Growing evidence suggests that Positive Youth Development (PYD), a holistic approach to developing assets and competencies, can help prepare young people for success in adulthood, including success in the workplace. At its core, PYD focuses on creating a supportive, developmentally appropriate learning setting by emphasizing positive…

In this paper, I discuss one photograph from a youth who participated in a 12-week arts based educational program I facilitated for Indigenous Young Adults at the Native Youth Drop-In centre in Toronto, Canada. By being able to communicate through their artwork, the youth shifted away from thinking of themselves as victims, and exuded a sense of…

This past winter, the third student-run homeless shelter in the United States came into being. Two recent Harvard graduates, Sam Greenberg and Sarah Rosenkrantz, who had volunteered at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter as college students, saw a need within the Boston and Cambridge communities for a homeless shelter serving young adults. Drawing…

This chapter describes developmental needs of emerging young adults and how they are often met, or not met, in faith communities. The author offers recommendations for creating better connections with today's emerging young adults.

A striking convergence of research, documentation, commentary, and policy in the past five years strongly suggests that an almost exclusive focus on academic knowledge and skills is an incomplete solution. Additional behaviors, skills, and mindsets--sometimes called metacognitive skills or 21st-century skills--are just as necessary for academic…

In this article, the authors analyze representations of social issues within contemporary memoirs written for and marketed to a young adult audience and multimodal zines produced by homeless youth. To read across these distinctly different texts (mass marketed and do-it-yourself cultural productions) and genres (memoir and zines), the authors…

What does it take to deliver WorkReady Philadelphia's high-quality career-connected programming? In short, it's all about the "elements"--those essential components of the system that combine to produce success for young people. This 2011-12 WorkReady report reinforces this theme by using visual aspects of the "Periodic Table of…

Brazil's National History Museum in Rio de Janeiro is reaching out to the most marginalized young people and establishing itself as an important partner in offering them alternatives to a life of crime and addiction. The target population for its programs includes disenfranchised children and young people aged 10 to 20--those living in the…

For the past six years in Winnipeg, Canada, young people from diverse Aboriginal backgrounds have been volunteering their time, energy, and talents to develop and deliver after-school physical activity, nutrition, and education programs for children in their school's neighbourhood. Known as "Rec and Read," the after-school activities are…

Chance, a word used in various languages to refer to "possibility" or "opportunity", is the name that was intentionally chosen for a project which has been running for 11 years in Naples and is aimed at young people aged 15-17 who have dropped out of compulsory schooling. Despite being based on a school structure and located…

Despite a 50-year interdisciplinary and longitudinal research legacy--showing that nearly 80% of young people considered most "at risk" thrive by midlife--only recently have practitioners/researchers engaged in the explicit, prospective facilitation of "resilience" in educational settings. Here, theory/knowledge distinguishing…

More than 32,000 young people in the United States exit the foster care system in a typical year by aging out to independence (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2011). Despite available financial support for post-secondary education through the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999, only 20% of college-qualified foster youth attend college and…

Young people with learning and behaviour disabilities often leave school without transition planning. When planning does occur, there is generally a discrepancy between the goals of students, parents, and professionals. Students requiring higher levels of support may not even be included in the planning process and transition plans are often…

Against a background of low literacy among many Jamaican children and young adults, the Learn-to-Read-Read-to-Learn @ Your Library was launched by the Jamaica Library Service and the Library and Information Association of Jamaica. The year-long program seeks to develop creative and literate learners through reading, writing and artistic…

The policy commitment in England to raise the participation age (RPA) for continuing in learning for all 17-year olds from 2013 and for all 18-year olds from 2015, brings with it the responsibility of ensuring that education and training are available, accessible and relevant to the needs of all types of learners. In recent years, little policy…