By Dale A. Blyth, Ph.D. and Eugene C. Roehlkepartain
(From September 1993, Source Newsletter) Everywhere we look these days, people are talking about the importance of recovering the power of communities. Coalitions and collaborations are watchwords for conferences, planning, and funding. The same emphasis is evident in youth work. Recognizing that no single institution can do everything that needs to be done for youth, people are looking more broadly at strong communities as a key to positive youth development.

However, when we move beyond the general calls for an emphasis on community, there is little consensus on what community is and what makes it strong. As a result, dozens of fragmented and overlapping strategiesÑfrom parent involvement in schooling to coordinated social services for vulnerable families to mentoring programs to collaborative networksÑare undertaken.

Many of these efforts may be highly effective at what they do. But they often do not address the core need: to build communities in which all young people are surrounded with multiple influences that give consistent messages of love, support, control, and positive values. For such a goal to be attained, we need to gain a better understanding of what factors in a community make the most difference for youth.

A new Search Institute report titled Healthy Communities, Healthy Youth begins to identify these community strengths by examining realities for youth in 112 small, mostly midwestern communities that had taken part in Search Institute Profiles of Student Life: Attitudes & Behaviors as part of the RespecTeen program. Instead of looking at the lives of individual youth, the study steps back to compare youth in one community versus another community. In the process, it identifies six key community strengths that, when present for most youth in a community, help to reduce at-risk behavior.

To identify key community strengths through the youth surveys, we first analyzed community health in terms of the average levels of 16 at-risk behaviors in the community (These behaviors involved alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drug use, sexual activity, depression/suicide, anti-social behavior, and school problems.) Communities in which the average young person is involved in few at-risk behaviors were considered the healthiest communities.

We found major differences in levels of at-risk involvement among communities. In the healthiest communities in the study, 62 percent of youth were at low risk in that they were involved in one or fewer of the at-risk behaviors. In the least healthy communities, only 42 percent of youth were at low risk. On the other end of the continuum, just 17 percent of youth in the healthiest communities were at high risk (four or more at-risk behaviors), compared to 33 percent in the least healthy communities.


Measuring Community Strengths

What factors contribute to these differences among communities? We explored this question by examining the percentage of youth in a given community that experience 13 different strengths in their families, schools, peers, and community. Out of the 13 strengths, six are particularly powerful in reducing at-risk behaviors in a community. These are: These six factors certainly point toward strong communities. In the healthiest communities studied (those where youth are least likely to engage in at-risk behaviors), the average community experiences 4.3 of the six strengths (A community is said to have a strength if the percentage of youth who experience that strength is greater than the average across all 112 counties.). In the least healthy community, the average number falls to 1.1. Furthermore, as we would expect, the average levels of at-risk behaviors among youth decline steadily as more of these strengths are present. In communities where youth experience none or one of the strengths, the average youth is involved in 2.6 at-risk behaviors. In communities with all six key strengths, the average youth engages in 1.6 at-risk behaviors.

Unfortunately, these six strengths are relatively rare in communities. On average, the communities have 2.9 of the strengths. Out of the 112 communities studied, only eight have all six strengths present, and 19 had none of the strengths. These differences are quite important in that they account for nearly 70 percent of the differences in community health.

Our analyses also suggest that these strengths are more important to community health than demographic factors that are often blamed for youth problems. For example, differences in community size and percentage of single-parent families together only account for 14 percent of the differences between communities.

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Keys To Community Strengths

While, for any given young person, the support personally received from family, peers, and school teachers is most important, the number of youth who experience key community strengths also matters. Furthermore, several themes or patterns emerge from the research:

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Strategies For Change

By definition, the challenge of building community strengths for youth is a task for everyone in the community. And each group has a unique role to play. Several key strategies for building community strengths apply across all sectors:

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Broadening Our Focus

For the past two decades, much attention has been paid to preventing individual teenagers from getting into trouble. Social workers and counselors have concentrated on addressing issues in the lives of particular teens. More recently, people have begun to focus on creating positive self-esteem, strong personal skills, and a sense of personal values in individual youth.

Each of these emphases has a place. But there is another level that can have a positive, potentially broader impact as well: finding ways to build strengths in communities and organizations so that all young people are supported, nourished, and empowered to grow up healthy.

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