations of their programs. The recently completed outcomes evaluation for Domus Kids found that the delivery of face-to-face services in the Domus school engagement program is positively associated at the 95% confidence level with outcome attainment, even after controlling for differences in students’ backgrounds and the barriers they had encountered – the strongest confirmation yet of the positive impact that CTOP’s grantee partners are making in the lives of young people.
Meanwhile, CTOP continues to innovate through its research agenda. With funding and technical assistance from CTOP, the Boston Consulting Group completed a gun violence problem analysis for the City of New Haven, analyzing data from their police department to reveal key trends, including a considerable increase in the percentage of young people involved in gun violence. The research project also included a first-of-its-kind maturity assessment for New Haven’s community violence interruption response system, benchmarking relative to effective practices across the country to inform where investments could improve effectiveness. The engagement also yielded an ecosystem map that captures New Haven’s existing community violence intervention resources, and deliverables that make the economic case for how financial contributions to New Haven’s Office of Violence Prevention (OVP) can reduce gun violence and improve well-being. Now published on the city’s OVP website, New Haven leaders can use the recommendations for their strategic planning. CTOP is now facilitating parallel bodies of work in Hartford and Bridgeport, with the same goal of leveraging data to inform strategic planning that can drive down the community violence that impacts so many of CTOP’s target population of young people.
We also continue to expand our portfolio of grantee partners. We are thrilled to be adding an eighth CTOP grantee partner, Manufacturing and Technical Community Hub (MATCH), a nonprofit launched in 2022 in New Haven that aims to create pathways to careers in the manufacturing industry for individuals with barriers to gainful employment. And as Dalio Education launches a new portfolio of work that makes co-investments alongside employers to build job training programs within their companies for CTOP’s target population of young people, our team is working closely as consultants to bring CTOP’s approach to bear in shaping the design and implementation of effective programming.
We are excited by this past year of work but even more so by the opportunities ahead. We invite you to stay updated on our work in the upcoming year through our website ctopportunityproject.org and by following us at @ctopportunity on X, formerly Twitter.
Adhlere Coffy & Amanda Olberg
Senior Portfolio Directors