What is Year Up United?

Year Up United is a workforce development nonprofit committed to ensuring equitable access to economic opportunity, education, and justice for young adults. Year Up serves young adults from under-represented communities and provides them with training and other resources, as well as connecting them to a nationwide network of employers that are increasingly in need of skilled, diverse talent.

Why did the Goodman Family Foundation invest?

In the words of Bennett Goodman, "Matching diverse talent to opportunity is the quickest path to sharing economic prosperity. Connecting more young adults to impactful jobs builds careers and communities."

Year Up is one of the only career education and training programs in the US that has proven, Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT)-backed, evidence of efficacy. In May 2022, the federally-sponsored Pathways for Advancing Careers and Education (PACE) evaluation of Year Up showed that $1 spent on Year Up produced a $2.46 return to society. The study found that over a seven-year study period, young adults assigned to Year Up earned $8,000 more per year compared with a control group — the largest sustained impact on earnings reported to date for a workforce program tested in a randomized controlled trial.

What impact are we hoping to achieve?

The challenge for Year Up at this juncture is to take their proven model, and scale it — often the hardest task for any nonprofit to achieve. We are funding Year Up to achieve not only scale, but cost-effective scale. We are providing $15 million to scale Year Up’s growth, allowing it to reach 10x the number of participants served annually by 2030 vs. 2022. We are also providing an additional $10 million to endow scholarships to Year Up participants in honor of former Year Up President and current Board member Garrett Moran.

Effectively scaling career education and training models that are proven to work is a crucial contributor to the Goodman Family Foundation’s overall mission of enhancing economic mobility in the United States.