In and effort to assist State, local, and tribal entities provide services to disconnected youth more efficiently across multiple federal funding streams, Congress authorized the Performance Partnership Pilots for Disconnected Youth (P3) under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014. The Act allowed grantee organizations and their partners to request to pool funds from different federal discretionary funding streams and receive waivers from these programs' eligibility, reporting, and other requirements. In 2015, the federal agencies participating in P3 awarded the first cohort of nine pilots. Subsequently, six more pilots were established in two additional cohorts.

The purpose of this study is to identify and document the extent to which the P3 initiative increased coordination across Federal agencies and programs to allow local communities the flexibilities they need to support disconnected youth. Further, based on the results from local evaluations at each of the nine P3 Pilots, the study will highlight effective and promising practices for achieving employment-related outcomes for youth.

This report provides reflections from the evaluation technical assistance (TA) team that assisted Cohort 1 pilots and their third-party evaluators in effectively designing and implementing local evaluations of the pilot interventions. The authors of the brief suggest that technical assistance staff and grantee/pilots staff could form strong partnerships by clearly establishing roles and responsibilities, sharing key information and goals, and establishing orientation policies for new staff, among other tactics.