New Year, New Look at Positive Youth Development

Inside Part I: PYD: NCFY Asks the Experts PYD Today Let Young People Take Charge and They Grow Up To Be Leaders NCFY Podcast: The Power of Service Experts' Favorite PYD Resources Part II: Creating a Youth Master Plan When Cities Make a Plan for Young People, Youth Workers are Part of the Process Master Planning for Youth in Rural Communities Support Systems for Rural Homeless Youth: A Collaborative State and Local Demonstration Keeping Kids Incorporated

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Marguerite W. Kondracke, President and CEO, America's Promise Alliance

Dismantle the Silos
Helping our young people lead healthy, productive, and successful lives requires that we approach their development in a holistic sense. All too often youth development is approached in silos with healthcare and healthy development in one silo and education in another. I've been really pleased to see the gradual movement over the last several years, led by our Alliance partners, to an approach that focuses on the needs of the entire child.

This holistic approach is the centerpiece of who we are and what we do at America's Promise Alliance and our partners. We believe there are five essential life, health, and academic resources that all young people need in their lives in order to develop positively. We call them the Five Promises:

• Caring adults
• Safe places
• A healthy start
• Effective education
• Opportunities to help others

We know that it's going to take more than what goes on in the classroom for our young people to graduate from high school and be successful in life, (though I'm not diminishing the importance of the classroom). The success of a holistic approach to youth development is reinforced in our research report Every Child Every Promise. We found that when young people experience at least four of the Five Promises they were

• twice as likely to get A's
• 40 percent more likely to volunteer
• twice as likely to avoid violence

Experiencing at least four Promises also eliminated academic achievement gaps between White and minority students.

What this tells us is that a holistic approach to youth development is a powerful way to ensure that all our children, regardless of ethnicity or background, reach their full potential.

One more critical element to mention: to be truly successful, we have to ensure that our young people experience these resources throughout their young lives. Often we'll see that research, programs, and funding are concentrated in early childhood and in the high school years. This is what our friend Governor Bob Wise at the Alliance for Excellent Education calls "the missing middle."  We are exhausting the bulk of our resources at the beginning and end of a young person's education and leaving a large discrepancy during those critical middle years. We need to fill that gap and make sure that our young people have these resources holistically and consistently.

Steven A. Culbertson >>