Over one million youth are not in employment, education or training in Canada. The long term effects of unemployment on youth can leave a scar that impacts both their confidence and earning potential for life.
Opportunity For All Youth wants to change the youth employment system so that all youth in Canada have a fair chance to access economic opportunity and prosperity. We work with young people, governments, employers and community service partners to address systemic barriers plaguing the youth employment system.
We run virtual hiring events in cities across Canada, where youth who register in advance are guaranteed an interview and feedback on that interview, and may get a job offer on the spot. We also support facilitation and learning between employers, youth, and employment services providers, where we share best practices, and create better employment and recruitment models that work for everyone.
Our Guiding Principles
A youth-first approach
Through our youth engagement activities, we collect insights from youth across Canada to ensure that our solutions are inclusive, accessible, and meet the unique needs of young people.
Data driven solutions
Our work builds on workforce development best practice and a growing digital toolkit driven from data collected from our hiring events. Our recruitment models are designed to be scaled from coast-to-coast across Canada.
Convening governments, youth-led organisations and employers
With a network of strategic partnerships across the country, we are well-placed to drive meaningful and sustainable systems change in the youth employment system across Canada.
Our Past and Future
Opportunity For All Youth was formed as a response to the numerous discussions, roundtables, reports, and policy papers on how Canada’s youth employment outcomes could be improved.
In 2017, the Canadian government’s Expert Panel on Youth Employment released a report, calling for “a multi-sectoral roundtable of employers to establish a hiring goal or challenge, including a specific focus on vulnerable youth.” The time was ripe to create a coalition willing to innovate, test ideas, and look for scalable solutions, and a group of employers and community stakeholders did just that, setting an ambitious target for NEET(not in education, employment or training) youth hiring across the country. The result was Opportunity For All Youth, which officially launched May 2018, supported by MaRS Partner Solutions and our valuable employer and community partners
Now funded by the Government of Canada’s Youth Skills Link program, we are based at MaRS, and our coalition’s impact continues to grow every day.
Community Service Partners
