The International Youth Foundation (IYF)

The International Youth Foundation (IYF) invests in the extraordinary potential of young people. Founded in 1990, IYF builds and maintains a worldwide community of business, governments, and civil society organizations committed to empowering youth to be healthy, productive, and engaged citizens. IYF programs are catalysts of change that help young people obtain a quality education, gain employability skills, make healthy choices, and improve their communities.

With the support of IYF and its partners, young South Africans are developing marketable skills in information technology; school dropouts in Australia are becoming young entrepreneurs; youth in Mexico are gaining leadership skills; and young people in China are running their own web-based newspaper.

Recognizing that no one sector of society has the resources or expertise to effectively address the challenges facing today’s young people, IYF serves as a catalyst to create strategic alliances among the corporate, government, and civil society sectors as a way to maximize the impact and reach of youth development programs. Many of these multi-sectoral partnerships are multi-million dollar initiatives carried out in multiple countries, funded over a period of three to five years. IYF also partners with multi-lateral institutions such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).