To What Extent Are CILs Serving Out-Of-School Youth from Minority Backgrounds?

The transition from school to postsecondary life can be difficult. Research shows that youth with disabilities are less likely than their nondisabled peers to successfully make this transition. The disparities in outcomes are larger for youth with disabilities who are from racial and ethnic minority groups. Minority youth are also more likely to be disconnected.

This Minority Youth and Centers for Independent Living (MY-CIL) practice brief is the third of a series in which the project will share key takeaways from its research with Centers for Independent Living (CILs) and other stakeholders about promising, evidence-based, and evidence-informed practices.

This brief includes selected findings from a MY-CIL survey that collected information on CIL services for out-of-school youth (OSY) with disabilities from minority backgrounds. The survey was completed by 218 federally funded CILs in 2020 and provided information on the characteristics of OSY that they served, the breadth of services they provided, services they deemed most effective, and challenges CILs faced in increasing and improving services for this population. In this brief, we share findings on the prevalence of OSY among CIL consumers, and the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of their OSY consumers. Overall, we found that all CILs are serving OSY, though to varying degrees. CILs reported that minority youth comprised a large share of OSY consumers for some CILs and much smaller for others.