Waltham Partnership for Youth Inc.

By collaborating with stakeholders across the City, we work to address long-standing systemic inequities while building a community of belonging and opportunity for Waltham youth.

One such inequity is the graduation rate. About 81% of Waltham’s high schoolers graduate within four years; for lower-income students, this drops down to 72%, and the disparity widens for other historically marginalized groups. In 2023, the graduation rate for Hispanic/Latino students was 67% and 54% for English Learners. This disparity goes back at least as far as 2006–the earliest year for which data are available on the MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website. These economic disparities have an impact on student academic achievement which, in turn, further limits young people’s lifelong earning potential. When designing interventions to increase school persistence in Waltham, there has been insufficient focus on students’ non-academic needs, such as mental health and belonging, which are critical to students’ ability to thrive.

Additionally, child development science tells us that one of the most important protective factors for young people is having trusted adults in their lives. Data from the 2023 Waltham Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS)–which our organization administers in partnership with the Waltham school district–reports that while nearly 69% of white high school students have a trusted adult at school, only 49% of Latinx students and 47% of Black students report the same.

Waltham is a vibrant city with a wealth of economic, educational, and cultural resources. However, many young people in our community do not currently have access to that wealth, which includes opportunities for high quality and inclusive education, access to diverse kinds of employment, and building social connections with peers and trusted adults.

Using a social determinants of health framework, we know that education, employment, and social connections deeply impact a community’s long-term well-being. WPY’s programming provides direct support for our community’s youth in those three areas, which is in clear alignment with the Addressing Health-Related Social Needs and Building Thriving Communities track for the Accelerator program. Through our CET and Wraparound programming and services, we are directly contributing towards workforce development, secondary education, and social cohesion, while also creating greater access to affordable and high quality mental health services and access to other vital community resources that support young people’s basic needs.

Success for our organization is multi-dimensional, centering around building a community of belonging and opportunity for Waltham youth. Each of our programs take a slightly different approach to measuring our success, as described below.

Our CET program’s Theory of Change states the following: Through our programming, we help Waltham close the economic opportunity gap, while making career paths more accessible and supporting youth to feel empowered, connected, and ready for their future career path. While the Theory of Change describes our program’s impact on youth, employers, and the City of Waltham as a whole, we also identified the specific skills, experiences, and outcomes with which students should leave our programs. These include the development of relationships with trusted adults and a community of aspiring peers; cultivating strong professional networks and reimagined career paths; and building important career readiness skills, with a particular focus on self-efficacy, self-care, and resilience. We also aim to engage new and existing employers to offer diverse and robust internships and meet the growing demand for new placements each year.

Success for our Wraparound program is also multifaceted, and continues to evolve as we gain ever-deeper understanding of the needs of our newcomer immigrant students. Our program’s objectives are increasing access to culturally and linguistically appropriate support for newcomer youth and families; increasing social cohesion by fostering connections among newcomer youth and introducing them to community resources that will help them thrive; and increasing school persistence among newcomer students, so that at the end of every year, students will progress academically (advance to the next grade level or graduate with their diploma).

We also have a commitment to hire staff and engage Board members who reflect the diversity of Waltham’s students. Half of our staff are people of color, including our ED and two program team leaders. 9 of our 10 staff members are bilingual, including all four staff on our leadership team, who are all also daughters of immigrants. One-third of our Board, including our Board President, are people of color. Two-thirds of our Board members grew up in and/or currently reside in Waltham, including all four of our Board Officers. We are incredibly proud that our staff and Board are representative of the community we serve, and we will continually strive to achieve this level of representation in the future.

We name all of these intersecting identities because, while being a district in which 61% of students are students of color (48% of whom are Latinx) and 25% are English Learners, there is a severe lack of educator diversity within the Waltham Public School district. WPY is committed to hiring staff who reflect the diversity of Waltham’s student body. Our offices are some of the few places where students have the opportunity to build relationships with trusted adults with similar racial/ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds.

Further, one of WPY’s five core values is youth-centeredness, which we define as believing in the power and potential of all young people and seeking to include youth as co-creators of our work. One significant way that we embed youth leadership in our work is by hiring students as Peer Leaders and Program Assistants. Supported by adult staff, their responsibilities include: conducting outreach for our programs; co-facilitating trainings; leading community projects; and providing input and guidance on the trajectory of our organization, including as members of hiring committees, monitoring and evaluation advisory groups, and strategic planning efforts.

Demonstrated Impact on Historically Marginalized Youth and Workforce Development: The positive outcomes of our CET program over the last five years are documented through rigorous data analysis. In 2022, we conducted a long-term evaluation of the first five years of our program. 84% of the 84 respondents–across racial/ethnic and socio-economic groups–felt that they were on track to achieving their career goals. We also determined that 88% of Latinx respondents, 50% of Black respondents, and 71% of lower-income respondents are on a path towards upward economic mobility. Further, 72% said that WPY makes up a significant portion of their resume and 69% said that WPY played a role in their decision of what to do after high school. To read more about our program’s impacts, please read our report here: https://bit.ly/WPY-Internship-Evaluation-Report

Support for Newcomer Immigrants: WPY’s other major program area is Wraparound Waltham. Launched in 2019, Wraparound Waltham is a multi-agency initiative of educators and service providers, whose objective is to increase school and community belonging, emotional safety, and well-being among newly arrived, Spanish-speaking Latinx immigrant students by facilitating access to culturally and linguistically appropriate school and community resources. Our evaluation report of the first four years of the program demonstrated that we have meaningfully served over 300 newcomer students in Waltham, and that of the 224 high school students that had participated, 86% of them progressed academically. While not an exact comparison, the graduation rate of Waltham’s English Learners–the majority of whom are Spanish-speaking newcomer immigrants–was 60.5%. To read more about the individual accomplishments, as well as the institutional and community level impacts, please read our Year 4 Annual Report here: https://bit.ly/Wraparound-Year4-Report