Outreach & Employment Specialist

3rd Street Youth Center & Clinic is a community-based nonprofit serving youth and young adults throughout San Francisco, with deep roots in the Bayview Hunters Point community. Since 2005, we have provided integrated health, behavioral health, housing, workforce development, and leadership opportunities that empower young people to make healthy, safe decisions and build successful futures.

Today, 3rd Street operates one of San Francisco's few Youth Access Points, manages multiple Transitional Age Youth (TAY) housing programs, and provides workforce pathways that connect young adults to meaningful education and employment opportunities.

3rd Street delivers this as an organization-wide In-House Employment Program, anchored by a Young Adult Job Centers embedded within the Lower Polk TAY Navigation Center and the Just Home Transitional Housing Program.

Rather than operating workforce services as an isolated program, 3rd Street provides generalized employment support to participants across the entire organization. Youth served are drawn from across all of 3rd Street's programs,including housing, behavioral health, health, education, and youth development so that young people can access employment support wherever they are already connected to us. The program primarily serves, but is not limited to, justice-involved TAY and youth ages 18–27 experiencing homelessness who are living in transitional housing sites.

The program provides career counseling and planning, job readiness training, employment placement, and retention services, with the Job Centers will serve as the hub that coordinates and delivers this support across the organization.

The Outreach & Employment Specialist is the primary point of contact for young people entering the Young Adult Job Centers, and the person who walks alongside them from first contact through a job that lasts.

This role has two halves.
1)
Outreach means actively getting in front of young people at our housing sites, across our programs and in the community, bringing them into employment services. It is not a passive, wait-for-referrals role.
2)
Employment services means career counseling, job readiness training, coaching, placement, and retention support for the young people who engage.

Performance context: This program carries defined contractual targets, including an annual enrollment goal and a placement rate at exit into unsubsidized employment, education, or training. This role directly drives both. We are looking for someone who can build genuine trust with young people who have been failed by systems before and who can also deliver on real numbers.

The following is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the Outreach & Employment Specialist. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change, or new ones may be assigned as needed.

• Conduct proactive, consistent outreach to young people across 3rd Street's programs: housing, behavioral health, health, education, and youth development, and in the surrounding community.
• Build visibility and trust through regular presence where young people already are, rather than waiting for them to come to you.
• Develop and maintain referral relationships with internal program teams, community organizations, schools, and partner agencies.
• Staff and animate the drop-in resource centers, creating a welcoming, low-barrier front door into employment services.
• Re-engage young people who disengage, treating return as a warm re-entry rather than a lockout.
• Conduct career counseling and planning sessions with real conversations about a young person's goals, interests, and job search strategy.
• Complete intake, eligibility verification, assessment, and enrollment documentation.
• Develop Individual Service Plans with each participant and update them as progress is made.
• Conduct regular one-on-one coaching to monitor progress, remove barriers, and keep momentum.

• Facilitate workshops and group sessions, open to any young person, covering:
• Resume and cover letter…