Building Healthy Communities for Positive Youth Development

ISBN-13: 9781441968197 / Angielski / Miękka / 2011 / 189 str.

Michael J. Nakkula; Karen C. Foster; Marc Mannes

Opis

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.

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.

Recenzje

"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

Spis treści

Introduction: Eight Interpretations of the Developmental Assets Framework.- The Purpose and Design of the National Case Study.- Findings from the Eight Communities: Transformation, Affirmation, and Blended Models.- Introductory Chapter to Wave I of the Study.- Traverse Bay Area’s GivEm40 24.7: One Sector at a Time.- Moorhead Healthy Community Initiative: The Forgotten Neighborhoods.- Portland’s Take the Time: Reaching toward 'The Tipping Point'.- Orlando’s Healthy Community Initiative: Community Sustainability.- Introductory Chapter to Wave II of the Study.- St. Louis Park’s Children First: Permeating Community Life.- Lawton/Fort Sill Community Coalition: Partnering with Prevention.- McPherson’s Asset Building Initiative: 'Leaderful' Communities.- Nevada’s Healthy Communities Coalition of Lyon and Story Counties: Rethinking the New Frontier.- Lessons Learned: Resisting the Template.

O autorze

Michael J. Nakkula, Ed.D., is a practice professor of education within the Division of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, where he serves as the director of a master’s program in school and mental health counseling. Nakkula teaches courses on adolescent development and the intersection of counseling, mentoring, and education within urban public schools. Prior to assuming his current faculty position, he was the longtime codirector of Harvard’s Risk and Prevention master’s program, where he designed and studied a number of initiatives that support the developmental opportunities for low-income youth. For this work he was named Harvard’s initial recipient of the Kargman Junior Chair for Human Development and Urban Education Advancement (1998–2004). Nakkula is the lead author (with Eric Toshalis) of Understanding Youth: Adolescent Development for Educators (Harvard Education Press, 2006), and is the coeditor of a special journal issue on the ways in which youth mentoring relationships are organized, assessed, and understood to promote best practices within different settings. He finds particular joy in helping to coach his sons’ (Lukas and Sam) youth hockey and baseball teams.

Karen C. Foster, Ed.D., is a former research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she enjoyed a longterm collaboration with Michael Nakkula. She trained in child and adolescent development at the former Cambridge Child Guidance Center and in the Behavioral Medicine department, also affiliated with The Cambridge Hospital, in Cambridge MA. Her early research was a study of Boston inner city students' experiences of stress and coping. She has spent the past four years as an external evaluator and consultant to the Ohio Board of Regents studying the impact of a state wide initiative to improve the quality of science and mathematics teacher education in the public schools. Her stint in Ohio provided a valuable opportunity to study the unique challenges to higher educational access posed by rural communities. The experience of working on the National Asset-Building Case Study Project was a primary force in shaping her deep interest in research approaches that authentically capture the work of social reforms. She has applied the model developed on the Case Study Project to other areas including immigrant healthcare practices, nutrition reform, service learning, and police profiling.

Marc Mannes, Ph.D., currently leads the Chicago office of Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy, operations, and technology consulting firm serving government clients. Marc spent a decade as director of applied research at Search Institute, where he oversaw the organization’s community research agenda and the extension of the Developmental Assets Frameworks to children. His career has focused on the intersections of applied research, policy formulation and implementation, program and product development, organizational and community change, and training. Mannes is coeditor and contributor to Balancing Family-Centered Services and Child Well-Being: Exploring Issues in Policy, Practice, Theory, and Research (Columbia University Press, 2001). He also served as a contributing author to Other People’s Kids: Social Expectations and American Adults’ Involvement with Children and Adolescents (2003), also part of the Search Institute Series on Developmentally Attentive Community and Society. Mannes lives north of Chicago in Wilmette, Illinois, with his wife, Karen, and their two daughters, Lilia and Natalie.

Shenita Bolstrom, MS, is a clinical research associate in the Neuromodulation business at Medtronic, Inc., global leader in medical technology, headquartered in Minneapolis, MN. Prior to joining Medtronic, Inc., she was field research coordinator at Search Institute, where she worked on research projects in the areas of community and social change, families and parenting, and youth development programs and practices. Shenita earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and her master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. When not at work, she’s out training for and completing marathons.

Blurb

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.