At the time of really difficult transition and challenges for our country, we cant afford as a society or economy frankly to leave any of our young people behind. Estimates show that somewhere, as many as 5 million young people between the ages of 16 to 24 in the United States are currently not enrolled in an Educational Program or participating in the work force. I believe very strongly as governors that we have the responsibility to do everything we can to reach these youth and give them avenues of opportunity to reconnect and engage with them in continuing education. And on ramps to fulfilling careers. And a lot of cases of course there are many barriers to making that happen. For these young people. Including economic mobility, and providing them with the opportunity for their futures. Some of the barriers, these young people are facing include homelessness, poor health outcomes, violence, and of course the criminal Justice System. In oregon we are tackling these barriers one by one. And a great example is a bill that i signed literally just this week. Senate bill 1008. It changes the way that we try and sentence use. Shifting the focus to prevention and rehabilitation. As we all know, you can spend time in adult prisons and are much more likely to reoffend. Racial and ethnic disparities are more pervasive in our criminal Justice System. And young peoples brains hold enormous capacity for change and influence. Over the years we saw how this played out in oregon. And hundreds of cases, impacting hundreds of youth. And of course their families as well. What was key for us was the data. The data really informed our past moving forward. By changing sentencing guidelines for youth offenders, we know that our communities can be made safer and more young people have the opportunity to use their time in custody to make a turnaround in their lives. Our guest today will help us explore a number of these solutions. Help us learn a little bit more about these 5 million young people. And hopefully provide us with strategies as governors that we can replicate in our states. Thank you again for joining us. Im going to turn it over to governor hutchinson. Thank you, Governor Brown. And thank you for your leadership in oregon. Those are good illustrations of progress that can be made. And arkansas, just like many other states that are represented by the governors here, we have a low unemployment rate. It is 3. 5 . Which means that we dont want anyone disconnected. We need to move people into the workforce. We need to give them opportunity. There is probably more opportunity today than at any time in terms of employment if we make the right decisions and prepare our youth and make sure that everybody has the connection. I will be introducing our panelists soon. But im grateful for their leadership on this challenging issue that we face. When i became governor one of the areas of disconnect with use was the foster care children. In arkansas, we had so many children in foster care and yet we did not have foster homes for them. We had an extreme crisis and a shortage. We convened the faith based community, the Nonprofit Community and created an initiative called restore help. As a result of that we have been able to increase foster care parent participation by 15 . More parents saying, we will join and help with our foster children. Children in foster care have been reduced as well because of some initiatives that we have engaged. We put 24 million into our foster care system for more caseworkers. And we reduced the ratio of caseworkers from 28 to 1 down to 18. 7, children for each caseworker. These are areas we had to make progress in to help these children get more connected and have more opportunity. Like Governor Brown we looked at our Youth Services and we moved, we closed two institutions and moved some of the services to the community so that they could handle more access to Mental Health care and drug treatment counseling as well. One of the things that i believe is important, is you want a disconnected youth to have the opportunity for a ged. For also there is even greater opportunity to get a High School Diploma. So we passed a law in arkansas that allowed an adult nontraditional student to get a High School Diploma. So someone, it might be a single mom with children, can go back and get their High School Diploma. And that has a little more umph even. I applaud Goodwill Industries for making sure that someone can get their High School Diploma regardless of circumstances in life. Let me go into our panelists. With that background. Today we have the pleasure of the it being joined by the executive director of youth move national. Monique miles, director of the Opportunity Youth form and Deputy Director of the aspen form for community solutions. Then john, chief executive officer of youth build usa. Let me first go through a little bit of the background. Miss bergen is an advocate for use with experience in Mental Health system and is working in the field of Youth Engagement to promote and encourage inclusion of youth voice in policy change with 11 years of experience, advocating for changes in Mental Health to improve care options and treatment. For our youth vaults adults with mental challenges. Ms. Miles works with the Opportunity Youth form comprised of a network of over two dozen urban, rural and tribal communities, seeking to scale multiple connection pathways that achieve Better Outcomes in education and employment for youth who are disconnected from education and work. Thank you for joining us. Mr. John valverde is the chief executive officer of youth build usa nonprofit that provides unemployed young people who left School Without a High School Diploma a pathway to education, jobs, entrepreneurship and other opportunities, leading to productive livelihoods and community leadership. With that, ms. Berg and i will turn things over to you first to provide an overview of the challenges that this young population faces and learn your personal perspective. Wonderful. Thank you for leading this conversation. And for all of your interest in this population of young people are disconnected. At youth move we frame this as opportunity for young people. There is an opportunity to offer these youth and young adults we engage. Really one out of eight youth in america between the ages of 16 and 24 are classified in this population as disconnected youth. To be clear this means that they are not connected formally to an education opportunity or an employment opportunity. And that they require some increased capacity in skill building in order to be a successful adult. There are many advantages of focusing on this population. This is a healthcare concern. This is an employment issue. This is an education issue. This is an adjuvant Economic Development issue. We have spent the morning talking about topics that touched specifically this population. Thank you for this time today. I represent at youth move, a National Youth driven Membership Organization dedicated to increasing leadership and advocacy skills within young people who are navigating the countrys social systems. That includes Mental Health, Child Welfare, juvenile justice. We believe by emboldening these young people to share their lived experiences, their stories of how services and systems either helped or didnt help them become successful and by sharing those with policymakers like you, we can create effective change. Our youth move members are passionate about creating Better Future for the next generation of young people. And they want to do that by being involved in decisions. That shape the policies and systems in front of us. Where working in an area where the country is interested in our themes. We are interested in patient centered healthcare to delivery. We are interested in measures that make us more effective with no additional resources. Our lands at youth move is, lets do that through youth voice. Lets put young people in the driver seat of their own care and also in the drivers seat of our system structure. As a young person who struggled with anxiety and depression in High School Years and i stepped out into the adult world, looking for continuing Educational Opportunities and i left my natural support behind. I found myself facing increasingly difficult Mental Health challenges and increased needs. And i didnt know how to have those needs met. Additionally i struggle to care for my physical health. I found myself pregnant at 19 and now i needed to not only for myself but for young daughter who would be joining me. I was blessed to be able to have services, wrapped around me. Services that met my Mental Health needs, skills practitioners to provide the medication and therapy in order to get back on my feet. I met faculty at an Educational Institute willing to work with me in my alternative education course. And i was provided prenatal and postnatal care, designed for teen parents to help empower me to become a successful parents. My story is not the story of every young person. There are youth across the country who are not allowed access to the supports and Services Like this. Whether it is my voice and hearing what was successful and effective in helping me meet my life goals or hearing from another young person who missed an opportunity or wasnt offered in support they needed at the moment. These stories can infuse and create systems that are more effective moving forward. Briefly, young people are so involved in creating opportunities and connections for this population. We have young people who are creating positive, prosocial peerbased programs in communities where they can invite disconnected young people in to create connection. Rather than isolation. To experience acceptance instead of stigmatization. We have young people who are working as youth advisors and youth experts to state agencies in each of your states to direct Mental Health and implement dollars effectively to the community and guide and serve as advisors to date agencies across the country. Young people are very interested in addressing the silo that exists between our system. A specific example, most of us live in a state where the childrens Mental Health system is responsible for care up to age 18 or 21 years of age. Then on one day, on a birthday no less, a young person is no longer eligible for those supports that were helping them be successful. And there is, what we call a cliff between those services in a childrens system and what is needed to access in the adult system. These are actively asking policymakers to think about how we intermix and create a bridge between those children and adult services. Letting a young person mix and match between the services, to stay with a caring case manager for a little bit longer to get them set up and be successful from childhood to adulthood. One more example of what are no only joining but creating an emerging youth peer workforce. The context is young people helping their peers and it is not new. It is now being invested in justice practices within the Mental Health system. The concept of a peer workforce is that a young person who has recently successfully navigated one of our social systems can turn around and assist another young person in navigating the stem. They serve as an advocate, a confidant, a mentor and a role model that there is hope for a successful future. We have a generation of young people who are committed to creating a stronger future and i think the strongest thing we can do is offer them a seat at the table as we design that successful future. That is a future where young people will not experience disconnection. Thank you. Thank you very much ms. Bergan. I appreciate you sharing your personal story and we appreciate your extraordinary leadership. Ms. Miles come over to you. Thank you. It is a real honor to be here. I want to start by thanking governors brown and hutchinson for this opportunity in addition to the leadership at nga. I want to tell you about our work and strategies that are working across the country to improve education and Career Outcomes. There are two key points that ms. Bergan noted that i want to underline. The first is how we have framed this challenge of disconnected youth matters. Our work renamed disconnected youth Opportunity Youth because the National Research found that number 1 it is systems that are disconnected, not the young people. When you talk to young people about the vision they hold for themselves, families and communities their optimism is palpable. The access frame matters, not only in our language the programming and policies. The second piece i want to talk about is Civic Engagement that young people hold in terms of the ways in which is a reconnect education and careers they are able to impact families and communities. The Civic Engagement frame is key to how we can be thinking about the programs and policies that improve outcomes for people. Really quickly, to give you a sense of the work we have been doing at the Aspen Institute for the past several years, two days we have invested in 28 communities across the country that includes world, urban, and tribal communities. We want to make sure that when we talk about advancing outcomes for our countrys most vulnerable and marginalized young people that we are documenting the way our Rural Communities and native and tribal communities are getting to Better Outcomes. We have support cross sector collaboratives in 28 places and that means that these collaborative are bringing together the post secondary system, justice, foster care system in addition to local philanthropy, and elected leadership. Together with young people at the center they are able to work on not just problem identification but solution design. When we heard the outcomes that Governor Brown and governor hutchinson have talked about, they are able to use the cross sector collaboratives to get Better Outcomes. Two days we have been able to track not only accelerated system change, now k12 partnering with post secondary, partnering with employers to get to Better Outcomes. At the same time we are seeing tremendous metric impact p. And most critically the Civic Engagement and capacity, the civic livelihood of our communities continuing to increase and benefit from these young people. With that in mind, the two last things i want to say that are tied to the values of how we have approached this work, we believe that the Aspen Institute when we talk about barriers young people face and the way systems are disconnected, we believe that is the result of historic policies. When we Start Talking about what works and what is most effective to improve outcomes for young people, it is critical we hold that historic perspective in our minds and we Center Strategies that embrace equity in this basically racial and gender equity at the center of solutions. The other piece we will always talk about continuously is why it is critical to have the people most impacted by these issues at the center problem identification and solution design. Young people are experts in what works for them and they are experts in designing solutions that can achieve impact. There are three points i want to make tied to how we may consider ways for states to improve outcomes for opportunities. The first is we must make the business case. We must continue to partner with employers and we have National Opportunities to do that at scale continue to improve not just education but Career Outcomes for young people. The second is there are so many policy barriers and policy opportunities that states can continuously move to generate Better Outcomes. The third piece i will touch on is thinking about the different ways that we frame the challenge. I want to offer up a couple of ways for states to consider framing not just the challenge but the opportunity that exists to improve outcomes. Starting with making a business case. We know from the bureau of labor statistics that nearly 6 million entrylevel jobs will be generated by 2020. We also know that when we look at the issue of retain meant in these jobs, and particularly retention strategies that employers are using, we know that annually, for example the retail sector, there is an annual cost of 10 million to address the retention challenges for entrylevel jobs in the retail sector. When we talk about what states can do there is an opportunity for governors to partner with National Employers that are work