Promotor Pathway Model
LAYC’s Promotor Pathway® is a long-term client management intervention model for disconnected and disengaged youth facing multiple obstacles that prevent them from accessing resources and achieving educational, employment, and healthy living goals. This evidence-based model allows Promotores to work on a one-on-one basis with each youth to remove barriers, proactively encourage participation in a broad set of LAYC services, and connect them to other needed resources within the community so they may make a successful transition to adulthood. With a strong theory of change and evidence of success, LAYC created a national network to scale and replicate this innovative model across the country.
Our Youth
Our goal is to serve youth ages 11 to 24 with a multiplicity of challenges, such as lack of education, homelessness, trauma, substance abuse, and court involvement. Our youth are often on the verge or already disconnected from school, employment, and community connections. LAYC developed a Risk Screening Tool that allows Promotors to assess the barriers in a young person’s life, allowing us to identify, outreach, and serve those experiencing the highest level of risks.
Our Approach
The Promotor Pathway® model focuses on cultivating and maintaining a lasting, trusting relationship with the youth to achieve success in education, employment, and healthy behaviors. Promotores support youth through “small wins” and provide crisis intervention in order to remove obstacles and engage youth in a broad set of programs and services in the community. Disconnected youth have a variety of risk factors that cannot be quickly addressed, and the long-term relationship, four to six years on average, enables Promotores to create lasting change.
Promotor Pathway Evaluation Video
Promotor Pathway Evaluation Video
Our Impact
Success within the Promotor Pathway® is defined as youth achievement of stability, connectedness, and self-agency. Specifically, each youth working with a Promotor will be tracked on progress toward three goals:
Increased academic success
Transition to work or completion of vocational/technical education
Improvement in practice of healthy behaviors and decreases in risk-taking behaviors.
Our Evaluations
Long Term Evaluation (2022)
In 2022 we published a long-term evaluation based on promising results from an initial study published in 2016 (detailed below). Between 2016 and 2019, LAYC engaged evaluation partners to implement a follow-up survey using the same randomized cohort of youth. This, for the first time, gives us a glimpse of our youth who are now between 22 and 29 years old. The phone survey, completed by 186 (39%) of the original study participants, asked about health, educational, and employment outcomes to get a glimpse into the lives of these youth as young adults.
Click here for the Executive Summary.
Click here for the full report by Dr. Shira Solomon.
RCT Evaluation (2016)
in 2016, the Urban Institute finalized a rigorous evaluation of Promotor Pathway® through a randomized control trial, multi-year study. The evaluation tracked 476 youth over 18 months to analyze the effectiveness of the model and revealed significant positive outcomes on school engagement, pregnancy prevention, and housing.
Youth with a Promotor were:
33% more likely to be engaged in school
33% less likely to have a child
60% less likely to have slept in a shelter or streets
In-School Partnerships
The Promotor Pathway® is a proud partner of Prince George’s County Public Schools Strategic Initiatives Office Prince George’s County Public Schools Title III Office and the International Student Admissions and Enrollment Office (ISAEO), and the DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE). These partnerships place promotores in areas of high and middle schools to serve students at risk of not persisting or graduating due to truancy, behavior issues, and other obstacles in their lives. Promotores are placed within:
DC Public Schools:
Cardozo Education Campus
Calvin Coolidge Senior High School
Theodore Roosevelt Senior High School
MacFarland Middle School
Ida B. Wells Middle School
Prince George’s County Schools:
Bladensburg High School
DuVal High School
High Point High School
Oxon Hill High School
Oxon Hill Middle School
Parkdale High School
Potomac High School
Nicolas Orem Middle School
Northwestern High School
Promotores in the News
Local Initiatives Support Corporation: LISC Announces Pay for Success Partners
LA Times: School district and Project Hope Alliance will help homeless students to age 24
Stanford Social Innovation Review: Five Programmatic Lessons in Scaling Impact
Washington Post: Charity Works: How crunching big data can save a child
Huffington Post, Chelsea Clinton: Reclaiming America’s Youth and Recovering Our Economy
Contact us.
If you would like to learn more about the Promotor Pathway in the Washington Metro area, please contact:
Shayna Scholnick
Promotor Pathway Director
shayna@layc-dc.org