In Their Own Words: Youth Share the Impact of Creating Youth Opportunities Programs
Youth leaders from Cedar Rapids Public Library, Pioneer Library System, and Oak Park Public Library share their experiences taking part in their libraries' Creating Youth Opportunities initiative.
Creating Youth Opportunities (CYO) was a ULC program that directly supported the capacity of 11 participating libraries to serve to serve opportunity youth in their communities. The libraries engaged with local youth through authentically designed and targeted programming, all with the goal of improving their long-term economic and social outcomes. The program ran from 2022 to 2025, with ULC supporting the libraries from the program research and design phase (2022-2023) through implementation (2023-2025).
The program recently concluded with a pre-conference event on October 22, 2025 at the ULC Annual Forum in Cincinnati, Ohio, in which cohort members from the 11 participating library systems shared practices and learnings from their local programs with the larger library field. This video, which features program participants from across the country, showcases the individual impact of the CYO program. View photos from the pre-conference workshop below.
A final white paper and webinar showcasing the final outcomes of the CYO program are forthcoming in December 2025.
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"The challenge of opportunity youth is not just about crime, however; it’s about the future and how bleak it becomes for someone when they lack work experience coupled with low educational attainment. That is what our library system, Memphis Public Libraries, had to consider when thinking about ways to address the opportunity youth numbers in the city."