No undergraduate or postgraduate programmes currently exist for the professional education of informal educators. The authors outline the development of previous programmes and consider the emergence of informal education as a discrete concept. The article then highlights some key failings in the professional education of informal educators and…

The Young Mothers Support Group program was designed to engage pregnant teens and young mothers in a youth-driven program tailored to meet their identified needs. Central to the success of the program were the premises that young women would engage in healthy relationships with adults and peers within the program, and were able to actively…

While research on program effectiveness offers ample evidence that afterschool programs can benefit young people in a variety of ways, this same body of research demonstrates that not all programs are equally effective (Granger, 2008). Some programs show positive results in many or all major outcome categories. Other programs are associated with…

Urban conservation and service corps units, which provide jobs to disadvantaged youth and engage them in activities beneficial to the wider society, such as building or restoring city facilities, are discussed in this document, which contains two separate reports. Report 1 describes the origin and basic features of urban corps programs in New York…

Belize (formerly British Honduras) has achieved a good deal of success with its Rural Education and Agriculture Programme (REAP). REAP was initiated in 1976 to create the attitudes and provide the skills necessary for rural youth to make meaningful contributions to the country's agricultural development. Initiated by an intraministerial and…

This workshop report deals with developing a youth service corps. Twenty-nine representatives from 15 youth corps attended the workshop, the second in a series of six sponsored by the Youth Corps Exchange Project. The report begins with an overview of the highlights of the workshop. The second section, which discusses the need for human services,…

A study was made of the Washington Agricultural Extension Service from 1912 to 1961 to identify and interpret the changing administrative structure, program content, methods and techniques, relationships with other organizations and agencies, fundamental changes in ways of deciding educational content, influences of the Extension Service on…

Youth monitoring and self evaluation services were developed for fourteen youth programs in the Eastern Region, the mid-Western Region and the Western Region of the United States. The concept of youth involvement is central to these fourteen projects. Youth involvement is defined as "initial participation by project beneficiaries in the…

This paper is intended to help program developers to initiate or refine school-based, self-contained delinquency prevention programs. These programs are limited, short-term efforts to minimize delinquent behavior among youth by creating school situations in which the factors that contribute to delinquent behavior are reduced. Designed as an…

In 1985, the Chancellor of West Valley College met with California Attorney General John Van De Kamp to explore methods by which the community college district could respond to the growing problem of drug abuse. The first step was the establishment of a 15-hour, fee-supported class on drug and alcohol abuse education for adult offenders at the…

A detailed profile of the largest fresh-air education program in the country for disadvantaged youth -- Sea Ventures -- is provided in this document. Created entirely through the effort of volunteers, Sea Ventures provides learning opportunities that go beyond occupying youngsters. This multi-racial/lingual juvenile delinquency prevention program…

While significant progress has occurred over the past several years regarding the expansion of the quantity and quality of after-school opportunities, the ambitious idea of "after-school for all" remains a distant goal. In this commentary, we push beyond some of the numbers to take a close look at questions related to access and equity,…

This document chronicles the experience of the National Training Institute (NTI) for Community Youth Work and four of its Building Exemplary Systems for Training Youth Workers (BEST) affiliates in establishing youth development practitioner apprenticeship (YDPA) programs. Part 1 describes the work of NTI and BEST intermediary organizations to lay…