Rising Together - Office of Workforce Development

Rising Together: Creating New Pathways to Employment for Youth and Young Adults Experiencing Homelessness is a coordinated effort among Boston’s lead agencies on youth homelessness to improve job outcomes for young people in need of stable housing. Funded by generous grants from the Heartland Alliance’s National Center on Employment and Homelessness as part of the Pathways Forward Challenge grant, and the Liberty Mutual Foundation, this 3 year initiative builds upon the work of Rising to the Challenge: Boston’s Plan to Prevent and End Youth and Young Adult Homelessness.

Our Mission: Rising Together is a community-driven, workforce development initiative that connects employers and service providers in Boston with youth and young adults at-risk of or experiencing homelessness in order to train, hire, retain, and advance the careers of these young Bostonians..

The Rising Together initiative brings together additional workforce development stakeholders into the conversation around youth homelessness to highlight employment solutions for our young people. This coordination of services is especially vital since meaningful and sustainable employment is key to housing stability and long-term success. Yet, less than half of 18-24-year-olds experiencing homelessness in Boston report active employment. The capacity building work of Rising Together has resulted in the development of tools and resources for working with youth experiencing homelessness and has been essential to building the foundation for ongoing collaboration between workforce development and housing service providers in the city of Boston.

Download the Rising Together fact sheet.

Steering committee

Boston Private Industry Council, on behalf of the Opportunity Youth Collaborative
Boston Youth Action Board
Bridge Over Troubled Waters
Department of Neighborhood Development, City of Boston
Health & Human Services Cabinet, City of Boston
Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development
More Than Words
St. Francis House
United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley

Career resources for youth

The following videos and powerpoints are from the Virtual Career Opportunity Series of live online events that Rising Together & YOU Boston held for young people in Summer 2020.