Urban Alliance and USPTO Partner to Provide Youth With Meaningful Work Experience

Guest blog post by Eshauna Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Urban Alliance

Earlier this year, the United States Patent and Trademark Office contracted with Urban Alliance to provide local under-resourced youth paid meaningful work experiences. This unprecedented collaboration came about in the fall of 2014, when United States Vice President Joe Biden, speaking at the United States Chamber of Commerce, cited the importance of closing the skills gap and highlighted Urban Alliance’s unique ability to build successful partnerships and develop meaningful and real work experiences for youth. Noting this organization as a scalable model with strong results, the Vice President issued a call to action, encouraging government and the corporate sector to find opportunities to work with Urban Alliance and other evidence-based groups in the youth employment space. The United States Patent and Trademark Office responded to this call, and currently hosts 20 Urban Alliance interns across various departments in their Alexandria headquarters.

In the United States, being unemployed creates the inability to live a life of self-sufficiency. Nationally, about 22% of all youth under the age of 18 – that’s about 16.1 million Americans - live in poverty. Across the county, about 14%, or 6.7 million youth ages 16-24 are not in school or working. In the nation’s capital, where Urban Alliance was founded in 1996, almost 30% of youth under the age of 18 currently live below the poverty level. When generations transition into adulthood without proper education and access to work, it creates a ripple effect.

Urban Alliance is working to change these daunting statistics through proactive intervention. The purpose of this organization is to work with under-resourced youth by their senior year in order to guide them towards a life of self-sufficiency.

The Urban Alliance program was created to deliver five comprehensive and complimentary employment-based interventions, which include: 

1. Six-week, soft skills training,
2. 10-month, paid, year-round corporate internship,
3. Two caring adults, a Program Coordinator and a Mentor, who provide workplace guidance and comprehensive services,
4. Post-high school planning and support, and
5. Continued, post-program alumni career services and wrap-around services to ensure long-term success and connectedness.

This combination of exposure to corporate environments, opportunities to exercise critical workplace skills, and support from caring adults creates a powerful intervention that has helped many young people create a strong foundation for future success and long-term economic self-sufficiency. Every year on average, 100% of Urban Alliance alumni graduate high school, 90% are accepted into a 2 or 4-year college, 80% enroll, and 80% persist on to a second year of college.

The Federal Government’s large workforce and diversity of career opportunities makes it uniquely positioned to build partnerships with groups like Urban Alliance. The Office of Personnel Management was the first Federal Government agency to partner with Urban Alliance, and has supported over 70 interns since the collaboration began. With the addition of the USPTO partnership, the Urban Alliance is beginning to make great progress toward enabling a diverse population of youth to be exposed to careers in the Federal Government and beyond.

Through the Urban Alliance internship experience, many youth are transformed and begin to build the tools that they need to create a brighter future for themselves. These results demonstrate the positive impact of a job and early workforce training. Federal Government partners are invaluable as they are able to provide young people with deep exposure to various sectors and a wide variety of skills. Bringing these two things together, as the OPM and USPTO partnerships demonstrate, can prove a powerful remedy for supporting youth and developing the next generation of talent for this country.