Workforce Voices: A conversation with Emil Ramnarine
Emil Ramnarine has spent 25 years building programs for young people that most systems have already given up on. The willingness to stay is what has driven him from the start.
It was the late 1990s, and Emil was a 19-year-old college student in Kansas with a tentative plan to become a child psychologist. A classmate named Tara mentioned she volunteered at a local group home and asked if he wanted to come along. He said yes, mostly out of curiosity.
The young people inside were teenagers who had already had serious run-ins with the law. Some were waiting to find out where they’d be sent next. Emil walked in anyway, genuinely unsure of what he’d find, or whether he’d know what to say.
The room was alive. These kids, carrying more than most adults ever will, were curious, funny, and completely present. They came right up to him. “How many adults can do that?” he said, incredulously. “Knowing what’s ahead of them, and still being able to laugh? I was humbled.”
Even at 19, Emil had a clear sense of what he wanted to model. He dressed intentionally, the way he’d show up to work, because he believed how you carry yourself is part of what you’re communicating. “Where you are today is just the starting point,” he said. “You can grow into something different, something more, and still be completely yourself.”
“Tara said be there for one hour,” he recalled. “I stayed four hours. Playing basketball, talking, having snacks. That was it. I fell in love. I got bit.”
He went home that day with something settled. “My choice, my purpose in life,” he said. “I’m going to follow this path.”
Twenty-five years later, Emil is still following it. As Chief Learning and Impact Officer at the Center for Fair Futures, he helps run one of the most ambitious youth coaching efforts in the country. His commitment to the people at the center of it has never changed.
He spotted a gap, and then he couldn’t leave it alone.
After Kansas, Emil moved to New York City in 1998 and found his footing at Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City, one of the country’s oldest youth mentoring organizations. He was working to expand mentorship access in East New York, Brooklyn, a neighborhood historically overlooked, where families were navigating real scarcity: limited access to healthy food, safe spaces, and the kind of consistent adult attention that helps a kid believe something different is possible.
Given his passion for sports and fitness and his instinct for meeting young people where they were, Emil began shaping something new inside that work. He designed a group mentoring approach built around movement and nutrition, recruited one friend from the gym as his first instructor, partnered with the Police Athletic League for space, and launched what would become Fit for Life NYC. “Before I knew it, I said: wait, this thing has legs,” he said.
As the program grew, Emil stepped out on his own to run it full time. He describes himself as an accidental entrepreneur, a nonprofit guy who realized he’d built something real and had to figure out how to sustain it, fast. He was learning what a balance sheet was while building the organization that needed one. Year one, one school. Year two, five. Word spread through communities that recognized what was being offered and wanted more. By the end, Fit for Life NYC was operating in more than 60 schools with a team of 80 coaches and staff.
What those years confirmed was what he’d believed since Kansas: follow what young people are actually curious about, and you get somewhere real. That belief became the foundation of everything he built next.
The adults are the challenge.
Emil is candid about what he’s observed across 25 years in this work. “It’s the adults that are the challenge,” he said. “Not the young people.” Adults get too rigid, too focused on prescribed outcomes, too caught up in what a young person should want, and lose sight of who’s actually in front of them. Young people notice. And they pull back.
What changes outcomes, in Emil’s experience, is whether there’s an adult willing to stay curious about a young person longer than is comfortable. That’s the idea at the heart of Fair Futures.
Young people aging out of foster care face a well-documented drop in outcomes, often cycling through the justice system, shelter system, and welfare system without sustained support. According to Child Trends, drawing on the National Youth in Transition Database, 59 percent of foster youth were employed at age 21 in 2024, reflecting the persistent barriers this population faces in reaching stable, living-wage work.
Fair Futures pairs a young person with a trained, paid coach beginning in 9th grade and keeps that relationship going until age 26. The goal, always, is a living-wage career pathway the young person chooses for themselves. That’s the workforce development mission running inside a child welfare structure.
“Historically in child welfare, young people were told what to do,” Emil said. “This is the job, this is the internship you should go to. Look where it’s got us. We sweep that away. We say: how do you want to live your life?”
Each coach works with 12 to 15 young people at a time, visiting schools, setting goals, and following the young person’s own curiosity. If a teenager is obsessed with music production, the coach doesn’t redirect them. They find a recording studio. They connect them with a producer. “We call it ‘the dance’ in coaching,” Emil said. “I’m going to dance with you. Let’s go, let’s follow it.”
The Center trains all 24 foster care agencies across New York City that run Fair Futures and monitors fidelity to the approach. Training flows out, outcomes flow back. The relationship between a coach and a young person is where everything actually happens.
In the first two years of full implementation, 90 percent of young people coached for 90 or more days achieved at least one academic or career development goal, averaging nearly four goals each. Students in foster care who received Fair Futures support began enrolling in high schools with graduation rates at or above the New York City average, a first.
When a young person keeps stumbling, that’s exactly when you don’t walk away.
Emil tells the story of a young man he calls D, a former participant at the foster care agency where he used to work. At 15, D was going to the NBA. He told everyone. It was the kind of certainty teenagers carry before life complicates things.
High school was hard. D made it through, barely, with a coach beside him navigating what kept piling up: academic setbacks, housing instability, the ordinary chaos of a life without a stable floor. He got himself into college. Emil is careful about that framing. D did that. The people around him showed up, and D walked through the door.
College lasted a semester. He sat in classrooms feeling like he didn’t belong, came late, argued with professors, stopped showing up. He dropped out. The NBA dream had quietly faded.
His coach stayed. That’s what the work requires. Young people stumble, and the question is always whether there’s an adult on the other side of that stumble who’s still there, still refusing to write the story off before it’s over.
A volunteer opportunity came up to coach a youth basketball team. Something shifted. D was good at it, and for the first time in a while, he was somewhere he wanted to be. A paid summer camp followed. Then travel, taking his team to Virginia and Pittsburgh, cities he’d never seen. Someone connected him with a recording studio. He released eight tracks on Spotify.
“Here’s a kid who struggled in high school, dropped out of college,” Emil said. “Found the thing that clicked. I’m not going to go to the NBA, but I love basketball, so I’m going to pour that into these young people. I love music, I’m going to figure out how to make an album.”
D is 25 now. Thriving. It took close to ten years to get there from that first conversation with a coach. There are thousands of young people just like D out there, Emil says, who simply need more time and a dedicated adult willing to give it to them. “That’s where people lose patience,” he said. “They didn’t show up, they’re dropping out, they’re not motivated. You stick with them. You increase their chances of getting to where they want to go. Not where you want them to go.” He paused. “But it takes time.”
Emil knows something about that. His father grew up in Guyana in deep poverty and used education as his way out. He told Emil and his sisters the same thing from the time they were young: education is the ticket from poverty to possibility. Go as far as you can with it, because it will take you somewhere. “Education pathways are people’s tickets into something better for themselves,” Emil said. “I’m still carrying that.”
Emil Ramnarine is the Chief Learning and Impact Officer at the Center for Fair Futures, a nonprofit organization that trains coaches and specialists across New York City’s foster care and juvenile justice systems. He has spent 25 years in child welfare, youth development, and social entrepreneurship.
This conversation is part of Workforce Voices, a conversation series produced by BOUNCE highlighting the stories and experiences of people working across workforce and economic development ecosystems.
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