Comprehensive Community Initiatives for Positive Youth Development

While Comprehensive Community Initiatives (CCIs) provide promising avenues to support the positive development of all young people, research findings assessing the relation between CCIs and community-level child and youth outcomes have been mixed. Although there are exceptions, few evaluations on the impact of CCIs on positive youth development have been conducted. In this edited collection, the authors draw on the field of developmental science to provide a basis for why CCIs are a powerful tool for providing all young people with opportunities to thrive. The collection begins with a brief history of CCIs and their impacts to illustrate why a developmental framework is needed, followed by a discussion of the editors’ proposed framework. Each chapter that follows offers some of the most rigorous research and extant knowledge of CCIs. In the final chapter, the editors provide recommendations for future research that can systematically explore the impact of CCIs, better indicating their effectiveness and offering proven strategies that can be implemented in varying contexts. Altogether, this collection offers researchers and practitioners in the field a means by which to better incorporate theory into the vision and practices of CCIs and, as such, the tools to better measure the outcomes of the CCIs.

Jonathan F. Zaff, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of the Center for Promise, the research institute of America’s Promise Alliance housed at Boston University’s School of Education. He leads research initiatives that examine how to create the conditions so that all youth can thrive academically, socially, and civically.

Elizabeth Pufall Jones, Ph.D., is a Qualitative Research Scientist at the Center for Promise at Boston University’s School of Education. Her research focuses on the processes and contexts associated with a multicultural individual’s navigation and negotiation of the multiple cultural worlds in which they live.

Alice E. Donlan, Ph.D., is a Quantitative Research Scientist for the Center for Promise. Her research focuses on adolescent social development and peer influences in school, with the goal of understanding how supportive relationships are built, and how those relationships promote positive youth development.

Sara Anderson, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Children in the U.S. at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She is the lead analyst on the long-term follow up of the Tulsa pre-K study. Her research interests include pre-K, residential mobility, and neighborhood effects.