In the last fiscal year alone, more than 60,000 young people participated in youth development or recreation programs provided by community-based organizations through City sponsored grants administered by the Office of Youth Development or in City-run programs through its Youth, Parks and Community Enrichment Department, police and fire departments and the Sacramento Public Library.
More than 200 of those young people, with an average age of 15, earned a $500 stipend for completing 40 hours of work-based learning programming including, work-readiness training, job coaching, and service projects through the #SacYouthWorks program.
More than 3,000 young people spent their weekend evenings at one of the pop-up events staged by various non-profit entities with City funding. More than 3,000 youth read five books or more in the library’s Summer Reading Challenge.
Hundreds of young people received training through police and fire summer camps, academies and cadet programs. Collectively, young people participated in 3.2 million hours of enrichment or recreation.
Staff from the primary City agencies serving youth on Tuesday provided an overview to City Council describing the scale and reach of youth programming in fiscal year 2021-22, and how it has grown since the Council adoption of Sacramento’s Youth Development Plan in 2018 and hiring Lindee Lane as the City’s first youth development policy manager.
Lane was recently granted resources to build the Office of Youth Development and charged with implementing the City’s first continuous quality-improvement system for youth investments.
OYD is distinct from Youth, Parks and Community Enrichment in that OYD manages City-funded youth development program grants and operates at the citywide systems level to advance the Youth Plan. YPCE manages City-run youth recreation-based programs, and operates at the department level.
“The City’s youth development team and grantee partners have been on the front lines doing amazing work, providing a variety of fundamental and innovative youth programs,” Lane said. “These programs addressed emergent needs of youth in response to the global pandemic and resulted in several highly successful responsively designed program investments such as #SacYouthWorks.”
The City is spending $38.2 million on programs directly serving youth in the fiscal year that ends June 30, the highest amount ever. About 85 percent of that spending came from the general fund, mostly from Measure U. The rest came from the City’s federal COVID-19 relief funding.