Improving Youth-Serving Social Settings: Intervention Goals and Strategies for Schools, Youth Programs, and Communities

This chapter summarizes three kinds of intervention goals and strategies that can improve youth-serving social settings. First, organizations and communities can come together in participatory ways to plan and implement setting-level change. Processes of buy-in, collaboration, and capacity-building are considered from both organizational and community perspectives. Second, organizations and communities can better use settinglevel data to monitor progress, rather than relying on the typical bean-counting approaches to measure youth participation, or single youth indicators like high-stakes testing. Third, organizations and communities can increase both the representation of diverse groups of youth in social settings and the quality of their experience. Examples are drawn from the other chapters in the volume.