THE BOARD SOURCE

Strong Partnerships = Strong Impact

If you haven’t heard, Apopka Mayor Bryan Nelson recently received the outstanding Employer Partner Award at the 2019 National Association of Workforce Development Professionals (NAWDP) Youth Symposium. CSCF nominated the City of Apopka for their outstanding collaboration and positive outcomes achieved throughout our five-year partnership.

Our impact is growing because it’s a program that works. Since 2015 we’ve partnered with Apopka on the summer youth program to place young adults into new or unique work environments they wouldn’t normally be exposed to ignite their potential for future career and educational growth.

This program is part of our continuous efforts in staging more impactful partnerships and bringing out solutions and efforts on how we actually train and inspire young adults. We continue to develop similar partnerships to replicate the success in other central Florida regions.

The strong engagement campaign of City of Apopka and CSCF has helped the program to increase participating AYW youth from 32 to 113 youth in four years. In summer 2019 alone, these 113 youth worked 20,613 hours earning wages totaling $226,743. Of the 27 unique business partners that participated in the program, a full 95 percent of worksite employers stated they were positively satisfied with results. These employers include major retailers, professional services firms, municipal and community organizations, healthcare companies and nonprofits.