Don’t allow the New Orleans city budget to shortchange our youth 

New Orleans has another difficult budget ahead. We know that means hard choices. Our request is simple: Take it easy on youth programs.

Last year, we took a close look at the city’s budget reductions and we calculated that approximately 40% of the reductions affected youth programming. That is a significant share for a city with roughly 112,000 children and young people up to  24 years old.

As city leaders make another round of decisions, we ask them to consider the cumulative impact of those cuts before asking our youth to absorb more.

The Big Easy Budget Coalition has been pushing for an equitable budget and a budget process that gives New Orleanians a clearer picture of the choices being made and meaningful opportunities to weigh in. 

It is difficult to see the full picture of the city’s investments in young people. A cut in one department may look manageable. Add reductions across youth services and the picture changes. Young people experience all of those decisions at once.

New Orleans has spent years building a way to look at that bigger picture

The New Orleans Children and Youth Planning Board (CYPB) exists because of an unfunded state mandate for comprehensive planning for children and youth. New Orleans established CYPB by ordinance to assess needs, coordinate resources and measure whether services are working. 

In response to that, in 2020, a large group of stakeholders — CYPB, the New Orleans Youth Alliance (NOYA), the then-Mayor’s Office of Youth and Families (OYF), young people and more than 50 community partners  — developed a 10-year roadmap, the Youth Master Plan (YMP). In 2021, the city council formally supported it..

We are now in that plan’s Phase Three: Implementation, Evaluation and Monitoring. The questions are practical ones: What does the data tell us about what young people need, where we are investing and what is still missing?

We have already seen Youth Master Plan priorities turn into public investment. Family Connects, which provides free in-home nurse  visits to families with newborns, received a $1.5 million city investment over three years. New Orleans voters also approved a dedicated early-childhood millage, advancing another priority reflected in the plan. 

The work has drawn attention outside New Orleans, too. As Baltimore develops its own Youth Master Plan, leaders from the Baltimore Children & Youth Fund came here to learn from young people, NOYA, CYPB and our partners.

The Youth Master Plan asks us to think beyond individual programs and to consider what young people need across their lives. To determine those needs, we rely on best-practice tools from institutions like the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions, which offers a useful framework centered on Belonging, Meaning, Wellbeing and Purpose. 

The idea is simple: young people need more than access to a recreation space or program. They need the relationships, opportunities and support that allow them to stay connected throughout the year.

Transportation shows why this matters. 

Young people identified transportation as a barrier while developing the Youth Master Plan. A key way to address this is through the Opportunity Pass, which started in September 2024 and has since provided free RTA rides to more than 11,500 New Orleans residents ages 16 to 24. A free ride may look like a transportation investment, but it can also mean getting to work, school, a doctor or a safe place when a young person needs one.

Philosophically, the city council has supported making the Opportunity Pass permanent. But it cannot become permanent without support from the city budget. Without a long-term funding source, the program will now come to an end. 

The need for transportation will not end with it. The cost simply moves somewhere else.

Better Information, Better Choices

In 2024, New Orleans allocated $600,000 toward a shared youth data system. As the city’s fiscal circumstances worsened and ARPA (federal COVID assistance) resources were lost or redirected, that funding never reached the youth-data project as originally planned. CYPB, NOYA, young people and community partners used available resources to continue the work. 

We established governance structures, selected data focus areas, adopted rigorous ethical frameworks, built a working prototype and developed a sustainability strategy for a Youth Data Hub.Alongside this work, we released the Opportunity Youth Data Dashboard this spring, which focuses on young people ages 16 to 24 who are disconnected from school and work. 

The dashboard allows for us to see cumulative effort. Organizations in the Opportunity Youth Collaborative contribute information using shared measures. We can look across programs to understand who we are collectively reaching, what barriers keep showing up and where young people are being missed.

The dashboard will be released annually. Once funding for the larger Youth Data Hub is identified, the Opportunity Youth data is intended to feed into it, helping build a broader picture of children and young people within the focus age range. . Together, these tools can help us make better decisions about where limited resources go and what young people actually need.

The needs are great. Families and community organizations are already stretched. Public agencies are doing more with less.  With the Office of Youth and Families now housed within the Health Department, coordination of youth services across city government may become harder at a time when we need it most.

We know difficult choices are coming. Young people already absorbed a significant share of last year’s reductions. 

But before asking them to absorb more, look at the whole picture.

Take it easy on our youth.