Community Programs to Promote Youth Development (2002) / Chapter Skim
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5 The Landscape of Community Programs for Youth
5 The Landscape of Community Programs for Youth
Pages 119-146
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PART 11 The Role of Community Programs for Youth
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This part of the report reviews studies and evaluations that detail how programs incorporate features of positive developmental settings and their impact on the outcomes for adolescents. Chapter 5 considers findings from a number of nonexperimental studies using various methods to collect information; Chapter 6 looks at findings from a set of comprehensive experimental evaluations.
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A half-dozen teenagers meet at their local community centers with adult city council members to share the results of a survey they conducted to help the city council understan`1 adolescent needs and how to serve young people more effectively. They leave the meeting with plans to meet again the following week with two city council members to pun a community service event for young people and their families.
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While many youth organizations, foundations, and citywide initiatives support youth development concepts and practices, there is little agreement on what specifically constitutes a youth development program and little systematic information on the breadth and diversity of efforts to provide these kinds of opportunities. Community programs for youth vary in many significant ways.
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Consequently, they cannot be said to represent "mode! programs" in a formal sense; instead, they illustrate the application of youth development concepts to program design dimensions.
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124 Community Programs to Promote Youth Development
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The Landscape of Community Programs for Youth 125 The institutional structure of programs can fundamentally affect the degree to which they address adolescent development, respond to local conditions, and provide appealing and safe settings. The Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development described youth programs through various categories (Carnegie Corporation of New York, 19921: · Private, nonprofit national youth organizations: There are a number of large national youth-serving organizations that have local franchises throughout the United States, and often internationally.
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· Grassroots youth development organizations: These autonomous community-based organizations are fundamentally independent from other organizations or institutions. While they generally do not operate in isolation, their work with youth does not depend on the acceptance or support of any single institution.
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hours, weekend, and summer programs and camps; · Sports, recreation, and other activities promoting physical fitness and teamwork; · Services that promote health and healthy clevelopment and behavior on the part of youth, inclucling risk avoidance programs; · Academic enrichment, peer counseling and teaching, and literacy; · Camping and environmental eclucation; · Cultural enrichment, inclucling music, fine, and performing arts; · Workforce preparation, youth entrepreneurship, and technological and vocational skill builcling, inclucling computer skills; · Opportunities for community service; · Opportunities that engage youth in civic participation and as part
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From page 128... ...
A variety of independent efforts to compile information about a particular set of youth programs have been conducted, but they are neither comprehensive nor national in their scope (National Collaboration for Youth, 19971. FEATURES OF COMMUNITY PROGRAMS FOR YOUTH The committee mapped the features of settings developed in the Chapter 4 against various program illustrations and drew some conclusions about effective strategies to incorporating features of positive developmental settings.
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These youth, she feels, could erode the spirit of entrepreneurship and responsibility that is the group's signature. The director of East Oakland's Youth Development Center has more pragmatic concerns the safety of the young people who come through the door every afternoon.
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Community programs for youth provide opportunities to expose young people to caring adults who challenge them, encourage them to participate in positive experiences, and respect their opinions. Youth respondents to the Community Impact!
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Some programs are staffed by full-time or part-time staff; others rely heavily on community or family volunteers. Adult leaders both paid and volunteer came from various personal and professional backgrounds in the programs reviewed in Community Counts.
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Membership matters not only to its approach to youth development but also to how it organizes itself to facilitate opportunities for youth. The target membership for a program may be broad or it may focus on a particular ethnic or religious group.
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Participants in the East Oakland Youth Development Center, which offers a range of activities for young people and their families, are required to make a commitment to the program through membership in one of the program's teams, dance troupes, or clubs. And to become a member of one of these groups, participants have to agree to the programs' values, which encourage self-respect and respect among peers and adults.
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Some nro~rams develop youth councils to sv~tematicallv -- -- -- A -- - -- -r ~ -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -~ -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -~ ~ ~ _ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ generate youth involvement. Others involve youth in responsible leadership positions around program activities, such as tutors, peer counselors and event organizers (Burt, 1998~.
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Opportunities for Skill Building At the heart of many community programs for youth are opportunities for skill building. Programs can use a wide variety of activities, such as community service, adventure and outdoor activities, art, drama, music, religious instruction, sports, cultural awareness, academic improvement, and career preparation, to support positive youth development and to meet the program-specific objectives.
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But youth development depends not only on the independent efforts of programs, but also on these efforts in collaboration with the community as a whole. Peter L
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Rather, creation of such programs requires collaborative planning by a community's youth-serving agencies, other social services and educational institutions, policy makers, community leaders, and young people" (National Clearinghouse on Families and Youth, 1996~. Agreeing on what communities want for all young people is an imnortant factor in supporting youth development.
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Through that collaborative process, they can begin discussing a youth development framework and how it might translate into a vision for young people in their community. The committee explored in more depth a few particular strategies to integrate community programs for youth with broader community pri.
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Root causes also include protective factors those factors that appear to buffer the effects of risk and promote positive youth development even in the presence of risk. The approach is designed to reduce risk in ways that enhance protective factors.
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Community Change for Youth Development. The Community Change for Youth Development demonstration, initiated by Public/Private Ventures, involved selecting three communities (St.
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, an example of an intermediary organization located in San Francisco, California, has been instrumental in promoting a youth development approach and supporting youth workers and directors. Through its Learning Network, directors and youth workers become familiar with best practices that support youth to build relationships with other youth and adults, participate in decision-making and leadership roles, become involved in the larger community, and develop skills and knowledge through their participation in challenging and interesting learning opportunities.
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Faith-Based Organizations Faith-based organizations have long been important providers of services to young people and the broader community, creating links between youth, families, and the community. Research on faith-based institutions and the role of religious organizations, such as churches and synagogues, suggests that they can contribute to community-wide efforts to promote youth development in several key areas, helping to reduce risky behaviors, building a value base from which young people make decisions, and involving a variety of people across the life span.
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Project SPIRIT, which has spread to at least eight states, also provides parents with education, pastoral counseling, and training (Congress of National Black Churches, 2001~. Community-Based Ceremonies for Youth Development As we have described, public and private organizations often provide communities with programs to support young people.
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Kinaalda mobilizes family and community support around a young woman's growth and integration into the Navajo social order. Community programs that support youth, such as the bar/bat mitzvah and the kinaalda, exist in many different communities Catholic first communion and confirmation, Mexican and Mexican American quincinera ceremonies for young women, Afrocentric coming-of-age programs, religious missions among 30ne author posits, "The differences between bar and bat mitzvah have been steadily diminishing to the point that today, in many congregations, they are virtually indistinguishable," thus, we refer to the bar mitzvah and the bat mitzvah as "bar/bat mitzvah" (Diamant, 1991)
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Community programs have the potential to provide opportunities for youth to acquire personal and social assets and experience features of positive developmental settings. Among other things, these programs can incorporate opportunities for physical, cognitive, and social/emotional development; opportunities that address underlying issues of ethnic identity and intergroup relationships; opportunities for community involvement and service; and opportunities to interact with caring adults and a diversity of peers.
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Finally, collaboration among researchers, providers, funders, and policy makers is important in order to develop and support communitywide approaches and implement a coordinated approach to designing, delivering, and evaluating community programs for youth.
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