Comprehensive Community Initiatives for Positive Youth Development

Beginning in the 1990s, policymakers, foundations, and practitioners considered the potential of comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) that could attend to the complex needs and strengths of low-income children, youth, and families. While these CCIs have been in effect for decades, we’ve only recently begun to understand their productive role.Comprehensive Community Initiatives for Positive Youth Development provides academics with the most rigorous research and extant knowledge of CCIs to provide theoretically grounded insights into the relevance of CCIs to child and youth development, and the facets that can optimize their effectiveness.

Jonathan F. Zaff, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of the Center for Promise, the research institute of America’s Promise Alliance housed at Boston University’s School of Education. He leads research initiatives that examine how to create the conditions so that all youth can thrive academically, socially, and civically.

Elizabeth Pufall Jones, Ph.D., is a Qualitative Research Scientist at the Center for Promise located in Boston University’s School of Education. Her research focuses on the processes and contexts associated with a multi-cultural individual’s navigation and negotiation of the multiple cultural worlds in which they live.

Alice Donlan, Ph.D. is a Quantitative Research Scientist for the Center for PromiseHer research focuses on adolescent social development and peer influences in school, with the goal of understanding how supportive relationships are built, and how those relationships promote positive youth development.

Sara Anderson, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Children in the U.S. at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She is the lead analyst on the long-term follow up of the Tulsa pre-K study. Her research interests include pre-K, residential mobility, and neighborhood effects.