Youthbuild USA

Background on Comprehensive Approaches

The history of public-funded youth programs in the United States is the history of separate, small-scale efforts and fragmentation. Starting with Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and the Neighborhood Youth Corps, youth policies in this country have largely been problem centered, focused on services designed to respond to single issues (e.g., youth unemployment, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, violence, dropouts) rather than taking a comprehensive approach to deal with a range of issues and opportunities to help young people mature and prosper. Each funding stream established by policymakers, while well intentioned, has its own sense of what is needed, performance standards for writing contracts and reimbursing youth programs, particular calendars, and favorite models. Youth program managers have long lamented the inevitable fragmentation that occurs, with the result that most youth programs settle on a bureaucratized niche in which to run their programs and find it difficult to cobble together the resources to respond to problems presented by young people, especially those problems that may lie outside the agency's core mission.

In response to this fragmentation and lack of comprehensiveness in youth programs, many individual programs have adopted a “youth development” perspective to signal a more comprehensive and developmental approach to youth programming (Flay, 2003). Yet even with this change in rhetoric, the actual program models used often look more like the past “deficit” models than new, age-appropriate comprehensive models of programming. In practice, exceptional programs have responded to fragmentation and promoted comprehensiveness in several ways.

First, many programs use information and referral systems to connect their young people to other programs in the community. Of course, the problem here concerns access issues; that is, it is often unknown whether the sending agency's young person will actually obtain the services required though another agency. Partially in response to this challenge, youth programs not only devise information and referral systems but also try to collaborate with one another through youth agency councils or other collaborative structures. The aim is to promote cross-referrals and generally to educate one another about the program opportunities in the community.

A second response is to co-locate services in one facility so that “shopping” for youth services becomes easier. Examples of this strategy include the schoolbased, social service movement “full-service schools,” whereby comprehensiveness is promoted by bringing youth workers from mental health and other sectors into the schools (Dryfoos, 1994; Ford Foundation and International Youth Foundation, 1997). Another manifestation of this strategy is the United States Department of Labor's ambitious attempt to form community-based “one-stop” centers through their Youth Opportunity grants, a multicity demonstration now slated to end.

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