Is your municipality the best place for youth to work?

Urban Work Index — Small & Medium Municipalities Edition

Helping small and medium municipalities become more attractive places for young people.

Objective

Create an award and information hub to help small and medium municipalities in Canada be more attractive to young workers. High quality, useful data will be used to build recommendations for small- and medium-sized municipalities to help retain and attract young people in effective ways.

The Need

Municipalities experiencing population decline and stagnant growth need to attract and keep people.

As large urban cities become unaffordable, smaller municipalities have the opportunity to attract young people, however:

Municipalities lack the data to understand how to differentiate and build strategies to be attractive to young workers.
Attracting new employers to drive economic growth often requires a strong skilled existing labour force.

Young woman surrounded by the words Opportunity, affordability, and education

The Index & Awards

The Index will measure your municipality’s attractiveness to young workers (18-29 yrs) across 5 topics: Education + Training, Employment, Entrepreneurship, Economy, and Affordability. It will allow municipalities to establish priorities for the future to attraction, retention and bounce back strategies for young people. The Index will become a launchpad for change and innovation for small municipalities (pop. 10,000 and 100,000). It includes:

5 topics with 20+ indicators and 75+ measurements
An open data set released on THE GRID, Youthful Cities’ open data platform
Comparative analysis provided to municipalities for cities in their region, of their size and nationally with larger cities.

Youthful Cities will award the top 10 best municipalities for young people to work in under 100,000 through a public release in September 2023.

Our Experience

Youthful Cities has been developing and releasing indexes since 2013 globally. We’ve launched two Canadian indexes ranking large cities as the best place for youth to work supported by RBC Financial Group. We’ve worked with economic development agencies to better position cities for attracting youth.

The Opportunity

Your municipality buys into the index with the base package and has the option to upgrade for further scoring and analysis. The municipality will be responsible for providing the majority of data to Youthful Cities*.

Base Level

A web-based dashboard that will include the following:

Overall ranking nationally
Overall ranking per topic
Overall ranking on each indicator
Comparison ranking with regional and city size comparison group
Access to your municipality’s raw data

Plus:

Entry into best municipality under 100,000 for
young people to work ranking and public release
Virtual training on how to collect data and utilize Youthful Cities collection systems
A regional virtual presentation of the overall results from the Index

Cost: $7,500 + applicable taxes

Enhanced Level

Deep city analysis and recommendations including the following:

Analysis of each topic, including the best and
worst performing indicators and measurements,
for your community and regional municipalities
3 – 5 key recommendations (areas of improvement) based on ranking of indicators and measurements
Virtual or in person 2-hour presentation/workshop with your municipal leaders