Ebook: Trends in Youth Development: Visions, Realities and Challenges
Author: Karen Pittman Merita Irby Thaddeus Ferber (auth.) Peter L. Benson Karen Johnson Pittman (eds.)
- Tags: Psychology general, Community and Environmental Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology
- Series: Outreach Scholarship 6
- Year: 2001
- Publisher: Springer US
- Edition: 1
- Language: English
- pdf
MOVING THE YOUTH DEVELOPMENT MESSAGE: TURNING A VAGUE IDEA INTO A MORAL IMPERATIVE Peter L. Benson and Karen Pittman THE CONTAGION OF AN IDEA In the past fifteen years, countless programs, agencies, funding initiatives, profes sionals, and volunteers have embraced the term "youth development. " Linked more by shared passion than by formal membership or credentials, these people and places have contributed to a wave of energy and activity not unlike that of a social movement, with a multitude of people "on the ground" connecting to a set of ideas that give sustenance, support, and value to increasingly innovative efforts to build competent, successful, and healthy youth. There are several particularly interesting dimensions to this movement. First, the youth development idea has the potential to draw people and organizations to gether across many sectors. Conferences and initiatives using youth development language attract increasingly eclectic audiences, bringing together national youth organizations, schools, city, county, and state agencies, police and juvenile jus tice workers, clergy, and committed citizens. Perhaps embedded in the youth de velopment idea is a philosophy or a "way" that has created an intellectual and/or spiritual home for actors across many settings. However this happens, it is clear that one of the powerful social consequences of the youth development idea is a connecting of the dots-the weaving within and across city, county, state, and of a tapestry of new relationships.
This important work presents contributions from leading researchers in the field of youth development. These papers address issues around what happens to American youth as they emerge from their pre-teen years.
Under the editorship of Peter Benson of Search Institute - a non-profit organization dedicated to the notion that our youth should be seen as assets, rather than liabilities - this book stands as an eloquent summary of the best ways to aid youth in their social, educational, and career development.