Using their U.S. and international experience, the authors discuss civic youth work touchstones, promising practices, and activities. A substantive bibliography lists the sources on the subject of civic youth work and provides links to scholarly work for researchers and practitioners to effectively support youth involvement in community, social, and political development.

Most youth civic engagement evaluation studies fail to reach beyond specific audiences, thereby hindering the diffusion of evaluation practice wisdom around effective methods to evaluate complex social innovations. This book therefore provides multiple case studies of youth civic engagement evaluation designs and straightforward guidance for designing youth civic engagement evaluations.

How can we better organize and support youth in their contribution to public life? Ross VeLure Roholt, Michael Baizerman, and Roudy W. Hildreth have developed this book to help practitioners and educators who work with youth look at young people in a framework that is qualitatively different. This book explores the idea of youth not only as a developmental stage but also as having a purposeful social role within civic life. This text presents co-creation as a form of direct youth work practice that invites youth to become actively involved in their communities as citizens, collaborating with youth workers to create and sustain safe spaces for civic engagement. The book's contributors show how adults who work with youth can promote a democratic environment where youth can discuss, engage, and act on issues that matter to them. This book provides concrete case studies of civic youth workers and participating youth creating spaces for the civic and political development of young people in places that lack a social expectation of young people contributing to public life. From developing strategies for conflict reduction in Africa to mending the religious divide in Northern Ireland, the examples describe how to coordinate, support, and manage programs and initiatives with young people that can effect positive change on a global scale.

Youth civic engagement efforts have become common across the globe. With the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, many have turned to civic engagement methodologies to create opportunities for young people to have a voice in decisions that affect them. With the dissemination of youth civic engagement practice, there is a need to evaluate these efforts to satisfy funders, stakeholders, and participants. As a social innovation, youth civic engagement efforts present unique issues to evaluation and invite innovative and participatory evaluation designs. This volume brings together experienced evaluators, evaluation and youth civic engagement scholars, and civic youth workers to inform evaluation designs for youth civic engagement practice and programs. The book uses the US Center for Disease Control's framework for evaluation process, and explores issues, questions, and choices an evaluator can make when designing an evaluation of youth civic engagement practices. The heart of the book includes case studies written by professional evaluators, evaluation and youth scholars, and youth workers to define issues for each stage and provide guidance for others who want to design a robust, rigorous, and responsive evaluation for youth civic engagement initiatives and practices. The final chapters of the book provide straightforward and clear guidance for beginning to intermediate evaluators when designing and conducting evaluation studies.

The decreasing rate of involvement in organized groups and with voting by young people is a disturbing trend that perhaps can be turned around. Becoming Citizens: Deepening the Craft of Youth Civic Engagement brings together civic education, experiential education, and political theory to provide a revealing multiple-perspective examination of the new alternative way of practice in the youth work field called civic youth work. This helpful resource bridges the theory of civic engagement with education, ground both in extensive data, and then discuss various youth civic engagement initiatives that battle apathy and effectively invite expanded involvement by young people. This title examines three different youth civic engagement initiatives, Public Achievement (PA), Youth in Government (YIG), and Youth Science Center (YSC). The book then discusses the initiatives from various perspectives, including the academic perspectives of educational theory, political theory, theories of youth, and vocation. This unique source offers multiple points-of-view and is designed to enrich both the theoretical and practical for practitioners and scholars—and provides a revealing and useful look at the available sources. This book is a valuable resource for secondary social studies teachers; school district curriculum coordinators; youth workers; university faculty in political theory, democratic theory, youth studies, child and youth care, recreational studies, public health, education, and social work; youth and community organizers; and program directors and managers in community-based youth services. This book was published as a special issue of Child and Youth Services.

The purpose of this book is to compile and publicize the best current thinking about training and professional development for youth workers. School age youth spend far more of their time outside of school than inside of school. The United States boasts a rich and vibrant ecosystem of Out?of?School Time programs and funders, ranging from grassroots neighborhood centers to national Boys and Girls Clubs. The research community, too, has produced some scientific consensus about defining features of high quality youth development settings and the importance of after?school and informal programs for youth. But we know far less about the people who provide support, guidance, and mentoring to youth in these settings. What do youth workers do? What kinds of training, certification, and job security do they have? Unlike K?12 classroom teaching, a profession with longstanding – if contested – legitimacy and recognition, “youth work” does not call forth familiar imagery or cultural narratives. Ask someone what a youth worker does and they are just as likely to think you are talking about a young person working at her first job as they are to think you mean a young adult who works with youth. This absence of shared archetypes or mental models is matched by a shortage of policies or professional associations that clearly define youth work and assume responsibility for training and preparation. This is a problem because the functions performed by youth workers outside of school are critical for positive youth development, especially in our current context governed by widening income inequality. The US has seen a decline in social mobility and an increase in income inequality and racial segregation. This places a greater premium on the role of OST programs in supporting access and equity to learning opportunities for children, particularly for those growing up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. Fortunately, in the past decade there has been an emergence of research and policy arguments about the importance of naming, defining, and attending to the profession of youth work. A report released in 2013 by the DC Children and Youth Investment Corporation suggests employment opportunities for youth workers are growing faster than the national average; and as the workforce increases, so will efforts to professionalize it through specialized training and credentials. Our purpose in this volume is to build on that momentum by bringing together the best scholarship and policy ideas – coming from in and outside of higher education – about conceptions of youth work and optimal types of preparation and professional development.