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What is Community Youth Development
(CYD)?
Community Youth Development (CYD)
is a perspective dedicated to:
- Advancing the field of youth
work
- Addressing the needs of all youth,
including displaced and vulnerable youth
- Promoting healthy participatory
communities through youth/adult partnerships
CYD is more than youth development
and is best understood through examination of its original components: community
development and youth development.
Community development typically focuses on community involvement as a method
to create and improve infrastructures and institutions within the community. Community
participation will result in better housing, jobs, schools, and services. The participants
in this arena are primarily adults. The underlying assumption is that community participation
is the best guarantee that these infrastructures and institutions will serve
to promote a healthy community.
Youth development has as its central concern the processes by which young
people meet their basic personal and social needs and build skills and capacities
needed to function and contribute in their daily lives. The focus is on the young
person. To grow and develop, young people's needs go beyond the basics of food, shelter,and
clothing to include a safe environment, love, purpose, opportunities to participate,
education, meaningful work, responsibility, and spiritual enrichment. An underlying
assumption is that individual personal growth and development in the aggregate will
result in better communities in the collective.
Community youth development merges these two fields into a new and larger
context of youth in communityóóa context in which young people's developmental needs
are addressed and they are important, contributing community members. Central tenets
include the following:
- Youth participation is key to
the healthy development of youth and community.
- Young people, in partnership
with adults, need to be involved in their own development and that of the community.
- Partnerships result in more than
material improvement because young people offer energy, creativity, life experience,
youth perspective, commitment, resilience, hope, joy, and love.
- Building a culture that values
democratic participation provides opportunity for the entire community to grow spiritually,
politically, and socially.
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