Youth Development: Issues, Challenges, and Directions

These past couple of days, I have been working through this massive document on Youth Development. It's a fantastic, and critical piece put together by Public/Private Ventures.

Here's a description:

During the past decade there has been considerable concern and discussion about what Americans can do to improve the lives and life prospects of our youth. The changing economy, the stress on family and community life that changing economy brings, concern about the adequacy of public education, the highly publicized incidents of gun violence in schools and the very large cohort of teenagers that this decade brings have only heightened the legitimacy, and the rhetoric, of that concern. In this volume of nine essays, leading researchers and practitioners in the field of youth development share what they have learned over the past decade about the potential challenges of the "youth development approach" and offer some suggestions about how to proceed in the coming decade.

Here's a list of the chapters:

1. Introduction

The Context for Moving Forward
2. Unfinished Business: Further Reflections on a Decade of Promoting Youth Development
(Karen Pittman, Merita Irby, Thaddeus Ferber)

3. The Policy Climate for Early Adolescent Initiatives
(Gary Walker)

4. The Cost of Financing of Youth Development
(Robert P. Newman, Stephanie M. Smith, Richard Murphy)

What We Know and Don't
5. The Scientific Foundations of Youth Development
(Peter L. Benson, Rebecca N. Saito)

6. Measuring Deficits and Assets: How We Track Youth Development Now, and How We Should Track It
(Gary B. MacDonald, Rafael Valdvieso)

Institutional Challenges
7. History, Ideology and Structure Shape the Organizatios that Shape Youth
(Joan Costello, Mark Toles, Julie Spielberger, Joan Wynn)

8. Juvenile Justice and Positive Youth Development
(Robert G. Schwartz)

9. Youth Development in Community Settings: Challenges to Our Field and Our Approach
(James P. Connell, Michelle Alberti Gambone, Thomas J. Smith)

10. The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same: The Evolution and Devolution of Youth Employment Programs
(Alan Zuckerman)