After-school programs, scout groups, community service activities, religious youth groups, and other community-based activities have long been thought to play a key role in the lives of adolescents. But what do we know about the role of such programs for today's adolescents? How can we ensure that programs are designed to successfully meet young people's developmental needs and help them become healthy, happy, and productive adults? Community Programs to Promote Youth Development explores these questions, focusing on essential elements of adolescent well-being and healthy development. It offers recommendations for policy, practice, and research to ensure that programs are well designed to meet young people's developmental needs. The book also discusses the features of programs that can contribute to a successful transition from adolescence to adulthood. It examines what we know about the current landscape of youth development programs for America's youth, as well as how these programs are meeting their diverse needs. Recognizing the importance of adolescence as a period of transition to adulthood, Community Programs to Promote Youth Development offers authoritative guidance to policy makers, practitioners, researchers, and other key stakeholders on the role of youth development programs to promote the healthy development and well-being of the nation's youth.

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 first volume of this SpringerBrief presents a series of papers compiled from a conference about how after-school programs may be implemented to promote positive youth development (PYD) hosted by Youth-Nex, the University of Virginia Center to Promote Effective Youth Development. This volume reviews the importance of after-school programs for PYD and discusses key components of effective after-school programs. It also discusses issues related to the evaluation and measurement of quality in after-school programs. In addition, the brief presents suggestions for how researchers, policy makers, and practitioners can move the field forward and maximize the potential of after-school time and programs for promoting positive youth development for children and adolescents. Topics featured in this brief include: The history of the relationship between after-school programs and positive youth development. Specific features of programs that are important for advancing positive youth development. Issues in and approaches to measuring quality in after-school programs. The Quality, Engagement, Skills, Transfer (QuEST) model and its use for measuring effective after-school programs. A case study evaluation of the Girls on the Run program. After-School Programs to Promote Positive Youth Development, Volume 1, is a must-have resource for policy makers and related professionals, graduate students, and researchers in child and school psychology, family studies, public health, social work, law/criminal justice, and sociology.

School activities alone are not always sufficient to ensure children’s academic progress or socio-emotional development and well-being. And the time when many children typically have the least adult supervision – immediately after school – is also the time that they are at the highest risk to act as perpetrators or become victims of antisocial behavior. Throughout A Blueprint for Promoting Academic and Social Competence in After-School Programs, which focuses on children in grades 1 through 6, noted experts identify the best practices of effective programs and pinpoint methods for enhancing school-based skills and making them portable to home and neighborhood settings. This volume: (1) Analyzes the concepts central to effective after-school programs. (2) Offers developmental, cognitive, and social ecology perspectives on how children learn. (3) Features more than 100 exercises that develop young people’s capabilities for academic, social, moral, and emotional learning – These exercises are ready to use or can be adapted to students’ unique needs. (4) Emphasizes young people’s development as students and as productive members of society during middle to late childhood and early adolescence. (5) Presents explicit theory and evidence that can be used to explain the value of after-school programs for budget proposals. This important book will find an appreciative, ready audience among the program directors who design after-school curricula, the educators who implement them, the mental health and social work professionals who help staff them, and the current crop of graduate students who will create the next generation of programs.

The second volume of this SpringerBrief presents a series of papers compiled from a conference addressing how after-school programs can promote positive youth development (PYD) hosted by Youth-Nex, the University of Virginia Center to Promote Effective Youth Development. It examines summer learning and best practices for different types of after-school programs by drawing on the experiences of researchers, program staff, and youth participants. It also presents case studies of five specialized programs and discusses their strengths, limitations, and challenges. In addition, the brief offers recommendations drawn from across the two volumes for how researchers, policy makers, and practitioners can move the field forward and maximize the potential of after-school time and programs to promote positive youth development for children and adolescents. Featured case studies of specialized after-school programs include: Richmond, Virginia’s ROSMY. The Clubhouse: Where Technology Meets Imagination. The Young Women Leaders Program (YWLP). Whatever It Takes (WIT) Program. UTEC of Lowell, Massachusetts. After-School Programs to Promote Positive Youth Development, Volume 2, is a must-have resource for policy makers and related professionals, graduate students, and researchers in child and school psychology, family studies, public health, social work, law/criminal justice, and sociology.

This book examines after-school programs in light of their explosive growth in recent years. In the rush to mount programs, there is a danger of promoting weak ones of little value and failing to implement strong ones adequately. But what is quality and how can it be achieved? This book presents findings from an intensive study of three after-school centers that differed dramatically in quality. Drawing from 233 site visits, the authors examine how – and why – young people thrive in good programs and suffer in weak ones. The book features engaging, in-depth case studies of each of the three centers and of six youths, two from each center. Written in a highly accessible style for academics, youth workers, after-school program leaders and policy makers, the study breaks new ground in highlighting the importance of factors such as collective mentoring, synergies among different programs and activities, and organizational culture and practices.

Cutting through the political rhetoric about the power of sport as a tool for social change and personal improvement, this book offers insight into how and why participating in sport can be good for children and young people. Still the only book to focus on the role of sport in positive youth development (PYD), it brings together high-profile contributors from diverse disciplines to critically examine the ways in which sport can be used to promote youth development. Now in a fully updated, revised, and expanded third edition, Positive Youth Development through Sport covers a wider range of disciplines including sport psychology, development psychology, physical education, sport development, and sport sociology. With every chapter asking why, what, so what, and what next, the book introduces the theoretical basis and historical context of PYD, quantitative and qualitative methods for assessing PYD in sport, and the potential of PYD in sport across different ages and abilities. This edition includes brand-new chapters on PYD in schools, in Indigenous populations, and across the lifespan, as well as new material on evaluating PYD programs and new case studies of PYD around the world. This is invaluable reading for all students, researchers, educators, practitioners, programmers, and policy makers with an interest in youth sport.