The PILOT Assessment: A Guide to Integrating Positive Youth Development into Workforce Training Settings

Positive Youth Development (PYD) is a capacity-building approach to program interventions that aims to promote soft skills, positive relationships, community involvement, family-school-work linkages, and academic engagement among youth to create a fully supportive and safe environment. The PILOT tool, developed by Child Trends, works on implementing those strategies concretely in the workforce for youth in primarily middle skill jobs. After working with five organizations to integrate the PILOT tool into their workplaces, Child Trends found that it not only improves the work outcomes of vulnerable youth populations and generates internal and external conversations about PYD, but that many places that practice these initiatives do so without formal recognition or prompting and thus go unfunded. Child Trends expects to further help program stakeholders, leaders, and funders in the next phase of their program when they look into how to systematize PYD policies.