Main description:

Developmental Assets and Asset-Building Communities examines the relationships of developmental assets to other approaches and bodies of work. It raises challenges about the asset-building approach and offers recommendations for how this approach can be strengthened and broadened in impact and research. In doing so, this book extends the scholarly base for the understanding of the character and scope of the systemic relation between young people's healthy development and the nature of developmentally attentive communities. The chapters in this volume present evidence that asset-building communities both promote and are promoted by positive youth development, a bi-directional, systemic linkage that - consistent with developmental systems theory - further civil society by building relationship and intergenerational places within a community that are united in attending to the developmental needs of children and adolescents.

Contents:

I Conceptual Foundations.- 1. Developmental Assets and Asset-Building Communities: A View of the Issues.- 2. Developmental Assets and Asset-Building Community: Conceptual and Empirical Foundations.- II Promoting Positive Youth Development through Community Building.- 3. Bringing in a New Era in the Field of Youth Development.- 4. Youth Participation: A Critical Element of Research on Child Well-Being.- 5. Enhancing the Assets for Positive Youth Development: The Vision, Values, and Action Agenda of the W. T. Grant Foundation.- III Building Families and Communities Serving Youth.- 6. Building Assets in Real-World Communities.- 7. Asset Building in Parenting Practices and Family Life.- 8. Nonparental Adults as Asset Builders in the Lives of Youth.- IV A Vision for the Future.- 9. Toward Asset-Building Communities: How Does Change Occur?.- 10. Afterword: Toward an Asset-Based Policy Agenda for Children, Families, and Communities.- Contributors.- Author Index.