Does Your Youth Program Work

Does Your Youth Program Work PDF

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 6

ISBN-13:

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To help evaluate youth programmes, measure how well they have been implemented, and determine whether they have had their intended impact.

Community Programs to Promote Youth Development

Community Programs to Promote Youth Development PDF

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2002-02-12

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0309072751

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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.

Equipping Quality Youth Development Professionals

Equipping Quality Youth Development Professionals PDF

Author: William B. Kearney

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2014-02-04

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1491719362

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Whether you are a seasonal volunteer, group leader or full-time professional, you need practical advice on how to provide young people with the tools they need to succeed. Equipping Quality Youth Development Professionals—E-QYP for short—provides best practices to help young people ages six to eighteen reach their potential. It also offers age-appropriate ideas that you can translate to your specific child and youth program. E-QYP is a handy reference for individuals, as well as a powerful volunteer and staff development tool when adopted by organizations. It also serves as a great supplement to college textbooks on child and youth development. With easy-to-read information and sample activities that really work, this guide can help you help the young people in your life. “Youth agencies serve huge numbers of kids in the United States, but few youth workers have specific knowledge about youth development, and agency budgets tend to have few dollars for staff training. Although the training and credentialing of all youth workers remains an aspiration, workers with and without training need ready access to research-based knowledge and practices. Equipping Quality Youth Development Professionals provides both. Whether read as a whole or accessed for just-in-time information, Equipping Quality Youth Development Professionals is a timely, valuable, and much-needed resource.” —Irv Katz, president and CEO, National Human Services Assembly and National Collaboration for Youth

The Changing Landscape of Youth Work

The Changing Landscape of Youth Work PDF

Author: Kristen M. Pozzoboni

Publisher: IAP

Published: 2016-07-01

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 168123565X

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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.

Toward Positive Youth Development

Toward Positive Youth Development PDF

Author: Marybeth Shinn

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-04-10

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0190450010

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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.

Transforming Youth Serving Organizations to Support Healthy Youth Development

Transforming Youth Serving Organizations to Support Healthy Youth Development PDF

Author: Ross VeLure Roholt

Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Published: 2013-11-18

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781118825167

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This volume tells the story of major organizational change efforts at one municipal youth-serving organization to better support healthy youth development system wide. Presenting the viewpoints of young people, frontline staff, supervisors, managers, and the director, it reviews how the organization developed and transformed. Each article then describes the different strategies and tactics used to support organizational transformation. Learn: How a youth work professional development strategy ended up as an organizational development and change strategy How the partnership with a university expanded to include community-based research and evaluation to support youth program development and improvement within the organization. How youth advice structures can support high-quality youth programming and, by extension, improvements in organizational supports for quality youth programs How partnerships with other organizations supported ongoing adaptation of the organization to better address youth needs This is the 139th volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.

Youth Development and Neighborhood Influences

Youth Development and Neighborhood Influences PDF

Author: Board on Children, Youth, and Families

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 1996-12-24

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13: 030952377X

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On January 25, 1996, the Committee on Youth Development of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families convened a workshop to examine the implications of research on social settings for the design and evaluation of programs that serve youth. The January workshop provided an opportunity for the committee to examine the strengths and limitations of existing research on interactions between social settings and adolescent development. This research has drawn attention to the importance of understanding how, when, and where adolescents interact with their families, peers, and unrelated adults in settings such as home, school, places of work, and recreational sites. This workshop builds on previous work of the National Research Council and reiterates its support for integrating studies of social settings into more traditional research on individual characteristics, family functioning, and peer relationships in seeking to describe and explain adolescent behavior and youth outcomes. Not only does this report examine the strengths and limitations of research on social settings and adolescence and identify important research questions that deserve further study in developing this field, but it also explores alternative methods by which the findings of research on social settings could be better integrated into the development of youth programs and services. Specific themes include the impact of social settings on differences in developmental pathways, role expectations, and youth identity and decision-making skills, as well as factors that contribute to variations in community context.

Career Programming: Linking Youth to the World of Work

Career Programming: Linking Youth to the World of Work PDF

Author: Kathryn Hynes

Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Published: 2012-08-14

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9781118439623

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Across education, out-of-school-time programming, and workforce development, researchers and practitioners are seeking ways to bolster the career readiness of our nation’s youth, particularly low-income youth. This issue brings together information from a variety of disciplines and fields to help researchers, practitioners, and policymakers understand what we know and need to learn to provide youth with effective, engaging career-related programming. The articles highlight key findings about how youth learn about careers and develop a vocational identity, whether adolescent employment is beneficial for youth, and how to align our various systems to promote positive youth development. Models of career programming from education, afterschool, and workforce development are highlighted, as are strategies for collaborating with businesses. The volume emphasizes the practical implications of research findings, keeping the focus on how to develop evidence-based practices to support career development for youth. This is the 134th volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.

Participation in Youth Programs: Enrollment, Attendance, and Engagement

Participation in Youth Programs: Enrollment, Attendance, and Engagement PDF

Author: Heather B. Weiss

Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Published: 2005-05-09

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13:

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This timely volume proposes that to fully understand, and then intervene to improve participation in out-of-school (OST) programs, issues of access, enrollment, and engagement must be considered, and in the context of program quality. Contributing authors unpack the construct of participation, posing a three-part equation, participation = enrollment + attendance + engagement, and examine these three critical components of overall participation in out-of-school time programs. Chapters provide research-based strategies on how to increase participation, and how to define, measure, and study it, drawing from the latest developmental research and evaluation literature. Volume editors Heather B. Weiss, Priscilla M. D. Little, and Suzanne M. Bouffard outline the main theme with an introductory review of participation as a three-part construct of enrollment, attendance, and engagement and show how this understanding of participation can help stakeholders to maximize participation in and benefits from programs. Other contributors discuss research in OST from the perspective of youth; similarities and differences in participation and outcomes across social ecologies; how youth and family characteristics can identify which youth are most likely to participate in organized activities; recruitment and retention strategies for OST programs; measuring attendance in OST programs; and encouraging progression from attendance to active engagement The editors and contributors to this volume provide compelling information that encourages practitioners, researchers and evaluators, policymakers, and funders, all working to improve the lives of young people through regular, meaningful attendance in the diverse set of out-of-school time programs operating throughout this country, to better understand participation—and how to use that understanding to increase enrollment, measure and sustain attendance, and engage young people to reap the full benefits of “being there.” This is the 105th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Youth Development. Click here to view the entire catalog of New Directions for Youth Development titles.