LA YouthNet is a coalition of youth-serving organizations, communities, regional leaders, researchers and policymakers across Louisiana who have committed themselves to building a youth system that provides a range of opportunities and options for the positive development of all Louisiana youth!

LA YouthNet was established in 2001 as a result of a seven-region youth development initiative funded collaboratively by the Louisiana Workforce Commission-Office of the Governor, Louisiana School-to-Work, and the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program in the Department of Social Services, each key partners in the Louisiana Youth Policy Network.

What is the Louisiana Youth Policy Network?

In January 2000, Louisiana was selected by the National Governor’s Association to participate in a national network of ten states to advance youth development plans and strategies. The Louisiana Youth Policy Network team is a state-level collaborative effort between a host of state agencies and organizations that support the positive development of youth. The long-term goal of the Louisiana Youth Policy Network is to build the infrastructure for a world-class youth development system. The short-term goals of the Network are:

• To work together, across agencies and funding streams, to identify future trends in youth development, education, and training;
• To create a state-level plan to address identified trends in youth development, education, and training; and
• To make policy recommendations regarding youth development to the Governor, the Children’s Cabinet and the Workforce Commission.

The members of the Louisiana Youth Policy Network and their respective agencies have agreed to collaborate to address several major challenges facing youth in Louisiana:

• A high percentage of Louisiana youth are not engaged in education, training, or work, measures related to our state’s pervasive poverty
• A serious “disconnect” exists between public youth-serving agencies, schools, and private-sector employers; no one takes responsibility for developing our large cohort of out-of-school youth
• Louisiana’s reluctance to change hinders the development of effective youth policies and the translation of research into quality program practice

By engaging in an on-going discussion among key stakeholders about investing in youth, the Louisiana Youth Policy Network team aims to impact these broad and pervasive issues. As a credit to the team’s collaborative efforts, Louisiana was recently awarded a Youth Development State Collaboration Demonstration project grant from the Department of Health and Human Services. Thus, the state will continue to build momentum toward the creation of a system that provides a range of opportunities and options for the positive development of all Louisiana youth. The team recognizes that youth are Louisiana’s competitive edge. By making an investment in the total well being of youth – from birth to age 24 – Louisiana moves one step closer to the economic prosperity and enhanced quality of life envisioned in the state’s master plan for economic development, Vision 2020. We commit to achieving nothing less.

See Louisiana Youth Policy Network Interim Report: Investing In Our Youth (in PDF format)