Community Change for Youth Development:
Lessons from a Two-Year Pilot
A Forum — January 30, 1998
In January 1996, Public/Private Ventures (P/PV), a national public policy organization, launched the Community Change for Youth Development (CCYD) Initiative at six pilot sites across the U.S. According to Bernardine Watson, P/PV Vice President and CCYD Project Director, this initiative was designed to increase the likelihood of children growing up to be productive adults by increasing basic developmental supports available to them in their communities. CCYD was based on lessons from the Summer Training and Education Program (STEP) which P/PV ran from 1984-1988. Although the short-term impacts from the STEP program were positive, long-term follow-up showed little difference in outcomes for program treatment and control groups. P/PV concluded that short-term programs were not very effective, unless part of a continuum of support services conducive to youth development.
To implement CCYD, P/PV selected six sites, with target groups of 1,000 - 2,000 12- to 20-year olds, and decided on five "core" concepts based upon their operational feasibility, ease of comprehension and measurability. The five core concepts include 1) the expansion of supportive relationships between adults and neighborhood youth; 2) widespread, constructive use of work as a tool for development, learning and income enhancement; 3) utilization of "gap" periods (e.g., non-school hours) in young people's lives for constructive activities; 4) creation and enhancement of opportunities for young people to be actively involved in decisions affecting their lives; and 5) provision of continuous support and effective transitions among institutions and activities for young people. As funding required timely implementation of the program, selected sites had less than 40 percent poverty rates, suggestive of some existing infrastructure. Wary of the slow pace of initiatives that focus on institutional change, CCYD took an approach to reform that centered on the involvement of residents in project planning, implementation and operation and emphasized activities that fit within the five core concepts. P/PV recognized that CCYD "cannot operate in a vacuum" and issues of neighborhood safety, improvements in education and in the quality of programs have to be addressed. The core concept framework was designed to help communities prioritize their needs and set clear goals.
St. Petersburg, Florida
James Mills, Executive Director, Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas County, cites the issue of sustainability as a major potential obstacle to CCYD in his community. "Will you be here next year?" was an initial community concern when CCYD was introduced in St. Petersburg. Another challenge is that resident mobility added to the difficulty of maintaining adult involvement; identifying a "neighborhood"; and matching adults with children. Other challenges include the "disconnect" in the minds of young people about the relationship between schooling and employment and obtaining a staff that was qualified with the range of specialized skills necessary for their positions.
Austin, Texas
Hoping to "enter a dialectic with neighborhoods," Dennis Campa, former Director, Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services Department, saw CCYD as the first step to developing social capital -- dense relationships between citizens and institutions -- within the community. According to Campa, "Experience shows that if institutions are strong and vibrant, the people have resources to draw on." He offers an example of one neighborhood program (a part of CCYD in Austin) that, through mandatory summer school, got 180 potential eighth-grade drop-outs to continue with high school.
Savannah, Georgia
Working with adolescents in 1988, Otis Johnson, Executive Director, Youth Futures Authority, began to see that many youth needed to be involved in programs before reaching adolescence. Hoping to influence youth "starting from conception," he began to work with younger children in 1992 and implemented CCYD in 1996. Through this work, the Youth Futures Authority has created a continuum of services for all youth, and Johnson tracks children from six-weeks old through high school graduation, checking for truancy, juvenile records, substance abuse, and teen pregnancy. In concert with CCYD's five core concepts, the goal is to improve the lives of youth and their relationship with adults.