YouthBuild
Grant Announced: November 30, 2010
Grant Amount: $1,580,000
Location: Port-au-Prince and Leogane
Key Partners: The MasterCard Foundation, Catholic Relief Services and Education Development Center, IDEJEN, Inter-American Development Bank, and USAID
Please click here to download the YouthBuild International Fact Sheet.
The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund awarded a grant to YouthBuild International to encourage long-term reconstruction in Haiti. The grant will address the challenges facing the one million youth entering the workforce over the next five years. The project supports the creation of education and skills development centers throughout Haiti where more than 5,300 Haitian youth will receive vocational training in construction and learn leadership skills for the future. Beginning with two centers which will serve approximately 1,320 at-risk youth in Leogane and Port-au-Prince, this program will enable Haiti's youth to participate in long-term reconstruction and development.
Each center will provide:
• Training in construction skills
• Leadership development, financial literacy, and basic education classes
• A stipend, equipment, uniforms, a daily meal, travel allowance, and a starter set of hand tools for participants that will allow trainees to become immediately employable upon graduation
YouthBuild participants on a contstruction site in Haiti.
The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund's investment expands the current YouthBuild International partnership with IDEJEN, a Haitian non-profit organization thatworks with at-risk young people.
Transforming Lives and Livelihoods
With support from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, YouthBuild and IDEJEN seek to achieve the following:
• Construction of the first two of 12 planned centers.
• Provide a two-to-one match of trainees' savings contributions.
• Support leadership training for the Build Back Better Youth Corps.
• Provide six months of follow-up support as trainees seek viable employment opportunities or pursue self-employment.
About YouthBuild International
The mission of YouthBuild International (YBI) is to unleash the intelligence and positive energy of socially-excluded youth in transforming their lives and rebuilding their communities. YouthBuild International is building a global network of programs dedicated to reaching, inspiring, preparing and connecting out of school, unemployed young people to viable employment opportunities. In YouthBuild programs, young people, ages 16-28, acquire basic education, job readiness, technical training, and leadership skills while building permanent community assets such as housing, community centers, schools, playgrounds and ‘green' infrastructure. YouthBuild adaptation and replication activities are now unfolding in 16 countries.
In the U.S., YouthBuild supports a network of 272 independent programs in 44 states engaging 10,000 young people each year. Since 1994, more than 84,000 YouthBuild students have produced over 18,000 units of low-income housing. YouthBuild has received over $755 million in federal support and has leveraged an additional $1.2 billion in local support for program operations. President Obama recently increased YB funding by $50m, identifying it as the single national youth development program likely to show immediate impact on the rolls of unemployed young adults. YouthBuild runs the largest, national community service program in the US which targets, low income, unemployed, youth, 40% of who are adjudicated and re-entering communities from locked facilities. Since, 1994 YB students and graduates have logged millions of service hours in a full range of service projects in urban, rural and tribal settings. For more information, visit www.youthbuildinternational.org.
