While minority youth and adults have traditionally experienced high rates of unemployment, recent demographic, educational, and technological changes have all combined to cause a sharp increase in the numbers of unemployed and displaced minority group workers. A review of past employment and training programs such as the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) reveals that they suffer from a variety of shortcomings, including a lack of effective transitional mechanisms for moving into unsubsidized jobs, a scarcity of successful models for upgrading employees to better positions, poor system coordination and ineffective program design, and a failure to involve private industry adequately in the design and operation of employment and training programs. Currently, the Ford Foundation is helping to address the employment-related problems of minority youth by performing the following activities: developing the basic literacy skills of dropouts and other high-risk youth; promoting public and private partnerships to address the training needs of high-risk and dropout youth; supporting research and policy studies involving youth, education, labor markets, and alternative forms of employment; and clarifying and testing ways in which displaced workers can adapt to the structural transformation of the labor market. (MN)