In today’s fast-paced, often-dehumanizing world, this book brings together the advice and expertise of leading scholars dedicated to affecting positive youth development. Providing a multifaceted, multidisciplinary blueprint for social change the book promotes individual adult involvement in adolescents’ lives to ensure positive youth development. It aims to mobilize a society of adults, through volunteer and other programs, and will interest anyone involved in working toward achieving positive youth development.

Scientific research and science-guided practice based on the promotion of an individual′s strengths constitutes a radical shift in a new and growing area of study within the field of human development. Its trademark term is `positive youth development′. This approach to human development is based on the idea that, in addition to preventing problems, science and practice should promote the development of competencies, skills, and motivation in order to enhance individuals′ developmental pathways. Approaches to Positive Youth Development, is based on this concept and brings together authors from across Europe and America who are leaders in their respective fields. The main focus of the book, beyond a clarification of the paradigmatic foundations, concerns the major contexts of adolescents and young adults, namely, neighbourhoods and leisure locales, school and family, and the major themes of healthy psychosocial development, namely, competences and knowledge, prosocial behaviour, transcending problems of delinquency, civic engagement, identity, agency, and spirituality.

It is a great pleasure to offer this volume from Michael J. Nakkula, Karen C. Foster, Marc Mannes, and Shenita Bolstrom as the latest in the Search Institute Series on Developmentally Attentive Community and Society. Its importance to the series and this ?eld of inquiry and practice is readily evident in its title, Building Healthy Communities for Positive Youth Development. Since the early 1990s, Search Institute has invited and encouraged communities of all shapes and sizes to use its framework of Developmental Assets and principles of asset building to create strong, vibrant, and welcoming communities for children and youth. We have operated largely at the grassroots level, encouraging innovation and adaptation around a shared vision, rather than proposing a program or model for replication. We seek to learn as much from the communities as they learn from us. This book offers in-depth case studies of what happened in eight diverse c- munities that took up our invitation. In them, we see a wide array of strategies and approaches that, on the surface, seem to have little coherence. But, as Nakkula and colleagues found, underlying each of these distinct efforts was a deep commitment to transforming the social norms of community life to more effectively attend to young people’s healthy development throughout the ?rst two decades of life. There have been many ambitious efforts aimed at comprehensive community change on behalf of young people.

Pt. 1. Positive youth development in diverse contexts during economic change -- pt. 2. Interventions to support and promote positive adaptation and development -- pt. 3. Research, interventions, and policy needs.

Social settings have enormous power to promote or hinder positive youth development. Researchers and practitioners know a great deal about features of schools and programs for youth that affect development, but much less about how to transform settings to bring about these desirable features. This book shows how to harness the power of settings. It shifts the debate from simply enhancing youth outcomes at the individual level to improving the settings of youths' daily lives. The book offers researchers and practitioners blueprints for creating and changing influential settings including classrooms, schools, universities, out-of-school time programs, ethnic systems of supplementary education, and other community-based programs. Leading scholars in psychology, education, human development, sociology, anthropology, economics, law, and public policy discuss a wide array of social change strategies, and describe how to measure key features of settings as a target and guide for change. The authors also demonstrate how larger social structures - such as school districts, community coalitions, community data resources - can support change. Many of the chapters describe ways to make settings work for all youth, including those marginalized by reason of race, ethnicity, social class, or sexual orientation. Toward Positive Youth Development will guide researchers, educators, administrators and policy makers to improve schools and youth programs for all of America's youth.

The main focus of this book, beyond a clarification of the paradigmatic foundations, concerns the major contexts of adolescents and young adults, namely, neighbourhoods and leisure locales, school and family, and the major themes of healthy psychosocial development.

-- Steven R. Rose, Social Work with Groups.

Liberty: Thriving and Civic Engagement Among America's Youth examines what it means to develop as an exemplary young person - that is, a young person who is thriving within the community and on the rise to a hopeful future. The book explores several key characteristics of positive youth development such as competence, character, confidence, social connections, and compassion that coalesce to create a young person who is developing successfully towards an "ideal" adulthood, one marked by contributions to self, others, and the institutions of civil society. In this unique work, author Richard M. Lerner brings his formidable knowledge of developmental systems theory and facts on youth development to analyze the meaning of a thriving civil society and its relationship to the potential of youth for self-actualization and positive development.