Kentucky

This story shows how community leaders built an overarching leadership council to coordinate and improve youth services. Those leaders used Ready by 21® strategies to expand the council’s scope to include organizations and agencies covering the full range of youth supports, and to get them working toward the same goals.

This document captures the work Kentucky did around Forum's at-a-glance chart tool.

The Kentucky Youth Development Coordinating Council was created to allow all youth serving state programs to work together to use existing resources more efficiently and improve services and outcomes with focus on: coordination, accountability, quality, and opportunities.

Across the country, too few youth leave high school ready for success. Community statistics and conditions vary, but there is no community across the country that is doing well enough by its children and youth. There is a need to do more. More to the point, there is a need to do better – to make bolder commitments, to create broader ownership and partnerships, to ensure greater returns on public and private investments.

The Forum for Youth Investment convened a group of key stakeholders in Louisville, KY at the Neighborhood House in an effort to assist these community and state leaders with aligning their youth efforts into a big picture framework.

The Youth Advisory Council works with the Kentucky Child Now! Board of Directors and participates in the planning and coordination of youth events and leadership training. Council members also promote community service statewide, are advocates for youth concerns and work to get youth more involved in their communities.

A few years ago, several Louisville entities, including city departments like the Greater Louisville Metro Parks Department and community groups like the Louisville Urban League, started collaborating to develop a data warehouse of information about the quality of living in Louisville.

A few years ago, several Louisville entities, including city departments like the Greater Louisville Metro Parks Department and community groups like the Louisville Urban League, started collaborating to develop a data warehouse of information about the quality of living in Louisville. This warehouse was merged with individualized information about students in the Jefferson County school district and then linked with the tracking systems of several after-school programs (at the schools and other organizations) in an effort to obtain a comprehensive picture of the lives of the county’s youth.