East Oakland Youth Development Center

The East Oakland Youth Development Center (EOYDC) is dedicated to developing the social and leadership capacities of young people between five and 24 years of age, so they can be more successful in educational settings, jobs, and community service. Each week, EOYDC offers a wide variety of academic, athletic, and arts and culture programming, after school and during the summer, to 300 students attending East Oakland public schools. The organization often has long relationships, averaging seven years, with the youth it serves. This grant will support EOYDC’s organizational adaptation planning and implementation, and advance the Performing Arts Program’s Youth strategy.

Founded in 1978, the East Oakland Youth Development Center’s mission is to develop the social and leadership capacities of youth and young adults (ages 5-24), so they can achieve excellence in education, career, and service to their communities. The center’s vision is a community of empowered youth and young adults who have the character, skills, and networks to enable them to be positive contributors to society. This is achieved by offering a range of developmentally appropriate after-school and summer programming to individuals who live and/or go to public schools in East Oakland. This includes a comprehensive and culturally responsive curriculum for youth job training: the Job Training for Success (JTS) program. The center plans to further evolve, evaluate the JTS curriculum, and create a universal job training program for opportunity youth.

As part of the PropelNext partnership with the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, we are recommending grants to seven organizations in the Bay Area working with high-risk youth: Alternatives in Action, Beyond Emancipation, Community Youth Center of San Francisco, East Oakland Youth Development Center, Huckleberry Youth Programs, Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, and Social Advocates for Youth. We selected these organizations from a pool of forty-eight candidates, after a thorough due diligence process involving external reviewers. Of the seven recommended organizations, three are based in San Francisco, three in Oakland, and one in Sonoma County. These organizations help youth ages nine to twenty-four who are at risk of dropping out of school, involved in the juvenile justice system, runaway, homeless, foster youth, or suffering from domestic violence. The organizations help in a variety of ways, providing mentors, after-school programming, job training, tutoring, shelter, community service projects, and leadership opportunities. These seven organizations will participate in the PropelNext program over the next three years. Another eight organizations will also be participating in the PropelNext cohort, including two others in the Bay Area, funded by the Packard and Sobrato foundations, and six organizations in Southern California, funded by the Weingart Foundation. In addition to the grant funds, the PropelNext program will provide training, individual coaching, technical assistance, and peer learning sessions to help the organizations develop their theories of change and implement performance measurement systems. We hope this initiative will significantly strengthen these youth-serving organizations, build a more enduring performance-based culture in the nonprofit sector, and ultimately lead to better outcomes for Bay Area youth.