Supporting San Francisco’s Disconnected Youth
In 2014, San Francisco residents voted to increase the Children’s Fund, a local property tax earmark for children and youth, and to extend it for 25 years. This proposition also renamed the Children’s Fund to the Children and Youth Fund and expanded its use to include services for Transitional Age Youth (TAY), young people age 18-24. The San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families (DCYF) was designated to administer funds for TAY services, and in 2016 started awarding a serious of pilot grants to support disconnected TAY. These grants employ two distinct strategies to meet TAY’s complex needs: 1) innovation grants that aim to address gaps or barriers in existing TAY services, and 2) collaborative model grants that focus on coordinated efforts to improve TAY outcomes. This report shares preliminary findings from Harder+Company’s evaluation of these grants.