The Urban Poverty program has two broad objectives: to build strong institutions in low-income communities through which the urban poor can work to solve their problems; and to help develop approaches to these problems that community institutions can use. The principal institutions the Foundation assisted this year are community development corporations, human service organizations, and public secondary schools. The program gives special attention to the problems of youth unemployment; the quality of high school teaching and learning; welfare dependency; teenage pregnancy and parenthood; maternal and child health and nutrition; neighborhood deterioration, crime, and arson; and the economic and social adjustment of refugees and migrants.

About one-fifth of the Foundation's program budget is applied to problems of urban poverty. Although most of this work takes place in the United States, grants also address the problems of the poor in Third World cities.

YOUTH EMPLOYMENT

Despite a robust economic recovery in the nation as a whole, unemployment remains high among inner-city youth. Jobless rates of 40 percent for black teenagers are common in many cities. A major factor contributing to these high rates is that so many minority youth leave school (whether as dropouts or graduates) without the basic skills necessary for entry into the job market. Many also cannot meet the requirements for participation in programs run under the Job Training Partnership Act (jtpa), the federal program that provides unemployed youths and adults with academic and vocational skills. Many of the local Private Industry Councils administering jtpa funds are training youth who read at least at the ninth- or tenth-grade level. Over half of black and Hispanic seventeen-year-olds, however, read at less than the seventh-grade level.

In addressing joblessness among youth, the Foundation places special emphasis on improving the job-training programs run by community-based organizations and other agencies that have a tradition of serving hard-to-reach, semi-literate young people who have failed in school or gotten into trouble. A number of these agencies are experimenting with a competency-based curriculum developed with Foundation support, renewed this year, by the Remediation and Training Institute (rti) in Washington, D.C. Called the Comprehensive Competencies Program (ccp), it integrates computer-assisted and other instructional systems that have been successfully used by the Job Corps, the military, and many schools in upgrading the skills of under-achieving youth. ccp provides instruction in reading, mathematics, and language arts, as well as "life-skills training," which teaches students how to take care of their health, find a place to live, and behave on the job.

ccp is currently being tested in some forty locations, including six learning opportunity centers operated by affiliates of Opportunities Industrialization Centers of America, twenty community-based centers run by affiliates of Chicago's Alternative Schools Network, and the Options Learning Center of the Capital Children's Museum in Washington, D.C. To assist this work, the Foundation granted these three organizations a total of $695,000. ccp will also be adapted by Jobs for America's Graduates (jag), the nation's largest school-to-work transition program, under a grant of $206,000. Operating in eight states, jag works with high school seniors, most of them urban minority youth, to remedy their deficiencies in basic skills and to help them find and hold a job.

The introduction of CCP in a variety of learning centers across the country, all operating within a common format, offers a unique opportunity to assess the effectiveness of remedial education in improving the employment prospects of dropout youth. Each site will gather information on student achievement, on the degree to which they retain their new skills, and on their later employment. This information will be used in making refinements in the program.

Public/Private Ventures (p/pv), a national intermediary organization that tests and evaluates employment programs for the disadvantaged, was granted a total of $1.4 million this year, most of it for an experimental summer program that is providing inner-city youth who have been failing in school with both jobs and academic assistance in reading and mathematics. They