Roundtable on Community Change

Community Building and Youth Development

Community Building and Youth Development

The existence of supportive settings for human development, particularly that of young people, is of crucial interest to the field of community building.  For this reason, the Roundtable focuses a number of its projects in the general area of Community Building and Youth Development.  Thus far, this aspect of the Roundtable’s work has focused on two fundamental issue areas: Structural Racism and Youth Development, and Reform Efforts Targeting Publicly Funded Youth Systems. 

For more information on the Roundtable’s work on Structural Racism and Youth Development see Structural Racism Policy Research.

Our work on reform of publicly funded youth systems began in 2003.  The Roundtable, with support from the W.T. Grant Foundation, hosted the Forum on Reforming Publicly Funded Youth Systems.  The Forum consisted of discussions about the social, political, and practical aspects of reforming a number of publicly funded youth systems, and engaged a diverse set of knowledgeable participants in a series of discussions designed to distill and build knowledge about the possibilities for and limitations of systems change in the areas of juvenile justice, education, and youth employment.  In addition to the discussion series, several of the forum’s participants wrote papers, each of which focused on one of the four youth systems and addressed the following themes:

• General theories and frameworks for understanding systems change
• Creating the will to promote change
• Creating the capacity for implementing and sustaining change, and
• Examples of systems change efforts that have documented improvements in outcomes for children and youth. 

Sponsored Research:

Reforming Urban Public Education Systems by Marion Orr, Ph.D.,  Department of Political Science, Brown University

Opportunities for Juvenile Justice Reform by Robert Schwartz, Executive Director, Juvenile Law Center

Youth in the Child Welfare System: Goals, Recent Reforms, and Barriers to Further Improvements by Matthew W. Stagner, Ph.D., Principal Research Associate, Population Studies Center, The Urban Institute

The Challenge Of Creating A Developmental Approach To Youth Employment by Alan Zuckerman