How to connect young Americans who need jobs with companies that need skilled employees is an equation that organizations across the U.S. have struggled to solve for years.

One such organization, Year Up, has the numbers to back up its value proposition. Average annual income the year before enrollment? $5,000 to $7,000. Average annual income of participants the year after graduating? $37,000.

To date, 13,000 people have graduated from the program.

More than 500 of those graduates are from Chicago, where a discussion of how Year Up is working to close the skills gap took place on Thursday morning, as part of the second annual Forbes Reinventing America Summit. The panel included Year Up graduate Jeanifer Anaya-Granados, Year Up CEO Gerald Chertavian, Deputy Mayor of Chicago Steve Koch, and Julie Smolyansky, CEO of Lifeway Foods. The panel was moderated by Marc Utay, Managing Partner at Clarion Capital.

For 15 years, the program has trained young Americans to work in skilled positions with companies like American Express, which has put Year Up graduates to work designing Java and Cobalt support systems for mainframes, and JP Morgan, where graduates design anti-money laundering curriculums.

“Year Up is about connecting supply and demand,” said founder Chertavian. “We have a huge demand for increasingly knowledge-based skills, and employers have trouble finding the skills and the workers they need.”

When Year Up began accepting students, approximately 3 million young adults were considered “disconnected” from mainstream economic activity. Since then, those numbers have more than doubled.

“For years, this was something that was ignored. You assumed the market would work its way out and people would find their way into some kind of job,” said Koch. “Fifty years ago you might get trained on the job, you might earn your way in. That’s not the case today.”

According to Koch, in Chicago alone, one in five jobs cannot be done without a background in STEM (skills associated with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.) In the coming years, the city will see as many as 100,000 job openings in transportation, distribution, and logistics, as well as 40,000 health care jobs, all requiring specific training and technical skills sets.

Koch said that a crucial part of bridging this divide has been connecting Chicago’s community colleges–a network that currently has approximately 110,000 students enrolled–to entities in the private sector and programs like Year Up.

“We can take this and make it the vehicle to channel people and train people towards job the economy demands,” he said, as opposed to “hoping that if you educate people in a general way,” they’ll find their way into sustainable employment.

Currently, 100 companies work with Chicago City Colleges to develop curriculum that will ensure students are trained for available jobs upon graduation. An added benefit of this is that students are further motivated by a tangible result of their efforts.

“They know where it’s taking them. It’s not in the abstract. People want to know where they’re going and they want to see an end result–if you marry those two things, it can be very effective.”

Julie Smolyansky, CEO of Lifeway Foods, described the advantages to the company–some of them unexpected–of providing positions to Year Up interns in departments such as HR and accounting.

“I think what they really appreciate is the entrepreneurial aspect of the business. [Our interns] have been operating under scarce resources, and that’s something we can learn from. They’re looking to us to teach them, and I’m looking to them to teach me.”

Smolyansky, who took the reins at Lifeway when she was just 27, said that the experience of having her own abilities questioned because of her youth has made her particularly receptive to the perspectives and energy that Year Up interns bring to Lifeway.

“Having that youthful mind and energy is so critical to today’s employers,” said Smolyansky. “We want their opinions, we want to know how they shop, we want to know what pulls millennials into buying products, what’s important to them. For me it’s a win-win: they need the jobs and I need their opinions.”

Perhaps the voice that resonated the most with attendees was that of Year Up 2014 graduate Jeanifer Anaya-Granados.

A first generation American born to Salvadoran immigrants Anaya-Granados was a motivated high school student who enrolled in college but was forced to leave after a year for financial reasons. She worked a collection of minimum wage jobs selling shoes, waitressing, and teaching Spanish to preschoolers before joining Year Up.

“Now I have the opportunity to go from a day-by-day lifestyle to working for my future,” said Anaya-Granados, who is employed full-time as a help desk technician at Thresholds while  completing a computer science degree. Her experiences working closely with employees in different departments to manage technical problems has sparked her interest in a future career in consulting.

Anaya-Granados cited the technical skills she learned through Year Up but particularly the soft skills–accountabliity, punctuality, crucial people skills–essentially the lacking behaviors that cause so many young people to lose first jobs.

What can all of this mean for a city like Chicago?

Utay cited a 2012 study that found that the cost to city governments each year of each resident who’s not fully participatory in the municipal economy is $14,000. When one of those residents secures a job that pays living wages, not only is the $14,000 cost to the city nullified, but the tax base grows.

Chertavian is careful to note that participation form the private sector and keen attention to the return on a company’s investment is key for the Year Up to serve an increasing number of participants and remain sustainable.

“Philanthropy is a limited tool to scale something very large,” said Chertavian. “What we realized after a decade was we had to focus on what would be the longterm revenue stream to fund a program like this so it could scale and be sustained to the levels of tens of thousands of young people.”

To that end, Year Up has begun working to further integrate into community colleges, working with existing infrastructure to better support students and help them connect to labor sources, while reducing costs to the program.

For Anaya-Granados, one of the most powerful lessons she learned in a program that has touched so many personally is to focus on the professional and block out personal distractions–a challenge for many first-time professionals.

“You’re there to work. You would see emotions just rise up ,and a lot of the students would want to blow up, full of emotion, but Year Up taught us you’re here to work. Nothing personal.”

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