The purpose of the Opportunity Youth Research Project was to collect data to better understand where Opportunity Youth (OY) are located. OY are typically defined as young adults 16-24 years old who are neither working nor enrolled in school or a vocational training program. Using traditional data sources to understand OY is difficult because they are inherently disconnected from systems that collect this data, such as schools.
The project goals were:
- Improve the collective knowledge base of opportunity youth in Detroit to better inform planning and programmatic decision making.
- Test a data collaborative structure using data from local organizations to find out if it is possible to use it on a larger scale and identify potential challenges to using it.
Throughout the project, we created a number of resources for organizations to use immediately in their work:
- This resource map can be used to understand who is providing services to OY and what services are being provided.
- To learn more about the process we used to make the resource map, check out this blog post.
- The D3Anonymizer helps organizations anonymize the data while maintaining a unique ID for each individual.
- This final report details the methodology and findings from our analysis.
- This blog post summarizes the lessons learned from the research process.
Data Driven Detroit would like to extend our gratitude to Microsoft, who provided funding to support this research.