How YouthBuild Philly Shares its Supportive Practices to Build Business Value and Better Jobs

YB Philly’s mission is to empower young adults (18- to 20-year-olds) to develop skills and connect to opportunities by fostering an environment of love, support, and respect for their whole person. Students earn a high school diploma, learn job skills, and connect to college and career opportunities.

This profile begins by recognizing how structural inequality impacts many young adults working in retail. It then outlines how the principles that shape YB Philly’s culture of respect and belonging – including restorative practices, positive youth development, and a trauma-informed approach – guide the practices its staff recommend to business partners. The profile then presents three key practices that YB Philly uses to engage retail business partners and promote retention and engagement of young adult workers:

• Identify “good-fit” business partnerships that set young people up for success.
• Strengthen front-line management through coaching and feedback.
• Provide customized training to help business partners institutionalize supportive culture and management.

The profile then offers two case studies to demonstrate how YB Philly applies these practices on the ground and the benefits of the work as reported by these retailers. These businesses’ approaches, and YB Philly’s engagement with them, offer lessons for other workforce providers seeking to improve jobs and career mobility for young people and for entry-level workers of all ages.

Historically, workforce development funding streams have incentivized providers to focus primarily on referrals to employment and related job placement metrics. Today, more and more organizations like YB Philly are also prioritizing strategies that promote economic stability and mobility for workers, including supportive management and clear pathways to advancement.

(This report is 23 pages long.)

The researchers identified the following findings and recommendations:

• Restorative Practices. YB Philly uses restorative practices8 to proactively build relationships, trust, and personal connections among students and staff. This helps foster a healthy community and prevent and resolve conflict.
• Positive Youth Development. YB Philly promotes positive youth development, “the process of providing support, relationships, resources, and opportunities needed [for young people] to become successful and competent adults.”
• Trauma-Informed Approach. , Black and Latinx children disproportionately experience adversities that can cause trauma. To address this, YB Philly staff employ a trauma-informed approach, which includes methods for working with young people who have been exposed to trauma.

Three Key Practices to Promote Retention and Engagement

Practice 1: Identify “good-fit” business partnerships that set young people up for success. Business practices that make employment opportunities a good fit for YB Philly students include the following:

• Treating YB Philly students as assets to the business.
• Providing schedules that accommodate students’ educational and career goals.
• Providing a clear career pathway for advancement within the company.
• Providing a support system to promote employee stability and retention.

Practice 2: Strengthen front-line management through coaching and feedback. The following are three of the areas in which YB Philly staff focus when providing feedback and coaching related to front-line management practices:

• Demonstrating empathy. YB Philly encourages front-line managers to have direct conversations with students to better understand their lives outside of work.
• One-way managers can integrate positive youth development into workplace settings is by providing timely and ongoing feedback to help employees improve their skills. This is particularly important for young people, who are often new to the workforce.
• Fostering respect and belonging. Recent research finds that, for young people, being treated fairly and with respect is one of the most important components of a quality job.

Practice 3: Provide customized training to help business partners institutionalize supportive culture and management.

• With select employer partners, YB Philly provides employer-customized trainings to build the capacity of front-line managers to support YB Philly students and other workers.

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2020
• Author(s): Weissbourd, J. & Newman, A.
• Funding Source: U.S. Department of Labor
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Wesley Peterson
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies