The Unprecedented Power of the Internet to Connect Youth to Opportunity

Abstract

Disconnected youth are under-networked, offering them few of the professional and educational opportunities available to their more privileged peers. There are currently many organizations and services that strive to connect youth to these types of opportunities, but they lack coordination, consistency and scale. The Internet is well positioned to be a revolutionary force in connecting these young people to opportunities they would otherwise not receive, and do so with unprecedented reach and depth. Camellia Network, working specifically with youth aging out of the foster system, is an online platform dedicated to connecting former foster youth with each other, with supporters, and with opportunities. While my work focuses specifically on this population of former foster youth, it is reasonable to extrapolate my findings and analysis to other disconnected youth populations. My Strategic Project was to create an “Opportunity Partnership” department for the organization that would develop and support a system of connecting former foster youth to professional and educational opportunities through the Internet. A new arm of the organization, the project was poised to test my theory that educational and professional opportunities can be made accessible and will be seized with the aid of the Internet. My Strategic Project is a potential proof point for the education sector, acting as an experiment for what can happen when we use the Internet to provide access to opportunity –jobs, trainings, professional development, perks- to disconnected youth. We, as educators, are always looking for the method, platform or program that will achieve transformation at scale. The Internet is an obvious choice for large-scale change. However, my project’s outcomes imply that it takes more than simply making something more accessible in order to affect real transformation. It suggests that achieving this kind of scale is not about making something that works well small, bigger. Instead, scale is about fitting the small, quality pieces together so something new can happen, across a wider range. Scale is about the network. The Internet can help us do that, if we use it correctly: to create a new and empowered community of opportunity.