This resource guide goes where many questions from the documentary video lead. Set out here are the goals, ethos, and defining beliefs behind youth organizations that subscribe to the principles exemplified in the two rural and two urban cases features in the documentary video. A decade of research in thirty regions of the United States and over 124 community youth organizations lies behind the findings, arguments, and implementation suggestions given here. A decade of study grounds exemplars in their local conditions and provides statistical comparisons of young people who take part in nonschool activities with a national data base of secondary-school students.

Part I discusses the institutional gap that family, school, and low-skill jobs cannot fill and the reasons why building and sustaining community organizations appeal to young people drawn to risk and in need of meaningful relationships. Part II provides exemplars of youth-based organizations that work as effective learning environments in economically impoverished communities'rural and urban. Part III describes in close detail just how the arts offer special appeal to young learners as wells as appropriate means for building economic and further education opportunities. Part IV reviews what can be learned from this research and its exemplars by those eager to take on youth and community development. Through all four sections of this resource guide runs the importance of working with the media and other public entities to correct misperceptions about what young people need, want, and can do.

Local citizens'parents, educators, policymakers, and businesses'make up the primary audiences for this resource guide. Within these groups are those who recognize that the future moral and social fiber of communities depends on responding thoughtfully to challenges that the new economy places on key institutions. With this recognition comes the worrisome realization that it is young people who feel current societal changes most significantly. Increasing numbers of children and youth beyond the age of eight spend no more than a few minutes weekly with adults who give them positive support in joint activities. Families, schools, religious organizations, and government can no longer fully meet the learning needs of young people who must have opportunities to talk, test, and apply the ideas and skills they gain in school. These key societal institutions have become overburdened and unable to adapt to changes in patterns of time allotment within households of two working parents or single parents. An institutional gap exists, and it affects youth and the future of their communities.

The sweep of advances in technology and communication constantly shifts rhythms, structures, and values of daily life in post-industrial societies. It is now not unusual for young people in and beyond middle childhood to spend far more time each day mediating their communications through machines than in direct face-to-face contact. These young people are drawn to the unprecedented access to information, distant correspondents, and creative possibilities in manipulation of software and hardware. Absent in these attractions are fundamentals on which key institutions have prided themselves: sustained guidance of caring experts, long stretches of give-and-take conversation, exchange of personal stories; and success and failure in the heat of a shared work project, and, most important, high expectations of social responsibility.

These essentials have always come in the midst of daily routines of family and community, but with the realities of work in the new economy, many of the interactions and values have fallen away to be replaced, if at all, by occasional help with homework, family attendance at spectator events, and quick visits with relatives. However, important as these latter interactions are, they cannot take the place of sustained guidance, time for conversation, and persistent faith in the positive capacities of youth.

Changes in workplace challenges and family opportunities place especially difficult demands on those who live in communities without adequate access to technology or jobs that pay livable wages. As the income distance between the rich and the poor grows, young people across all income levels hold similar fascinations with buying, seeing, or doing the latest. Fashion popular culture, and leisure equipment companies target those between the ages of eight and twenty-eight in age-segments'each of which receives special marketing and advertising. Viewed as consumers concerned most about appearances, these groupings of "tweens," "teens," and beyond receive almost no attention as resources, assets, and producers for their families and communities. This report draws attention to the intense desire of the young to be visibly active, to have time with friends, and to be caught up in a flow of focused energy that is supportively channeled by those whose experience has given wisdom as well as expertise. Community organizations that recognize these needs offer the young responsible roles, youth learning challenges, and travel and contact opportunities. Adults and older youth members in these organizations accept that young people, especially those in economically disadvantaged communities, need to be needed. If they can work to improve basic social goods through work in the arts, on environmental projects, and by mentoring younger children, they find it natural to draw heavily on skills and knowledge gained in school. They build out from these educational foundations to action, creativity, and reflection. The activities that go on within these organizations embed extensive practice of skills and habits that employment and effective family life increasingly demand: teamwork, persistent effort, self-monitoring, creative problem-posing and problem-solving, and negotiative argument and critique.

As these nonprofit organizations and their youth increasingly realize the hazards of being dependent on grants and charitable contributions, they look to their own skills and knowledge to generate earned income for support. These efforts enable social entrepreneurial ventures that introduce apprenticeship possibilities, legitimate business experience, and the realities of market needs and client satisfaction. Lessons gained from participation in extended projects, public performances, authentic audience and client critique, and cost-benefit realities stick with learners.

The key challenge this resource guide addresses is how to join youth and their communities in organizations where young people and supportive adults learn, teach, and create, as well as help build economic opportunities for youth in their own neighborhoods. Meeting this challenge brings still other needs:

• redrawing public and media images of youth and their potential
• rethinking the kinds of activities that create the richest learning activities in the nonschool hours.
• finding ways to grow a professional fields for those who work in community youth organizations
• building attitudes and expectations for new kinds of collaborations to support these organizations
• being increasingly creative about funding sources that support the social and human capital investment of young people as they follow-through on projects while they also develop new initiatives.

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