NCJ Number
139625
Date Published
1990
Length
48 pages
Annotation
The National Collaboration for Youth, a consortium of 15 major national youth serving organizations, sponsored Making the Grade, a national and local level project designed to raise public awareness and stimulate collaborative action on behalf of America's youth.
Abstract
The two major thrusts of the project were to conduct a national media campaign to educate the public about the critical problems affecting a significant number of youth and to instigate a carefully designed community engagement process to provide opportunities for citizens to develop and implement viable solutions to these problems. Over 350 Town Summit Meetings were held nationwide to discuss six specific issues: functional illiteracy, juvenile crime, school dropouts, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and youth unemployment. During these meetings, communities consistently cited effective parenting as an essential element to alleviating many of these problems. Participants emphasized the need for education systems to be more responsive to current needs and pointed to the enormous influence of the media in raising public awareness. A common theme at the meetings was the need to devote more resources to preventive, rather than curative, efforts. 5 appendixes