Goals and progress
Community investment | Our program in action
Empowering youth, This Way Ahead
Location: New York
Summary: Through our signature program This Way Ahead, our employees are helping youth gain the skills and confidence they need as they move into adulthood — by exposing them to the real world of work.
Delivered in partnership with The Door, a New York-based nonprofit, This Way Ahead exposes underserved youth to a range of work-related learning experiences including diversity, career pathing, conflict resolution, decision-making and communication skills. The curriculum was written by Gap Inc. employees and is delivered by our store management and The Door staff in four phases: career exploration, job readiness training, an internship, and follow-up support.
Each year, more than 100 youth participate in the program and compete for 40 internship positions in our Gap and Old Navy stores in Manhattan. Interns meet regularly with a supervisor who talks with them about their jobs and their educational and career goals.
Delivering the Virtuous Cycle
To understand the impact of This Way Ahead, we have partnered with the TCC Group to evaluate and help us improve our work. After two years of evaluation, we confirmed that the program is producing positive results on three fronts:
1) Participants are building their confidence, improving their ability to more accurately self-assess their skills, and learning how to get and keep a job. They're also recognizing that a high school diploma isn't always enough.
2) Our nonprofit partners are growing their skills as members increase their understanding of what it takes to help youth succeed in the world of work.
3) Our employees are developing their own skills through the program, generating increased levels of pride in the company they work for and enriching their experience at Gap Inc.
Mabel Meneses, a Gap store manager who teaches This Way Ahead classes, goes so far as to call the program “part of my benefits package.”
"My work with the This Way Ahead program has been very rewarding,” she says. “I have been able to learn valuable lessons in facilitation techniques as well as how to approach issues from a different angle. Maybe this work was not supposed to become such a training tool, but it did for me."
Now in our third year, we continue to learn and improve the program based on the evaluation and feedback from all participants. We plan to expand this initiative to San Francisco in 2010.
