Supportive developmental systems for children and youth: A theoretical framework for comprehensive community initiatives

Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 40 (2015) 1–7

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Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology

Supportive developmental systems for children and youth: A theoretical framework for comprehensive community initiatives Jonathan F. Zaff b, Alice E. Donlan a, Elizabeth Pufall Jones a,⁎, Emily S. Lin a a b

Tufts University, United States America's Promise Alliance, United States

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Available online 2 May 2015 Keywords: Comprehensive community initiatives Positive youth development Youth system

a b s t r a c t This special issue gathers comprehensive community initiative (CCI) researchers to discuss findings from cutting-edge research and provide directions for future work. To introduce the special issue, this article provides a brief review of the existing research on CCIs and the current CCI movement. Further, we recommend a conceptual framework for the study and implementation of CCIs based on relational developmental systems theories of development (e.g., Overton, 2013), wherein the developmental system for youth comprises key developmental supports that a young person needs to thrive and recognizes the agency of the youth. When the developmental supports across these contexts are aligned with the strengths and needs of each young person, a supportive youth system is formed. We argue that using a theory of change consistent with this framework will increase the likelihood that a CCI will have a positive impact on children and youth. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Pervasive inequalities exist in the United States across academic, health, social, and civic outcomes. Historically, these inequalities have disproportionately affected low-income communities and communities of color (Sampson & Bean, 2005; Wilson, 2013), and often leave these communities without much-needed resources. This lack of resources has resulted in disparities in multiple types of outcomes, including lower high school graduation and college enrollment rates, as compared with high-income, predominately white communities (America's Promise Alliance, 2014; Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, 2014). To close these gaps, policymakers, foundations, and practitioners have looked to comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) as a means to understand the needs and strengths of individuals and their communities, to strengthen the capacity of the community to address those needs and strengths, and subsequently, to attend to the complex needs and strengths of children and youth. Predominantly, youth-focused CCIs have been used to support youth growing up in low-income and historically disenfranchised communities, where these pervasive inequalities exist (Lin & Zaff, 2010). CCIs are based in communities, organized by a group of institutions and individuals, and tailored to support a given community's unique strengths and needs, with the intention of organizing multiple actors to pursue a common agenda toward a common goal or goals (Kubisch, Auspos, Brown, & Dewar, 2010). When those goals are oriented toward young people, CCIs can position themselves to create the conditions within which all young people in a community have the opportunity

⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (E. Pufall Jones).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2015.03.004 0193-3973/© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

to thrive (academically, socially, emotionally, physically, vocationally, and civically). Ideally, CCIs create a sustained coordination of organizations and agencies that have a shared vision, agenda, and goal(s) for a community, where those at the collective table work together to restrict duplication of services, and match community needs to organizations' capacities (Backer, 2003; Kubisch, 2010; Fishman, Farrell, Allen, & Eiseman, 2000), thus building an infrastructure that supports systemic, communitywide change. Indeed, a strong infrastructure enables a community to provide tangible benefits to children, youth and families (even if specific direct-service programs are not sustained) by directing existing or new resources to the needs of the community's population (Mancini & Marek, 2004). In other words, if one program closes, a high-quality CCI can compensate by identifying the need quickly, and leveraging other resources to meet it. In addition, a CCI can identify and more efficiently address additional needs by coordinating services and supports or developing new ones. What we believe is missing from the literature on CCIs is a framework that provides a clear rationale for implementing youth-focused CCIs and that recognizes the agency of youth in their own development. Relational developmental systems models (RDS; Overton, 2013) may be the most appropriate model to guide the development of CCIs. As detailed below, from the RDS perspective, development is defined by the mutually influential relations between an individual and his or her context. Therefore, an RDS framework would provide a theoretical structure for researchers to use to examine how and whether the conditions in a community meet the developmental needs and leverage the strengths of children, youth, and families. An RDS framework would also provide a shared understanding from which practitioners can build a body of practical

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knowledge. In light of these benefits, this article provides a link between RDS theory and research on CCIs to understand why CCIs are an appropriate method for supporting young people and how development occurs within community contexts. We posit that implementing strategies that are guided by an RDS framework should increase the likelihood that a CCI will optimize the developmental outcomes for each young person in a CCI community. We also introduce the articles in this special issue, which represent some of the cutting-edge of research and theory on youth-focused CCIs. Our purpose is to describe CCIs as a potentially powerful means for supporting young people, particularly young people growing up in economically disadvantaged communities, and highlight how an RDS framework can complement and strengthen existing efforts and optimize their outcomes. This introductory article is not focused on the structures and processes of the CCI that can lead to success (e.g., building trust among CCI members, creating a shared mission, vision, goals, and accountability, developing protocols so that entities within a community work together). While we recognize that structures and processes can have substantive impacts on the outcomes the CCIs seek to achieve (Brown, Hawkins, Arthur, Abbott, & Van Horn, 2008), our focus is on theoretical and empirical guidance that CCIs can use, once sufficient structures and processes are in place to act, so that they are more likely to achieve their goals. Previous research findings assessing the relations among CCI strategies and community-level child and youth outcomes have been mixed (for an exception, see Hawkins et al., 2009). Therefore, we believe that while prior efforts have been thoughtful and wellintentioned, they have not taken the developmental needs and assets of youth and families into account, resulting in limited efficacy. The other, complementary articles in this special issue provide additional guidance on the formal and informal processes and structures that CCIs can implement to increase their chance of success. Overall, there has been little systematic research done to evaluate the impact of CCIs on positive youth development (Lin & Zaff, 2010). The majority of CCI evaluation efforts have shown little effect on targeted community-level outcomes such as poverty reduction or educational achievement (Lin & Zaff, 2010), but a few studies have shown declines in alcohol, drug, and tobacco use, and violence (e.g., Hawkins et al., 2009). One possible reason for the lack of optimal outcomes is that many community leaders create CCIs, and determine the strategies they will use, before understanding the needs and strengths of a community or without establishing an underlying developmental theory for why their strategies would be beneficial. In contrast, we argue that if the needs and resources are taken into account when planning and implementing a CCI, and solutions are designed based on developmental system theories and research, the efforts will be more likely to optimize community-level outcomes. The following section uses a developmental systems perspective to describe why CCIs are potentially important mechanisms for change. Starting from the inside out: Children develop within a system of relationships To understand how CCIs may lead to beneficial changes in developmental outcomes, we start with young people at the center of a diverse ecosystem, and appreciate the interdependent, individual strengths, relationships, and contexts that shape development (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). Human development is characterized by the dynamic relation(s) between an individual and her or his context (Lerner, 2013; Overton, 2013), and adaptive developmental regulations (i.e., mutually beneficial relations between a person and his or her context; Lerner, 2004) are more likely to occur when contextual supports are aligned with individual characteristics (Brandstädter, 1998). Examples of outcomes that have been achieved by such alignment include higher rates of academic achievement, civic engagement, and prosocial behaviors, and lower rates of incarceration and teen parenthood (Benson, Scales, Hamilton, & Sesma, 2006; Cunha & Heckman, 2006; Scales et al., 2008).

In addition, consistent with the idea of mutually beneficial relations, young people who benefit from the developmental supports apparent in their ecologies are more likely to give back to and improve their communities and broader societies (Zaff, Hart, Flanagan, Youniss & Levine, 2010). Defining development as the relations between youth and context as does not imply that “context” is homogeneous. Instead, as expressed by the Bioecological Framework (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), an instantiation of RDS theories, youth are embedded within a multilayered ecology (from the most proximal relationships with parents, peers, and other adults in a community, to schools and youth development centers, to the more distal such as public policy and cultural norms), with the person–context relation occurring among all of these layers. Building off of the Bioecological Framework, the Phenomenological Variant on Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST; Spenser, 2006) proposes that a primary component of a developmental system is the self-system; the individual's meaning making process as related to their lived experiences. Thus, as Spencer and colleagues (e.g., Spenser, 2006; Spencer, Dupree & Hartman, 1997) suggest, growing up in adverse, stress-inducing environments (e.g., having few developmental supports and exposed to high levels of violence and racism; Spenser, 2006), is detrimental to how youth perceive themselves and to the development of their self-systems. The meaning attributed to these experiences and the self subsequently, and recursively, negatively impact the individual's relation with their surrounding environment. Thus, theory and research suggest that development is optimized when supports across multiple contexts within a community are brought into alignment with the needs and strengths of the children and youth in the community (Brandstädter, 1998; Eccles & Gootman, 2002; Eccles et al., 1993; Nation et al., 2003; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). A child and youth-focused applied extension of these RDS models is what we call a youth system; the set of key developmental supports that a young person needs to thrive that are present across and within contexts (family, school, and all aspects of a community). When these supports are brought into alignment with the needs and strengths of a young person in a community, a youth system becomes a supportive youth system (Zaff, 2011). For example, when a young person struggles in math, parents, teachers, peers, and school administrators could potentially provide supports that capitalize on conceptual and behavioral aspects of a youth's life experience to contribute to success, such as a culturally appropriate formal and informal curricula (Cooper, 2011). A task for CCIs, then, is to create the conditions so that all young people in a community experience a supportive youth system. Consistent with the tenets of RDS theories (Lerner, 2013; Overton, 2013), we propose that a supportive youth system: 1. Recognizes and encourages the inherent agency of youth and their families (e.g., in deciding what is best and most viable for their own families and future goals); 2. Incorporates the multiple contexts within which youth develop (e.g., school, home, community) and provides complementary supports across these contexts and aligned across time; and 3. Is comprised of the entire ecology within which a young person lives and grows, including informal developmental contexts (e.g., the culture of a neighborhood or the power of peer influences) and formal institutions (e.g., youth development organizations, schools, social services). Lerner (2013) proposes that because there are potentially infinite combinations of individual–context relations, it should be possible to find combinations that form ecologies that provide supports consonant with a given individual's characteristics, resulting in adaptive developmental regulations (Brandstädter, 1998). This interindividual variation (or diversity) in intraindividual change (i.e., within person development) becomes the basis for why CCIs are a potentially powerful intervention to create the conditions to support all young people. Thus, youth-focused CCIs are positioned to create the conditions within a community to support its young people. Instead of focusing on one or a few discrete programs that might only provide opportunities for a subset of youth in the community, a CCI has the potential to alter organizational, policy,

J.F. Zaff et al. / Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 40 (2015) 1–7

and other community-level factors to create the opportunities for its young people. A supportive youth system is not comprised of low-quality developmental contexts. Indeed, an array of complementary, low quality aspects of contexts will likely only exacerbate the probability of negative developmental outcomes. Instead, a supportive youth system provides youth with the building blocks of positive youth development; the key developmental resources within a young person's ecology that the young person needs to thrive (Benson, 2002). We define building blocks as the expectations, relevant experiences, boundaries, and/or nurturing supports that encourage youths' abilities to set goals, navigate toward those goals, and negotiate opportunities and barriers in reaching those goals. Multiple frameworks of building blocks have been proposed as heuristics and testable models for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and the general public. The Five Promises from America's Promise Alliance (Scales et al., 2008), 40 Developmental Assets from Search Institute (Benson et al., 2006), the Social Development Model (Hawkins et al., 2009), the National Research Council's Features of Positive Developmental Settings (Eccles & Gootman, 2002), and the factors distilled by James Connell and colleagues (Connell, Gambone, & Smith, 2001) are five examples of such frameworks (see Table 1). Underlying these frameworks are general features that promote positive outcomes across the contexts of family, school, and the broader community: • Relationships that provide support and guidance for children (e.g., parents, teachers, other adults in the community and formal mentors); • Meaningful, substantive and skill-building opportunities in and out of school; • Safe and healthy environments in and out of the home; • Opportunities for young people to make a difference in the community to give them a sense of agency as well as a sense of purpose about something that is greater than themselves; and • Sufficient structure and positive social norms that help to guide a young person's behavior. In some communities, particularly those with economic advantages, there is a higher likelihood that supportive youth systems are developed through the resources of the family and neighborhood without intervention (Dupere, Leventhal, Crosnoe, & Dion, 2010; Lareau, 2003; c.f., Luthar, 2003). In such communities, high quality schools tend to be the norm and these communities are typically filled with enrichment programs, offered both through a plethora of non-profits and through the municipality (e.g., Houston & Ong, 2013). In high-resource communities, safe green spaces, grocery stores with fresh fruit and vegetables, and easy access to health care are commonplace (Carter & Welner, 2013). The confluence of these benefits makes a supportive youth

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system more likely for each of the young people growing up in such a community, though not inevitable (e.g., see Luthar & Latendresse, 2005). In historically disenfranchised communities, however, access to key developmental resources and opportunities to thrive are limited. School resources are stretched thin (Duncan & Murnane, 2011), the presence of gangs and incidents of violence tend to be high (Howell & Eagley, 2005; Morenoff, Sampson, & Raudenbush, 2001; Wilson, 1987), low proportions of adults have completed post-secondary education (Crowder & South, 2003), communities are often without access to healthy food, and health care is out of reach or incomplete (Vlahov et al., 2007). Given these barriers, parents may not have the experience or the capacity to navigate the few opportunities that may be available for their children (Jarrett, 1999). Thus, for many young people in historically disenfranchised and under-resourced communities, efforts outside of the family could help to facilitate the construction of supportive youth systems that are able to meet the young people's needs and support their strengths. Creating a supportive youth system is different from just putting more (and even better) programs into a community. Consider the following hypothetical scenario: In Community A (which has sustained and concentrated poverty), a high-achieving, high-quality charter school opens; the neighborhood YMCA is refurbished and enriched with additional slots and high quality programs; and a community health center opens providing comprehensive physical and mental health and dental services. Although there are a variety of new and/or strengthened supports at the community level, a cohort of children from the community might enroll in the charter school, while another cohort participates in programming at the YMCA, and another subset accesses the health care services at the health center. There might be some overlap among these cohorts, but generally the young people will experience only a few of the crucial supports they need (America's Promise Alliance, 2006). In contrast, a supportive youth system is comprised of developmental supports that are positioned to attend to the strengths and needs of each young person, such that each young person experiences the full set of building blocks that he or she needs to achieve positive developmental outcomes. Building blocks are not only delivered through formal programs; relationships with parents, peers, and non-parent adults, collective efficacy and norms in a community, neighborhood safety, and green space are all examples of informal modes for delivering developmental supports. Importantly, a supportive youth system hinges on the recognition of the agency possessed by all young people and their families. Thus, the solution to creating a supportive youth system is not just to create more programs, but also to create opportunities that are responsive to what young people want and need to resolve difficulties in their lives and to achieve goals that they are pursuing. To offer another hypothetical example, in Community B an assessment is conducted to identify the needs and strengths of the youth as well as the capacity of the community to fulfill those needs and strengths. New opportunities and

Table 1 Examples of positive youth development frameworks. Fundamental factor

Caring relationships Skill building

Safe and healthy environments Opportunities to make a difference Structure and positive social norms

Term for each factor by youth developmental framework Five Promises (Scales et al., 2008) Caring adults

National Research Council (Eccles & Gootman, 2002) Supportive relationships

40 Developmental Assets (Benson et al., 2006) Support

Effective education

Opportunities for skill building

Constructive use of time; commitment to learning

Safe and constructive use of time; healthy start Opportunities to make a difference

Physical and psychological safety

–

Opportunities to belong; support for efficacy and mattering Appropriate structure; positive social norms

Empowerment

Safe and constructive use of time

Constructive use of time;

Connell (Connell et al., 2001) Multiple supportive relationships with adults and peers Challenging and engaging activities and learning experiences Adequate nutrition, health, and shelter; physical and emotional safety Meaningful opportunities for involvement and membership

Social Development Model (Hawkins et al., 2009) Bonding Social competence; behavioral competence; cognitive competence Spirituality

Opportunities for prosocial involvement Healthy beliefs; clear standards

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experiences are created, such as those described for Community A. However, instead of assuming an “if we build it, they will come” mentality, the community leaders interview families, teachers, youth workers, social workers, and others in the community in order to understand what each child and family needs. The leaders in Community B then provide trainings and work with families to build both the providers' and the families' ability to access and develop the opportunities and experiences for support. For example, a “community navigator” could be tasked with coordinating supports for a cohort of families and keeping track of how well these supports meet each young person's needs, and how these supports might change in order to meet changing needs. Much is known about what young people need and ways to meet those needs. Ample research has attempted to isolate the effects of particular delivery systems on developmental outcomes. For example, after-school programs, mentoring and parenting programs, and school improvement initiatives have been evaluated and shown, at least to some extent, to provide the full set or a subset of the building blocks described above (see Eccles & Gootman, 2002 and Zaff & Smerdon, 2009 for reviews). However, knowing “what works” has not historically meant knowing which delivery system, or strategy, is appropriate for which young person during which period of the young person's development and within which community. Thus, more research is needed to understand the most appropriate and adaptive methods for connecting individuals to resources within their community contexts (e.g., Dodge, 2011). More recent studies have extended these ideas by looking at the additive, interactive, and even multiplicative effects of multiple delivery systems (see Zaff & Smerdon, 2009 for a review). The evidence from such studies and the strong theoretical grounding provided by RDS theories (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Lerner, 2013; Overton, 2013) leads us to propose that a supportive youth system is an appropriate framework for constructing community change efforts that will achieve transformational change for youth. Community-level actions create the conditions to optimize delivery systems so that all young people have access to the supports and initiatives that are appropriate for them. CCIs can help coordinate these supports and initiatives. By taking a community-wide approach instead of a program-level approach, CCIs are positioned to create the conditions for all young people to access the delivery systems and experience the building blocks they need to thrive. A different theoretical framework, prevention science, has traditionally been used to inform the work of a CCI. Prevention science is based on research and theory that asserts that a collection of interrelated risk and protective factors in multiple contexts (e.g., home, school, community) contribute to the likelihood that youth will engage in an array of negative health behaviors (e.g., alcohol and drug use, unprotected sex, violence and other forms of delinquency), and influence academic trajectories (e.g., Battin-Pearson, Newcomb, Abbott, Hill, Catalano & Hawkins, 2000; Guerra & Bradshaw, 2008; Jessor & Jessor, 1977). That is, young people experience varying levels of risk (e.g., low-quality schools, unsafe neighborhoods, traumatic life experiences) and protection (e.g., supportive parents, caring school climate), which work in concert to predict a youth's educational, social, and health outcomes (Biglan, Mrazek, Carnine & Flay, 2003; Durlak, 1998). Thus, according to this perspective, increasing the protective factors that young people experience could positively impact multiple outcomes over their lifetimes. Once risk and protective factors are identified for a given set of outcomes, interventions can be designed and implemented by policymakers and practitioners to manipulate “upstream” factors that impact “downstream” outcomes (e.g., Hawkins, 2006). CCIs explicitly using this framework to guide planning have shown positive, long-term impacts (Hawkins, 2006; Redmond, Spoth, Shin, Schainker, Greenberg & Feinberg, 2009). However, we argue that when these CCIs implement programs in silos and the programs do not necessarily complement each other, they become more similar to Community A (providing services without asking if they are necessary, unresponsive to community needs) instead of Community B (engaged with the community, aligned and interactive with community members). In addition, prevention

science does not explicitly focus on the agency of the youth and families in communities. Again, rather than insinuating that prevention science, or other perspectives, are the wrong approach for CCIs, we posit that a supportive youth system framework based on developmental systems theories would support and optimize the positive youth development outcomes sought by prevention science and other perspectives. In the next section, we provide a brief history of CCIs and discuss the findings from a selection of large-scale evaluations and reflect on how the history of CCI implementation is consonant and dissonant with a supportive youth system framework. A brief history of CCIs and their impacts The history of place-based efforts to promote youth development is long. One of the earliest urban community change initiatives in the United States came in the form of Hull House, a settlement house founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in Chicago in 1889, which provided medical, social welfare, economic, housing, child care, and educational services to families throughout the Near Westside of Chicago. Local, state, and federal anti-poverty programs that followed, such as the New Deal programs, Urban Renewal, Model Cities, and the Community Development Block Grants, frequently included a focus on improving the lives of young people. The 1980s and 1990s brought a convergence between social change efforts for young people and social science research. Philanthropic organizations like the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation all embarked on ambitious, multi-year, multi-million dollar initiatives to support community collaborations to combat poverty and its negative social correlates for young people (Kubisch et al., 2002). Simultaneously, the call for efficiency and accountability in large-scale social programs grew louder from government spending critics, as well as from funders (Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, 2008). This convergence produced an increase in research on community change efforts (e.g., Kubisch et al., 2010). Within the past decade, the public and private sectors have mobilized an emerging movement to catalyze and support CCIs that typically use a prevention science approach to guide their work. America's Promise Alliance's 100 Best Communities for Young People and GradNation Communities, the Forum for Youth Investment's Ready by 21 initiative, the Strive Partnership, and Purpose Built Communities are a few examples of non-profits that promote and support child and youth-focused CCIs that design complementary developmental supports across contexts. In addition, inspired by the work of the Harlem Children's Zone, a CCI in New York City that creates a birth-to-college pipeline (Dobbie & Fryer, 2011), the U.S. Department of Education created the Promise Neighborhoods Initiative (PNI, U.S. Department of Education, n.d.). The PNI was designed to incentivize communities to design and implement CCIs that improve educational and developmental outcomes of the children and youth in communities throughout the country. More specifically, the framework of the PNI includes creating a college-going culture through the creation of a continuum of academic programs and family and community supports. The first round of planning grants was awarded to 21 communities in Fall, 2010, with additional rounds in 2011 and 2012. Larger implementation grants were awarded to a sub-set of the planning grant communities. However, numerous non-funded PNI-inspired communities have continued their work, leveraging local funding sources (U.S. Department of Education, n.d.). Other initiatives from the White House and federal agencies complement the PNI. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development created Choice Neighborhoods (CN), the next generation of the federal Hope VI program to turn dilapidated public housing into more inviting mixed-income housing (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, n.d.). In addition to a focus on housing, CN provides supports and services to youth and families to improve youth educational outcomes, and is dedicated to improving neighborhood conditions so that

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more businesses will invest in the neighborhoods. The first funded communities for CN were announced in 2011, with $122 million awarded to five sites (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, n.d.). The White House Council for Community Solutions (2012) recommended that CCIs should be encouraged as a key lever for community-level change, particularly around issues of youth who are not in school and not in the workforce. The recommendations of the Council were put into action by the subsequent creation of the Aspen Forum for Community Solutions at the Aspen Institute. At the time of this writing, the Forum has provided two rounds of planning and implementation grants to 21 communities throughout the country to focus on disconnected youth (Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions, 2014). While there is an emerging movement of CCIs based on a belief that they provide promising avenues to alleviating the consequences of inequality, research on CCIs aiming to improve the well-being of young people has typically focused more on the structure of the collaboration than on effectiveness. That is, there is much discussion in the literature on whether the members of a collaboration communicate well with each other, trust each other, share a set of common goals, and optimally, begin to work together (Granner & Sharpe, 2004; Zakocs & Edwards, 2006). However, there is a dearth of research on the implementation of strategies that evolve out of the collaboration and the subsequent impacts of those strategies (see Hawkins et al., 2009; Spoth, Guyll, Redmond, Greenberg, & Feinberg, 2011 for notable exceptions). Among those evaluations that have examined impacts on community-level, child and youth outcomes, the results have been mixed (Kubisch, Auspos, Brown, Buck & Dewar, 2011). In addition, there are other initiatives that are showing great promise and progress, but which have not necessarily used methodologies that allow for making causal conclusions, and there are countless initiatives that, anecdotally, are making great strides, but have not employed a systematic evaluation. However, next we will discuss lessons from the CCIs that provide support for the notion that using an underlying RDS theory to design and build strategies will make it more likely that CCIs provide the comprehensive supports that each young person in a community needs, and create community-level impacts on youth development. In 1988, The Annie E. Casey Foundation funded the New Futures Initiative, which focused on strengthening community collaboration to improve educational achievement and youth employment rates, and reduce teen pregnancy rates (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2000). Five cities (Dayton, Ohio; Lawrence, Massachusetts; Little Rock, Arkansas; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Savannah, Georgia) developed five-year plans to reach these outcomes. The combined budget for these cities was expected to reach over $100 million, including matching funds (Joe & Nelson, 1989). After the first three years of the initiative, Wehlage, Smith, and Lipman (1992) found that the actions taken by the communities supplemented the ongoing practices in the schools, but did not alter the schools. After five years, measurable progress toward the initial goals was questionable. All of the cities had increased high school dropout rates, except Little Rock, which showed increased middle school dropout rates. Youth in New Futures schools had greater declines in math and reading scores than youth in non-participating schools (Center for the Study of Social Policy, 1995). Reasons for the lack of positive impact have been attributed to the difficulty and complexity of implementing CCIs, as well as a lack of the persistence needed to keep the efforts moving forward. The difficulties in building the necessary structures and processes for a successful CCI are beyond the scope of this paper, but we refer readers to Kubisch et al. (2010) for a review of the difficulties (and opportunities) that CCIs face. More fundamentally, a question has been raised about whether a CCI could be expected to overcome a lack of economic opportunity and a dearth of social capital (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2000). Finally, researchers found what they considered to be a fallible theory across the communities; the communities assumed that interventions needed to alter students, not the social settings within which students develop.

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That is, the theories of change were neither consistent with RDS theories broadly, nor with a youth system more specifically. In a related example, consider the Hewlett Foundation's National Improvement Initiative (NII), which promised $750,000 per year, for six years, to a limited number of place-based collaborations to achieve ambitious social and community capacity outcomes. Although NII goals did not explicitly focus on young people, all three NII communities (Mayfair, West Oakland, and East Palo Alto) chose to implement programs to support young people. Despite notable outputs, such as increased health care coverage, establishment of youth and family centers, and the implementation of mentoring programs, neighborhood and block clubs, language classes for adults, and after-school enrichment programs, NII ultimately did not show the kinds of outcomes it set out to achieve; namely, there were no indications that residents were less poor than before (Brown & Fiester, 2007). This lack of a particular kind of social impact may be at least partially attributed to a fluctuating and controversial evaluation design that did not have clear outcomes or local legitimacy. However, Brown and Fiester (2007) noted that two key failures widely reported by staff members: 1. Participants could not figure out a way to move forward through conflict and differences, and 2. There was not enough collective learning within and between NII participants. Also, distinct from a systems approach, it should be noted that the NII communities implemented individual programs, such as mentoring programs and language classes, instead of linking across programs and contexts. In contrast to NF and NII, the Communities That Care (CTC) system provides an interesting example of how developmental theory and evidence-based programs can be brought together to achieve social impact. Conceived by Hawkins, Catalano, and colleagues (1992), CTC drew on the lessons of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention and other initiatives to create a replicable, science-based program for community coalitions to prevent adolescent drug use and delinquency (Hawkins et al., 2009). A randomized trial of the CTC system yielded statistically significant differences in substance abuse and delinquent behavior in 5th through 8th graders, with results as dramatic as the finding that students in control communities were 60% more likely to initiate the use of alcohol between grades 7 and 8 than students in CTC communities (Hawkins et al., 2009). A follow-up study of the implementation of CTC elements showed that the difference between CTC coalitions and matched non-CTC prevention coalitions in control communities was not that CTC coalitions were more cognizant of the importance of targeting risk or protective factors. Instead, CTC communities demonstrated more fidelity to all the other pieces of the framework, which focus largely on coalition building, the developer's social development model, systematic needs assessment, and implementation of evidence-based programs (Arthur et al., 2010). In reviewing the intentions, successes, and failures of these CCIs, one important theme occurs repeatedly: use of theory should not stop at the creation of a CCI to effect community-level change; rather, theory should drive the subsequent action and implementation of a CCI's work. An explicit theory of change or conceptual framework appears to be an important component of these efforts to facilitate learning among all stakeholders, and to link short-term, local actions to systemic change that impact individuals within the community. Being clear about actions that are consistent with an underlying developmental theory equips researchers and practitioners with a framework within which to determine the most appropriate actions and to articulate how these actions will lead to impacts. Overview of special issue The articles in this issue explore various components of CCIs, with an implicit focus on how to encourage the development of supportive youth systems. Given that youth-focused CCIs have historically taken many forms and created change in their communities using a variety of strategies, this special issue brings together research from an array of initiatives in the United States. These articles examine different aspects of

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CCIs, such as: the processes that bring together multiple partners into a coherent initiative; the development of strategies and actions that support positive developmental outcomes; the capacity that communities need to implement and sustain action; and the trajectories of protective factors that can be encouraged by CCIs. We conclude this special issue with a synthesis of the existing knowledge base on youth-focused CCIs and proposed future steps for the youth development research field. Zaff, Pufall Jones, Lin, Aasland, Donlan, Prescott and Baker (this issue) examined the perceived and identified needs considered by CCI executives, direct service providers, and the youth and their families in these communities. To begin to fill a gap in the research on an RDS approach to CCI needs assessment, planning, and implementation, the authors looked carefully at how to assess needs at each level of the CCI and, by using such assessments, if perceptions of need vary at each level of the CCI (e.g., are the needs identified and addressed at the executive level the same at the direct service and youth level). In exploring relationships among the various levels of the CCI, the authors indicate the importance of aligning the strategies of the CCI with the needs and strengths in the community — where the shared vision, goals, and strategies of CCIs incorporate the perspectives of all stakeholders in order to design and implement the most effective actions. While Zaff et al. (this issue) explored the importance of alignment across the levels of a CCI, O'Neal, Mancini, Bowen, O'Neal, and Arnold (this issue) unpacked the quality of ties within a community, by exploring the relationship between social capital and developmental outcomes. As such, Mancini and colleagues examined the importance of relationship quality among systems. Their findings show that establishing and sustaining youth programs and community initiatives that build on natural, informal networks in communities, and that provide youth with opportunities for positive social connections, reassurance of worth and opportunities for guidance and nurturance are essential ingredients for positive developmental outcomes. The authors indicate that relationships positively affect youth in numerous domains, in part because the social provisions within communities buffer youth from adversity and minimize disparities. CCIs provide the potential and opportunities to develop buffers, such as supportive relationships, against adverse experiences and to promote positive outcomes. Consistent with RDS theories, these protective factors relate to and develop from an individual's ever-changing needs and strengths. Kim, Oesterle, Catalano, and Hawkins (this issue) show that, as youth develop within a CCI, the number and type of protective factors change over time. As such, despite CCIs providing a context for supportive developmental relationships (Mancini et al., this issue), CCI leaders must also realize and adapt to the ever-changing needs of youth as they develop. Lansperry and Hughes (in this issue) examined how CCIs vary according to contextual demands. Therefore, while different developmental contexts may share similar goals for youth, the CCIs vary widely in terms of the effective scale, range, intensity, and dosage of supports and opportunities in each community. There is no single formula that works. Coleman and Osher (this issue) explore the individual and contextual variations within one such CCI that promotes (and is achieving) positive developmental outcomes. Lin, Zaff, and Gerstein (this issue) conclude by reflecting on the theories, methods, and questions explored in the articles collected within this issue. They offer 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. In particular, the authors offer researchers and practitioners in the field a means by which to better incorporate theory into the vision and practices of CCIs and a means by which to better measure the outcomes of the CCIs. Using these reflections, and other extant data on CCIs, the authors propose the following questions: 1. Are CCIs a worthwhile mechanism for improving communitylevel indicators of child and youth well-being? Too often, we see

studies that begin with the assumption that CCIs are the “right” solution. 2. If CCIs are at all worthwhile, are they appropriate for all communities and under all circumstances? CCIs are designed to leverage the unique needs and strengths of communities (Auspos & Kubisch, 2004). Recognizing that there is inter-community variation in needs and strengths, CCIs might not be an effective strategy for all communities (e.g., rural communities where organizational capacity is scarce, or cities with weak mayors) or for resolving problems in all developmental domains (e.g., whether best for health outcomes instead of social outcomes?). 3. What are the effective methods for creating CCIs? If CCIs are in fact effective, communities need guidance on how to implement them in ways that optimize their chances of success. The designers of CTC and Say Yes have developed operating systems for communities; are these operating systems universally relevant for CCIs? Are there design principles from which all communities can build? In this introduction to the special issue, we have presented a framework that we believe could be an effective guide for communities implementing CCIs and for researchers and policymakers interpreting the results of a CCI's efforts. This framework is not designed as a comprehensive answer to CCI effectiveness. Endemic to CCIs (and, really, any cross-organization initiative) is the negotiation of inter-organizational politics among those at the CCI table, determining collective goals and accountability, and deciding whose voice counts; among other potential hiccups at the organizational level (see Kubisch, 2010; Kubisch et al., 2010 for reviews of CCIs and their barriers). 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