Positive Youth Development

In an effort to respond to the needs and requests articulated on the two preceding pages, Hopeworks 'N Camden appropriated the positive youth development model to focus its operations.  This model has been characterized by or associated with several other frameworks of understanding youth development:

• Youth-centered
• Asset-oriented
• Strengths-focused
• Community-based
• Experientially-driven

These features are in strong contrast to the traditional models of youth development.  Characteristically, human service agencies focus on individual, family, neighborhood and community needs, deficits and problems.  This negative emphasis communicates a sense of failure and helplessness, reinforces low expectations, creates dependency on outside resources and agency-created solutions and discourages individuals and communities from moving in the direction of positive outcomes.

Conversely, our positive emphasis on resilience and protective factors, assets and strengths:

• Communicates a sense of hope
• Establishes expectations for success within an individual's capacities
• Promotes empowerment and independence
• Sets in motion forces for improvement

This paradigm shift is more clearly articulated in the following table:

Working for the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council of the National Academies, Jacquelynne Eccles and Jennifer Gootman, edited one of the seminal works in the field of youth development, Community Programs to Promote Youth Development.  In it, they articulate eight features of positive developmental settings, the "active ingredients" in community programs that facilitate positive youth development:

• Physical and psychological safety
• Appropriate structure
• Supportive relationships
• Opportunities to belong
• Positive social norms
• Support for efficacy and mattering
• Opportunities for skill-building
• Integration of family, school and community efforts

A good cross-reference to these features comes in the form of another list of "eight."  In creating their resource, Keys to Quality Youth Development, the University of Michigan Extension relied upon the research of Gisela Konopka and Karen Pittman to articulate eight keys or critical elements essential to the healthy development of young people.  In positive youth development programs, youth:

• Feel Physically and Emotionally Safe
• Experience Belonging and Ownership
• Develop Self-Worth through Meaningful Contribution
• Discover Self
• Build Quality Relationships with Peers and Adults
• Discuss Conflicting Values and Form Their Own
• Feel the Pride and Accountability that Comes with Mastery
• Expand Their Capacity to Enjoy Life and Know that Success Is Possible

In reviewing the concepts behind positive youth development, we hope to expose our e-Mentors to our "world view" or our "frame of reference."  All of our actions are guided by these concepts and ideas and while the particular details of how we carry each of these things out is not an essential understanding for our e-Mentors, it is important to note that each of these principles or keys is constantly at work here at Hopeworks.

An excellent compliment to this discussion is Peter Witt's paper "What is this Thing called Youth Development." 

As a side note, our understandings of positive youth development are being pushed further by Ed DeJesus and the Youth Development and Research Fund as they innovate theory that is creating the culturally relevant youth engagement model,summarized here.

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