A new report about Toronto\u2019s youth unemployment crisis found young people are not asking for handouts and are seeking fair access to employment.<\/p>\n
The Toronto Youth Employment Postcard Report is a \u201cyouth-driven policy document\u201d developed by The Neighbourhood Group Community Services along with the Toronto Youth Cabinet and other community groups. It was unveiled at City Hall on Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis report reflects over a year of community consultations, frontline insights, and youth-led research, outlining the urgent need to expand meaningful and gainful job opportunities for young people \u2014 especially amid a summer where youth unemployment and youth violence continue to rise across our city,\u201d a release states.<\/p>\n
Serena Nudel, director of community programs at The Neighbourhood Group Community Services, spoke to Breakfast Television on Thursday ahead of the report\u2019s release, and said a major takeaway from the report is that youth want to work and are ready for it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are looking for opportunities and they\u2019re ready to work and we need to be able to create those opportunities for them so that they\u2019re able to thrive and succeed in the future, so that they are able to have the opportunities that their parents did, that past generations have, so that they\u2019re able to succeed,\u201d Nudel said.<\/p>\n
According to the report, youth unemployment has risen to the highest levels seen since 2016, excluding the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
Statistics Canada said the national youth unemployment rate held steady at 14.2 per cent in June and \u201cremained significantly above\u201d its pre-pandemic average of 10.8 per cent, recorded from 2017 to 2019. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for people aged 15 to 24 in Ontario was 15.8 per cent in June.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith reductions in youth-specific employment programs at every level of government, young people across the city are facing increasingly limited access to meaningful, gainful work,\u201d states the Toronto Youth Employment Postcard Report.<\/p>\n
It also found certain groups, including racialized, Indigenous, newcomers, 2SLGBTQ+, people living with disabilities, low-income and those living in Toronto Community Housing, face \u201cdisproportionate barriers to employment.\u201d<\/p>\n
At a news conference, Coun. Parthi Kandavel spoke about the tough time young people are having when looking for work.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom working-class families to even middle-class families, the challenge of youth employment is very real. We saw this clearly last week when 54,000 people, predominantly young people, applied for 5,000 temporary summer jobs at the CNE. That really underscores the challenge before our young people and before our city,\u201d Kandavel said.<\/p>\n
A youth advocate echoed that sentiment saying that young people are ready to work.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think this has been a message that young people have reiterated throughout this campaign. \u2026 Young people want to build a better future. We\u2019ve heard the phrase often times that youth are our most vulnerable asset, but unfortunately, we haven\u2019t invested in those assets the way we should have,\u201d the advocate said.<\/p>\n
The report draws from a city-wide postcard campaign launched in 2024 that gave a voice to students facing a difficult job market. The Toronto Youth Cabinet, in partnership with The Neighbourhood Group Community Services, heard directly from 7,265 youth who shared their experiences, aspirations, and challenges through a city-wide postcard survey.<\/p>\n
On Breakfast Television, Nudel shared some of the messages they\u2019ve received from young people.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re saying that they\u2019re having such a hard time because they don\u2019t have any experience, so they\u2019re unable to get a job and they\u2019re unable to get a job because they don\u2019t have any experience. So we see youth having hundreds of applications and not hearing back from employers,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw a lot of youth saying that they are in need of making money to be able to support themselves and their family, whether it be saving for university, whether it be for their own personal needs, but what we\u2019re really hearing is that they want to contribute to their family as well. So they\u2019re not looking for a handout, they\u2019re just looking for an opportunity to thrive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among the key findings (as released in the report):<\/p>\n
64 per cent of youth said a job would reduce their dependence on parents and help them take control of<\/p>\n
their financial lives to support with urgent needs like food, rent, and transportation<\/p>\n
75 per cent of respondents said a meaningful job must align with their passions, values, or sense of purpose \u2014 including opportunities to give back to their communities<\/p>\n
74 per cent of youth cited structural, systemic, or logistical barriers \u2014 including transportation,<\/p>\n
inaccessible job locations, and competing responsibilities like school or caregiving.<\/p>\n
77 per cent reported that a lack of qualifications, prior experience, or training held them back from accessing opportunities.<\/p>\n
Nearly 60 per cent said their identity or how employers perceive them (race, age, language, gender, disability) created barriers to employment \u2014 making discrimination the most cited challenge.<\/p>\n
The report also found a correlation between youth unemployment and youth violence in Toronto.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re hearing the youth voices say that if they had a job, if they had opportunities for growth, if they had hope, that this would divert them away from engaging in violence. As we see increasing violence in the city, we need every solution we can to help address it,\u201d Nudel said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDifferent levels of government need to come together. We need to have the private sector. We need to have social service agencies. We all need to get to the table to come together to come up with a solution. A problem of this magnitude isn\u2019t solved by one group alone. It involves a real collaborative effort if we\u2019re actually going to make a difference.\u201d<\/p>\n
City council had passed a motion to create 10,000 additional youth jobs by the summer of 2026. The call from community groups is for government agencies and all three levels of government to come together to help create more jobs for young people.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see that there has been a commitment from City Hall, but we really need people to come together to push this forward. We see it in paper, but now we need to see it in action. We need to see the different levels of government. We need to see the leadership from the city. We need to see the private sector, and we all need to come together, and I think that with the intention in place, we\u2019re going to be able to make a difference and move this forward,\u201d Nudel said.<\/p>\n
Read the full report below:<\/p>\n
With files from Alan Carter, CityNews; and The Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new report about Toronto\u2019s youth unemployment crisis found young people are not asking for handouts and are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57819,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[45,49,48,124],"class_list":["post-57818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jobs","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-jobs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}