Positive Youth Development State and Local Collaboration Demonstration Projects
Fiscal Year 2005 Highlights: Iowa

Local community: Southeast Iowa City

In addition to a neighborhood with higher poverty rates than the surrounding communities and at least two schools on the U.S. Department of Education’s “watch list,” Southeast Iowa City has a unique problem: each year it absorbs a large number of new residents, often people who can’t locate public housing vacancies in Chicago, 200 miles away. Finding themselves in an unfamiliar city where they have no relatives or other social ties, many families stay in Iowa City for only 6 months to 2 years before moving back to Chicago.

The Iowa Collaboration for Youth Development is a group of State and local agencies working to promote the use of Positive Youth Development principles in state policies and programs. The collaboration also aims to help communities like Southeast Iowa City improve the well-being of young people, particularly in four areas: educating youth and preparing them for the world of work; preventing risky behaviors and outcomes such as violence, alcohol and drug use and abuse, adolescent pregnancy, and delinquency; intervening on behalf of and treating youth in the child welfare, juvenile justice, social services, substance abuse, and public health systems; and encouraging youth leadership, citizenship, and service.

Partners:

Iowa Department of Human Rights, Division of Criminal and Juvenile Justice Planning (grantee agency)
United Action for Youth (lead local partner and Runaway and Homeless Youth grantee)
Iowa City School District
Neighborhood centers, city and county governments, and human service providers
Race to Knowledge, Inc.

In Fiscal Year 2005, Iowa project collaborators

• Trained youth through the Youth Volunteer Program
  
• Shared youth concerns with the community through the Youth Voice team
  
• Enhanced afterschool programming at four sites, adding arts such as music, dance, photography and video, creative writing, and performance
  
• Involved youth in the work of the Southeast Neighborhood Youth Development Project’s Broadway Street Neighborhood Advisory Council and Youth Advisory Council
  
• Provided training and technical assistance in youth development to communities in Johnson County and Southeast Iowa City

Challenges to the collaboration project’s work include

• Meaningfully involving adult citizens in the youth development movement
  
• The transience of Southeast Iowa City’s population
  
• Finding ways to measure the collaboration’s effectiveness