Connecting Underrepresented Youths with Employment Opportunities
Organization: University of Kansas
Primary Investigator: Alexandra Kondyli
Research Track: Resource and Service Equity
Out-of-school-time (OST) opportunities support youth in developing workforce readiness and cultivating occupational identities; however, underrepresented youth face inequitable access to these opportunities. Community stakeholders and University of Kansas researchers will develop and implement an integrated mobile application and tools that help the youth discover, access, and participate in OST opportunities, create shared-mobility identities, and cultivate environmental-friendly travel behaviors.
NSF Abstract
Youth participation in out-of-school-time (OST) opportunities has been shown to improve access to internships, develop workforce readiness, and cultivate occupational identities. However, in sprawling low-density metro areas like Kansas City, a substantial physical disconnect and spatial mismatch between residential areas, jobs, and OST opportunities combines with a lack of reliable transportation services to significantly impact youth from low-income homes and schools, who are disproportionately Black and Latinx. This project?s goal is to increase OST-activity participation and address marginalized-youth employment disparities by providing tools to discover, access, and participate in OST opportunities.
This project develops, pilots, and evaluates an Optimized Unified Transportation (OUT) framework designed to increase awareness of OST opportunities; decrease access disparity through innovative and efficient shared-mobility services, policies, and governance; and incentivize energy-efficient travel choices. Key knowledge advances include: (i) innovative analysis of student mobility needs and preferences together with incentives that encourage participation and energy-efficient travel behaviors, (ii) first-of-their-kind travel-demand models that consider transportation equity and social-determinant outcomes, (iii) development and testing of a community-driven framework that includes shared mobility, business models, policies, and governance, and (iv) development and real-world pilot testing of a mobile-application-based technology that incorporates the framework. The project?s Collaborative Engagement Stakeholder Group (CESG), comprising community stakeholders, community members, researchers, and civic organizations from the Kansas City metro area, engaged students (ages 13-18), parents, mobility providers, school and city officials, and employers to identify acceptable shared-mobility solutions, policies, and governance. This project will develop novel models to understand the impacts of these solutions and incentive strategies on students? travel choices. The resulting solutions and models will be used to develop metrics that specifically measure accessibility and equity. These metrics will be integrated into the OUT framework, which will then be optimized through simulation to achieve societal benefits and increase system efficiency. Optimized approaches will then be piloted in the mobile application and evaluated. Our innovative modeling approaches, governance, and policies will be transferable and scalable for use with other communities and population groups (e.g., adult workers). The project will train youth, undergraduate students, and graduate students, and the pilot will involve underrepresented youth.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.