Building Healthy Communities for Positive Youth Development

Beschreibung

The Healthy Communities • Healthy Youth (HC • HY) project has provided grassroots support for the creation of robust, welcoming environments not only for children and adolescents at risk but for all youth. Building Healthy Communities for Positive Youth Development explains the Developmental Assets framework in depth and demonstrates how eight local initiatives across the country have adapted and implemented it to fit the unique cultures and resources of their neighborhoods and the needs and strengths of their young people. Stakeholders collaborating in the process include parents, educators, politicians, service providers, law enforcement, volunteers, and—as active participants instead of merely recipients of services—youth themselves.In this visionary book, the authors provide readers with a flexible, living blueprint for promoting the well-being of children and teenagers. Areas of coverage include:Core themes of the eight HC • HY initiatives.The use of an asset-based common language among participants.Building common ground among the various sectors involved in the initiatives.The varied roles of young people within the initiatives.Research design and methodology; data collection and interpretation.Funding issues and challenges. The mission outlined in Building Healthy Communities for Positive Youth Development fits the interests of a wide range of professionals, including developmental psychologists; child, youth, and family service professionals; clinical child and school psychologists; and allied education and mental health practitioners working with children and adolescents.
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.
Explores how youth development and community development intersect and influence one another Focuses on multiple manifestations of a community-designed approach rather than a replication of a national model or program Builds bridges between theory and practice Provides a unique window into what is arguably the broadest grassroots community organizing movement for youth development in the country

Autor*in

Michael J. Nakkula

Themen in »Building Healthy Communities for Positive Youth Development«

Adolescent Development Child Development Community Developmental Assets Positive Psychology Positive Youth Development Resilience Search Institute Strength-Based Communities Strengths development language

Stimmen zu »Building Healthy Communities for Positive Youth Development«

"Building Healthy Communities for Positive Youth Development comes to us during a time when many are calling for significant school reform and worrying about growing rates of school dropouts and cases of bullying and youth suicides. Whereas many schools are
instituting antibullying programs or “dare to care” suicide prevention efforts or offering alternative programs for students at risk of dropping out, they by and large follow the deficit model approach.

Nakkula et al. remind us that canned programs of reform, built on a view of youths as being diagnosed with “problems” to be solved, well intentioned though they may be, will never prove so powerful as that group of committed individuals—the religious leaders, the teachers, the business owners—who can reflect on their deeply held beliefs and then thoughtfully act in new ways that support healthy development of our youths and our communities."

- Ellen L. Nuffer
PsycCRITIQUES - July 27, 2011, Vol. 56, Release 30, Article 6

Details

Link teilen