How UWGT is helping to tackle the issue of youth unemployment

Youth have been hit especially hard when it comes to gaining access to meaningful employment, but the United Way of Greater Toronto (UWGT), along with several of its partner organizations, have stepped up to help address the crisis.

The vice-president of community impact and mobilization with UWGT, Nation Cheong oversees the funding investment it has made in more than 300 service organizations in Toronto and Peel and York regions. He said several of them are invested in youth programming, including employment opportunities.

“The United Way is helping to drive a community voice in addressing youth unemployment and developing solutions and then investing in innovative solutions for young people across the Greater Toronto Area,” Cheong said.

Among those funded organizations is The Neighbourhood Group (TNG), a non-profit organization that was founded to strengthen neighbourhoods and support vulnerable populations. It consists of several charities that came together to work with the United Way and serves about 47,000 people a year.

“The Neighbourhood Group, every couple of years, picks an issue to advocate on that we think we can move forward in society, a problem that we see in our services,” said Bill Sinclair, CEO of the organization. Recently, working with the Toronto Youth Cabinet from the City of Toronto, it identified youth unemployment as a top issue in society today.

In August 2024, it partnered with the Toronto Youth Cabinet, University of Toronto’s School of Cities, Toronto Community Housing and First Work to hold a Youth Employment Summit. Sinclair said it included more than 130 Black, Indigenous and newcomer youth from across the city, along with more than 50 stakeholders from non-profits, youth serving organizations, the private sector and community decision makers.

“That Youth Unemployment Summit was a large event where we really brought people together and really saw the shared interest in how to address youth unemployment and how it was affecting them,” he said.

As part of the collaboration, the 10,000 Youth Summer Jobs Campaign was launched with the goal of creating 10,000 summer jobs for youth by 2026. Questionnaire postcards were created and distributed at schools in equity-deserving neighbourhoods to ensure the campaign reflected the views and needs of young people.

Mireya Martinez, a youth attending York University, said that in 2024 and 2025 she spent several months unemployed. She felt “powerless about not only not being able to help my family financially, whether or not I was making the right choice of being in higher education and/or being able to continue my studies.”

Martinez was one of the many youth who not only filled out postcards as part of the youth employment initiative but also took part in broader consultations where young people in equity-deserving communities shared their personal experiences with unemployment and job-seeking.

“Unemployment impacts a lot of youth, especially when you are from an underprivileged community,” she said. “Employment opportunities do not come as fast, or it is much more difficult to get a referral to these jobs as the current market stands. People get jobs out there because they may know somebody and that someone is able to refer them into the positions they may be looking at.”

Through the postcards, TGN heard youth describe feelings of frustration, isolation and anxiety about their futures. “Recent changes to employment services, including funding reductions and program closures, have left many young people without support,” said Sinclair. “The situation is compounded by rising youth violence, which can be linked to economic insecurity and lack of opportunity.”

Cheong said another example of how the UWGT is investing in community services is ACCES Employment and its Street Fleet mobile van service. It is designed to deliver job search workshops and employment services to communities across the GTA, especially in underserved or high-need areas.

“Street Fleet is innovative in the sense that it mobilizes employment services and allows the van, which is equipped with technology, Wi-Fi and computers, to go out into the communities to partner with local libraries, community organizations, to get employment information and to build employment skills for young people in communities that do not necessarily have access to those services,” he said.

“We’ve already worked with over 600 young job seekers. supporting them through that service,” said Allison Pond, the President and CEO of ACCES Employment. She said community partners will contact ACCES and book the mobile van for events they are holding.

“If young people are there doing other things, like sports or cooking lessons in the hubs that same day, we serve the youth from this van,” she said. “It is one van so far and through support from our corporate partners, the United Way of Greater Toronto and the Greater Toronto Airport Authority … we have been able to deliver services from the van, and it has been amazing.”

“Unemployment hasn’t been this high for more than a decade, you know, apart from the pandemic, but it is and there are so many reasons behind it,” Pond said, adding there have been funding cutbacks and there are fewer services related to youth employment.

Both Pond and Sinclair said there are many reasons for this, including events going on in the world — like the current strained relationship between Canada and the U.S. and the threat of tariffs affecting the economy.

“We are quite concerned that with the conflict going on between the United States and Canada, that it’s hurting the economy, that people are not hiring, and that people have to dig deeper and work harder to make sure there are summer jobs,” Sinclair said.

“Summer jobs are the first thing to go. It is the first thing companies do to economize, and we cannot have that. We cannot have a whole generation of youth never having had a summer job. It is not like we can wait and see if things will be better in five years. We need jobs today.”

Martinez was fortunate enough to get a job through the Toronto District School Board’s Centre of Excellence for Black Student Achievement’s (CEBSA) summer leadership program, where she did a placement for the summer with The Neighbourhood Group. After her placement, she applied for a peer worker position and has continued her employment with TNG.

Martinez said she would like to see the provincial and federal governments invest more into the creation of employment-based programs for youth to have jobs that align with their interests and provide them with transferable skills. Programs like the CEBSA, which aims to provide experiential learning opportunities for Black students during the summer so they can build skills.

“CEBSA understands many youth, especially Black youth, who may be limited in opportunities for skill building, and try to assess diverse ways of measuring skill, such as academic performance, extracurriculars and volunteering that may otherwise not be evaluated as much from a corporation,” she said. “Programs like this could be applied to a broader range of youth to allow them opportunities to network, gain experience and discover their interests so they could apply to jobs more broadly.”