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 indicates that eight of the nine Cohort 1 pilots had local evaluations supporting causal evidence of how one or more aspects of the pilots' interventions affected education, employment, and other outcomes. The evaluations found that of the six types of interventions implemented, three demonstrated evidence of improving expected youth outcomes—case management services, combined case management and WIOA services, and the Two-Generation education and training program. However, two of the three local evaluations examining case management (only) also found evidence of negative outcomes (reduced family member referrals to adult education and participation in career preparation and subsidized employment).