She's part of a youth employment advocacy group called the “Young Legends.” And 21-year-old Virgen Guadarrama quickly realized that for young workers to make a mark – legendary or not – employers need to understand what skills they bring. Too often, she found, they did not.

To Guadarrama, underestimating the assets workers her age have in abundance (e.g., technical, computer, and advocacy skills) leads to underestimating their value in the workplace.

“There's a lot of different skills that I think would work in different job environments,” she said.

The Young Legends aim to make the value of young employees apparent to firms – and to the job seekers themselves. The program is part of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s Working Cities Challenge community development initiative, and it exists to help reduce youth unemployment in Hartford. One of its tactics is increasing awareness of the benefits of hiring younger employees. It also connects young people to trainings, job openings, and experts who can offer support and mentoring.

The Boston Fed’s Jessica Grant-Domond, a community development analyst, said the one-to-one interactions and the fact the Young Legends all hail from Hartford are major program strengths.

“They know their peers and the issues and concerns they have,” she said. “They’re not relying on a system to guess what those are.”

Ambitious goal short-circuited by COVID-19

The Young Legends formed in 2018 (initially under a different name) as part of Hartford Working Cities, and they had about a dozen volunteer “legends” at their peak.

Their initial focus was engaging young adults of color, ages 16-29, in several south Hartford neighborhoods. But they later partnered with a similar group and expanded to a citywide focus, said Joel Hicks-Rivera, who directed Hartford Working Cities during the Working Cities Challenge’s three-year grant period.

Hartford had lots of unemployed or underemployed youth then, even though its manufacturing sector was struggling to fill openings left by a wave of retirements, Hicks-Rivera recalled. The health care industry was also booming, but few young adults of color were entering that field.

The initial 10-year goal of the Young Legends was to help drive down the city’s youth unemployment rate from 23% to 10%. It was ambitious, Hicks-Rivera said, and it ended up getting short-circuited by the spike in unemployment that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic.

But even before then, the group realized local systems needed to change before real progress could be made. For instance, Hicks-Rivera said, Hartford’s abundance of workforce development agencies needed to be better coordinated, so they could share information and resources more efficiently. The Young Legends helped do that through gatherings such as the Connecticut Working Cities Challenge Workforce Summit in September 2019.

Among the Young Legends’ other activities:

• Partnered with Hartford Generation Work to produce a briefing paper, “Young Adults@Work: Employment Practices that Motivate Young Adults”
• Hosted “Network Nights” to build connections between young adults and potential employers
• Represented young adult perspectives on the Education and Training Consortium for Hartford Working Cities, as well as the Hartford Opportunity Youth Collaborative
• Helped organize the Northeast Opportunity Youth Conference at the state Legislative Office Building in 2019

“Legend” sees in others what she found in herself

Like the rest of the Working Cities Challenge Connecticut, the funding period for Young Legends expired in the fall of 2021, and the program has had little recent activity. But the state of Connecticut recently announced a $2 million commitment to the Working Cities initiative. That funding will support Hartford Working Cities and its efforts to help to young people in 2022 and beyond.

Guadarrama, a native of Hartford’s Frog Hill neighborhood, has been a Young Legend from the start, and she’s seen the work change – partly because the initial focus on networking and training couldn’t continue during the pandemic.

Most recently, the University of Connecticut senior participated in weekly video check-ins that were offered during the highest stress times of the pandemic. These had a broader focus than workforce development, and Guadarrama tried to provide a place where young people felt safe connecting with each other and could get referrals to agencies that offered support for educational or health needs.

Guadarrama said she’s also changed because of the Young Legends. For instance, she said, she was once shy and unsure, but as a Young Legend, she’s spoken about the workforce issues of her generation in front of Connecticut legislators and at the Boston Fed.

The things she’s seen in herself are part of what makes her passionate about making sure employers know what young people have to offer.

“I've been able to step out of that comfort zone a little bit more and really push myself to do different things,” she said. “And I believe others can, too.”