This report presents the results from an evaluation of the Latin American Youth Center’s Promotor Pathway program in Washington DC and Maryland; it discusses literature on programming for at-risk youth, LAYC and the Promotor Pathway Program, evaluation implementation, service use, program impacts, and the evaluation’s implications for practice and policy; and the appendices provide supporting data and documents.
This document reports on an evaluation of the Latin American Youth Center’s (LAYC) Promotor Pathway program, which provides youth with a “promotor” who provides case management, mentorship, and advocacy to those who have multiple risk factors. LAYC was founded in 1968 to provide services to the emerging Latino community in the District of Columbia and has grown to provide youth development programs for a range of low-income immigrant youth and youth of color, and their families. The evaluation tested a “top up” model and used a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design to assess whether the Promotor Pathway program improved outcomes at the 18-month follow-up, in the areas of education attainment, employment, reduced births, residential stability, and reduced risk-taking behaviors. The evaluation primarily collected data using a series of questionnaires, and the study sample comprised 476 youth who were randomly assigned to the treatment or control group. Study results at the 18-month follow-up demonstrated the following things: in-school rates for treatment youth were 14 percentage points higher than their control group peers, though that result was largely driven by Latino males, and no gains for the treatment group were demonstrated regarding college attendance; no overall impacts were found for employment outcomes for females but males in the treatment group were less likely to have worked recently, or worked fewer hours per week, which may be attributable to higher education gains for males; the program reduced births during the 18-month study period for the treatment group; treatment group youth were six percentage points less likely to have slept in a shelter during the past six months; no positive effects were found regarding substance use; and treatment youth were nine percentage points more likely to say they had a special adult in their life.