I want to begin with a not-so-recent book that somehow escaped my notice when I complied my Fostering Resiliency document - The Search for Structure: A Report on American Youth Today, by Francis Ianni (1989). This book provides rich, in-depth research support, resources, and opportunities in promoting positive youth development.

Ianni's book summarizes his research of over a decade, spanning the 1970's and 1980's, in which he and his colleagues observed and interviewed thousands of adolescents in the many contexts of their lives - families, schools, peer groups /gangs, youth programs, street corners, and even jails - in 10 geographically, racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically representative communities throughout the United States. Their guiding research questions were: "What are the codes or rules that structure and organize the transition form child to adult status in the social contexts of actual communities, and how do the adolescents in these communities internalize and learn to use or abuse these rules?"

Ianni's findings clearly challenge the prevailing world view that "adolescent society"or the "youth culture" is "a separate social system, with a psychosocial unity of its own, that is capable of resisting and even countering the adult society's authority and demands for integration into the general community" ( Ianni, b,p.674).Rather, "The teenagers in the 10 communities we studied were actually as different from each other as adults are. The variation went beyond individual differences in biological predisposition or temperament or some critical life experience, such as the loss of a parent. Teenagers live in poverty or affluence or someplace in between, come from broken or intact families, attend good or bad schools, and encounter very different role models in the communities in which they live. Adolescent development takes place within a specific community as the individual teenager's internal resources are nurtured or stifled by the opportunities available'(Ianni, a, p/23).

What did make a difference, Ianni found, was experiencing shared expectations: "In every community, urban inner-city as well as suburban or rural, we found that not age mates but a variety of continuing relationships with family members, relatives and neighbors, institutional settings, and the adults who are part of them serve as exemplars and guides for individual or groups of adolescents. Congeniality among their values and clarity and consistency in their guidance are essential to the adolescent, who is engaged in a search for structure, a set of believable and attainable expectations and standards from the community to guide the movement from child to adult status. If the values expressed by different community sectors are at odds, if their directions are unclear or inconsistent, the teenager cannot be expected to accept their good will or trust their judgment" ( Ianni, a, p. 262).

Communities that worked for adolescents, that facilitated instead of hindered the transition form childhood to adulthood, were those in which adolescents were linked into positive social support systems with adult role models and with positive peers. While these happen naturally for many youth, the trend has been a decrease in these natural support systems for a growing number of youth. The increasing fragmentation of family, school, neighborhood, and community life make the creation of these linkages especially critical.

Ianni's research supports the programmatic implications of other protective factor research in calling for programs that link adults and youths such as mentoring, tutoring, and apprenticeship; programs that link youth with other youth, such as peer helping and peer mediation; and programs that link youth with community life through community service endeavors.

However, Ianni echoes resiliency researcher Emmy Werner's concern that creating environments that promote the healthy development of youth, especially during the childhood to adult transition, is not just creating a potpourri of programs. He also calls for - as will the other books we review - the institutional changes in which the family, the school, the workplace, and the criminal justice system create new linkages with youth and each other. Examples of systemic changes that restructure social relationships and truly re-weave the fabric of resiliency include intervention thrusts like school-to-work transition efforts; the integration of academic and vocational tracks in schools; second-chance programs for kids who have dropped out; programs that reconnect youthful offenders with their families and communities, parents, and teachers; student involvement in school governance; and workplace family support efforts.

Developing successful programs and systemic changes is most effectively done, according to Ianni, by the creation of a community youth charter: "Programs for adolescents should grout out of a community youth charter which promulgates the expectations and standards that can met the developmental needs of the adolescents in the specific community. A well-integrated and consciously developed pattern of relationships can provide a stabilizing transformational structure that produces equally integrated identities as workers and citizens and parents; no single institution has the resources to develop all of these roles alone" ( Ianni, a,p. 279).While a community's norms and expectations are often unwritten, a community that gives voice to them by developing and explicit youth charter through"comprehensive community planning" involving youths is, in essence, weaving a fabric of resiliency that links youth into their community through caring relationships based on positive expectations and through opportunities for meaningful participation.

Community Supports

Another valuable document focuses on the critical role community supports -especially youth-servicing organizations and programs - play in the healthy development of adolescents. A Matter of Time: Risk and Opportunity in the Non-school Hours is the December 1992 report of the Task Force on Youth Development and Community Programs of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Anyone working in middle-grade school reform is well-acquainted with the taskforce's earlier, wonderful document, Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century. In this report, the task force extends its effort to improve the lives of young adolescents "by advocating a new national effort to make use of non-school hours for the vast and important job of promoting development among American youth..." (p. 119).

A Matter of Time is must reading for the comprehensive community planning efforts recommended by Ianni's research. Not only does it provide research support for the role community-based youth-serving organizations play in adolescent development, but it also surveys the wide spectrum of programs that are "out there" and provides us with the first large-scale national study of the services and program structures of these organizations. A Matter of Time asserts that for a growing number of youth, the family, school, and community supports essential to healthy development have been decreasing and that the non-school hours, which for a majority of adolescents is wasted time, offer a rich, seldom-acknowledged opportunity to provide adolescents with the kinds of participatory experiences that promote healthy development through the creation of"networks of community supports." Specifically, this study found that successful community programs do the following:

• Tailor their program content and processes to the needs and interests of young adolescents

• Recognize, value, and respond to the diverse backgrounds and experience of young adolescents
  
• Extend their reach to undeserved adolescents
  
• Actively compete for the time and attention of young adolescents
  
• Strengthen the quality and diversity of their adult leadership
  
• Reach out to families, schools, and a wide range of community partners in youth development
  
• Enhance the role of young adolescents as resources in their community
  
• Serve as vigorous advocates for and with youth
  
• Specify and evaluate their programs' outcomes
  
• Establish strong organizational structures, including energetic and committed board leadership

This document also recommends specific policy agendas for the institutions -national youth organizations, other community organizations, schools, parents and families, health organizations, higher education institutions, research and evaluation organizations, founders media, government leadership, and, of course, adolescents themselves - that must work together to create the fabric of resiliency that promotes healthy youth development. "Every level of government, every adult, and nearly every for-profit and nonprofit organization in this country has a role to play in the development of community-level support services for young adolescents" (p.111). In the end, the report says: "We will all benefit form such an effort. For the nation as a whole, the rising new generation will consist of healthy, confident young adolescents who are ready to become fully contributing members of society. For all of America's youth, uncertainty about their futures will be transformed into preparation by a caring community for a promising and fulfilling life. Risk will be transformed into opportunity for young adolescents by turning their non-school hours into the time of their lives" (p.15).

Losing Generations

The new book by the National Research Council's Panel on High-Risk Youth, Losing Generations: Adolescents in High-Risk Settings (1993) is based on the same premise as A Matter of Time.

The panel notes, "Many of the major institutions, or settings, in which adolescents are growing up are unable to provide the guidance and support young people need for positive development" (p. 193).The purpose of this book, however, is to move research and policy away form its concentration on the individual characteristics of youth and families in explaining high-risk behavior to focus on the settings, the environments, that make healthy development difficult. "High-risk settings do not just happen: they are the result of policies and choices that cumulatively determine whether families will have adequate incomes, whether neighborhoods will be safe or dangerous, whether schools will be capable of teaching, whether health care will be available - in short, whether young people will be helped or hindered while growing up" (p. viii). In an effort to redress the over-emphasis on individual risk factors, the panel studied the major institutional settings youths experience: families, neighborhoods, schools, health systems, employment and training opportunities, and (as these institutions become more severely stressed) the juvenile justice and the child welfare systems.

The panel concludes that "four conditions create and sustain high-risk settings": (1)the large and increasing number of families who are living in or near poverty; (2)the concentration of poor families in some urban and rural neighborhoods and the increase in the numbers of severely deprived neighborhoods; (3) the nation's major service institutions and systems - health, academic, and vocational education, and employment and training - are not meeting the needs of many young people; and(4) the strong influence of racial and ethnic discrimination on employment, housing, and the criminal justice system.

Any attempt to ameliorate these conditions "must be powerful and comprehensive"(p. 237). Just as our earlier two books concluded, Losing Generations warns that"attention to policies supporting families and neighborhoods and restructuring service institutions is necessary to impart the functional academic, vocational, social, and psychological competencies needed by young people" (p.237).

The panel challenges federal and state government to "face responsibility" and provide "financial support, leadership, and incentives toward change." That change, however, must happen at the community level. Echoing the theme of several recent books such as David Osborne's Re-inventing Government, the panel suggests that our current economic crisis gives us the opportunity to rethink federal, state, and local roles and funding "as a way of bringing the resources needed to deal with problems closer to the people who are most likely to do it sensibly" - local communities (p. 245).

Good Practice

Reinforcing both Ianni's research and that of the Carnegie task force, the panel's chapter on "Good Practice: Community-Based Interventions and Services" is a rich summary of effective community efforts focused on strengthening families and communities, implementing comprehensive services for positive youth development. Reflecting their resiliency paradigm, the panel concludes: "In good practice initiatives, community residents - both adults, and increasingly, adolescents - are viewed as integral resources who can contribute substantially to the change process. That is, good practice programs focus on the conditions for change -engagement and empowerment - rather than the problems per se of families, neighborhoods, and young people" (p. 195).

Providing further validation for the resiliency approach, the panel concludes that in good practice efforts, "Consistent demonstrations of caring and high expectations are a prerequisite," as is "providing young people with choice and voice" in program operation (p. 219).

Several themes recur in the above three books: (1) the community is a critical arena for youth development; (2) the relationships, expectations, and opportunities for participation youth find in their communities is critical to healthy development;(3) there is a need to create programs that reconnect kids to adults and other kids in mutually caring, respectful, and shared power relationships; (4) there is a need to restructure the linkages among the critical institutions in youth's lives -their families, schools, neighborhoods, and community organizations and services. These books also document many, many examples of programs and efforts to reconnect youth as well as to build linkages between families and schools and communities.

What all these successful efforts require is the active participation and involvement of all of us, not just as professionals, but as students, parents, and citizens. However, what is not discussed in these wonderful resources is the idea that civic participation has, indeed, become problematic in our culture. As Robert Bellah in The Good Society states, "...responsible social participation, with an enlightened citizenry that can deal with moral and intellectual complexity, does not come about just from exhortation. It is certainly not enough simply to implore our fellow citizens to 'get involved.' We must create the institutions that will enable such participation to occur, encourage it, and make it fulfilling as well as demanding" (p. 19).

From Western Center News, December 1993, Vol. 7, No. 1

References

Bellah, R. et al. (1992). The good society. New York: Vintage.

Ianni, F. (1989a). The search for structure: A report on American youth today. New York: The Free Press.

Ianni, F. (1989b). Providing a structure for adolescent development. Phi Delta

Kappan, may, 673-682.

Osborne, D. (1992). Re-inventing government. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Panel on High-Risk Youth of the National Research Council. (1993). Losing generations: Adolescents in high-risk settings. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Task Force on Youth Development and Community Programs of the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development. (1992, December). A matter of time: Risk and opportunity in the nonschool hours. New York: Carnegie Corporation. 1991 NWREL, Portland, Oregon

Permission to reproduce in whole or in part is granted with the stipulation that the Western Regional Center for Drug-Free Schools and Communities, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory be acknowledged as the source on all copies.

The contents of this publication were developed under Cooperative Agreement Number S188A00001 with the U.S. Department of Education. However, the contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education.