Community Youth Development

By Paul L. Watson Jr.

Imagine you were just hired as a youth development worker in a small community. During your first week on the job, your boss takes you on a local tour. As you drive into a residential area, you see a large group of teenagers standing in the middle of the road. You stop your van; park it and walk ahead to see what’s going on while trying not to be conspicuous. As you get closer, you realize there are two groups facing each other. Most of the youth have chains, pipes, or knives in their hands. You have stumbled upon a gang fight.

Just then, the two groups start to walk towards each other. Suddenly, one youth pulls out a gun and points it at the leader of the other group. Quickly, the group without the gun scatters, all except the leader. Instead of running, he continues to walk towards the youth with the gun. The youth with the gun runs up to the leader, puts the gun to his head, and pulls the trigger. The gun misfires. The leader grabs the gun and the two youth start fighting. At this point, all the others come back and a large fight ensues until the police arrive.

Your boss turns to you and says: “The leader who didn’t run – he’s the first youth I want you to work with.” What would you say? What would you do? Would you reconsider this line of work? If you decided to meet this challenge, how would you approach this young man? What method would you choose to develop this youth?

The approach used in this real-life situation was Community Youth Development (CYD). While CYD has many definitions, essentially it is an approach which embodies the best principles of youth development and community development. Community development demands that citizens initiate and control activities to positively influence conditions affecting their lives. It calls for citizen participation, cooperation, and collaboration.

CYD takes this principle one step further. It requires that young people be actively engaged in the process by developing their own identity, self-worth, independence, sense of belonging, and connections to family, community, the Earth, and the sacred. It also develops their capacity to engage in life­long learning in order to contribute to family, community, and society, as well as to demonstrate competence in vocational choices.

Youth development can be simply defined as a process that assists youth in making a positive transition into adulthood, with the desired outcome being a healthy, happy, productive adult who is capable of making contributions to their own development, their family’s development, and their community’s development. The primary responsibility for a youth’s development lies with the parents. However, there are far too many youth who have parents who are not capable of providing positive assistance, parents who are distracted by working and/or trying to survive, or the youth do not have any parents. In these cases there is a need for youth development professionals and programs to fill this gap.

The conventional wisdom in this country is 1) that we want to prevent young people from engaging in destructive lifestyles – drug use, delinquency, violence, school failure, early pregnancy (these are called Prevention Outcomes) and 2) that we want young people to achieve – to graduate high school, to get a job or go to college (these are called Achievement Outcomes). While these are desirable, when Problem Prevention and Achievement Outcomes become the principle goals that we establish for our young people, we are essentially selling them short. We need to additionally promote Developmental Outcomes – the knowledge, skills, behavior and personal attributes young people need to be healthy and succeed.

Youth development research documents that two factors can negatively or positively impact a young person’s development - their family and their community. By creating opportunities for youth to work in partnership with adults to minimize or eliminate negative impacts within their communities, we improve the young person’s chances of having a positive transition into and being fully prepared for adulthood.

The community development processes enable people to work together around common issues and aspirations. This includes people coming together to pursue an activity for its own sake, developing organizations which provide services, participation in partnerships including management responsibilities, and involvement in broader movements to achieve social change.

This approach was endorsed by the Center for Youth Development and Policy Research in Washington, DC. In answer to the question, “Why youth development and community development should be connected?” former director Karen Pittman replied:

“Young people should be involved in community development because they live in and belong to their community. If young people are not connected and respected, they have the power to destroy the community. Involving young people in the development of their communities encourages them to become stakeholders in their communities and to care about them.”

Why get young people involved in community processes? The fact is they already are involved. They grow up in communities and are affected by what surrounds them. When a young person comes to a social service agency for assistance, one of the first things done is an assessment of family history, dynamics, and systems, because the way a family operates has a direct effect on its members. The same is true of communities. The conditions in a community have a major impact on every family within it, which in turn impacts each individual in that family.

In 1970, when I was working with the Black Panther Party, I used to walk through a Harlem neighborhood and talk to the people living there. One cold winter day, I left an apartment building with tears in my eyes because of what I had seen. The front door of the building was wide open because it was broken. It had snowed earlier in the week and there was more frozen snow on the stairway inside the building than outside on the sidewalk. The first apartment I entered had a family of six living in two bedrooms. There was no running water because the pipes were frozen. The family was heating the entire apartment with an electric hot plate in the kitchen. I asked myself: What kind of person would I be if I were living in these conditions? Would I be concerned about getting my homework done? Would I be compassionate towards others? Would I think anyone else cared about me, besides my family? What would I be willing to do to get heat and food for myself and my family?

My experience that day in Harlem convinced me that the conditions in our communities had to change if people were to have the opportunity to reach their full potential. It also made me think about the young gang leader I mentioned at the beginning of this article. That young man was not in a gang when he moved into that small community. He was not a violent person. He had grown up in a strict, church-going family, but when he left home he moved into a community in which violence was a way of life. As a homeless street youth, he adapted to his environment in order to survive. Eventually, he began to excel in displays of violent rage, and thus became a gang leader.

The youth worker assigned to that gang leader realized that if the young man was not connected to the community and was not respected, he had the power to destroy the community. He saw the young man doing it every day. He realized the gang leader had the power to build that community if only he could be set on a positive course. The youth worker also knew that if this youth and other young people in that community were to join in partnership with him and other adults, together they could become a powerful force that could transform their community. The youth were the key to building civil society in this neighborhood, just as they are in thousands of communities like it around the country and throughout the world. Too often though, youth are overlooked, ignored, or relegated to play only minor roles in community life.

Among the native peoples of northern Natal province in South Africa, there is an approach to working and living with other people that recognizes the critical importance of being engaged with, and acknowledged by, others in the community. Referred to as “the Spirit of Ubuntu,” this approach emerges from a Zulu folk saying: “A person is a person because of other people.” One’s identity and sense of worth and power is based on being seen and acknowledged by others.

The youth worker understood this and developed a strategy to engage the young man. He began to talk with him about conditions in the community and how the young man had the power to change these conditions. The worker said he would be willing to help. They soon established a partnership and went to work. They formed a youth council of gang members. They involved the entire community in obtaining adequate recreation facilities for the youth. They were successful in having Black History taught in elementary, junior high, and high schools. They organized rent strikes against slum landlords and developed a community newsletter. Within two years, there was a marked change in the conditions in their community.

I thank that youth worker every day. Because of his use of CYD principles, he saved my life. You see, I was that gang leader. Through CYD I finally came to know my own identity and sense of worth and these were acknowledged by my adult partners.

That youth worker was doing more than diverting a single youth from a life of crime and violence, saving tax dollars, and even saving a life. He was developing an ally to help him change the conditions in that community. He was helping me to find and live my own calling. He was facilitating my creation of a dream of a just and compassionate society because he understood that it is our dreams that call us forth. He knew I would share that dream with everyone who would listen until it was realized.

Today, more than any other time in history, we need to do what that youth worker did with me.