In July, the L.A. Compact, convened by UNITE-LA, together with the L.A. Opportunity Youth Collaborative, released a case study detailing its efforts to connect foster youth to public workforce programs in L.A. County using a shared referral process across agencies. This brief describes the development and implementation of a process to coordinate and streamline foster youth referrals to workforce programs and includes specific recommendations for process improvement based on feedback from both network partners and foster youth themselves.

Recommendations to improve foster youth access to public workforce programs include:

1. Joint agreement among DCFS and L.A. County workforce systems on a definition of "foster youth" to be used for both eligibility and prioritization for workforce services.
2. Developing a department-wide goal, implementation, and accountability plan within L.A. County DCFS to ensure that 100 percent of youth have vital documents in the custody of their caregiver by age 14.
3. Developing application programming interfaces (APIs) across multiple workforce data systems to reduce duplication of tracking and reporting mechanisms.

We also invite you to check out the executive summary.