Youth Today: Private Competition, Public Confusion

By Karen Pittman, July 2000

The staff at the International Youth Foundation-US (now the Forum for Youth Investment) spend a lot of time in meetings — other people’s meetings. Occasionally, these meetings spark distinct emotions. Last month’s meetings left us humbled, angry and embarrassed.

In November 1995, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Population Fund and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) convened a study group on programming for adolescent health. They reviewed the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of key interventions, highlighted some of the essential factors and strategies needed to implement and sustain good programs, developed a common framework for country programming, and recommended a set of priority actions to accelerate the pace of programming in adolescent health worldwide.

Sound good? It is. But beyond even the remarkable products the group produced, a flow of conflicting emotions was triggered by the process — and by the commitment to creating a common framework and agenda broad enough to acknowledge the many specific programs and efforts, and a common set of benchmarks and indicators clear enough to assess and guide country and community efforts.

Less than 24 hours earlier, we had convened a meeting on an unrelated topic. It was a useful meeting. But mainly we got several earfuls about the state of the field — and it wasn’t pretty. Those convened were not folks who create frameworks, models and technical assistance packages, but those who use them (or whose constituents use them). And they were frustrated, even angry:

“The intellectual leaders of the field have made it difficult for other people [laymen] to understand how what they are saying fits together. It’s like they are Coke and Pepsi — battling over terms, labels and brands, and who is going to be the champion.”

“They are absolutely in competition, fighting over semantic differences, instead of agreeing to label the same basic substances as cola.”

Youth development is getting a bad name. When we marveled at the work of the international study group, several of the international participants noted that it was actually easier to help different countries — and even international mega-bureaucracies — adopt and use a generic frame than it is to coax the developers of competing programs and approaches to acknowledge one. They saw the U.S. as a quagmire of competition. Researchers are wary of tapping our expertise, lest they be seen as picking sides. If advocates agree on anything, it is that we are unable to speak in a collective voice loud enough to have a chance in policy-making circles.

Something needs to happen soon. The problem goes beyond just branding specific products. The fundamental confusion is generated by the proliferation not just of different direct service programs, but of different community change approaches that are seen as competing by some, complimentary by others. Are young people resilient or developing? Should communities build assets or prevent problems? Should they prioritize and target, or look for opportunities to improve everything? Not only do we fail to name the cola, we also fail to agree on an overall diet: Is the recommendation for a low-sugar plan, low-fat plan, high-fiber plan or a macrobiotic plan? It is at this level that the lack of clarity may be most damaging.

Are there too many cooks creating masterpieces to improve youth outcomes? Maybe yes and maybe no: America thrives on competition, and by all counts there are too few organizations competing to serve young people, not too many. The real problem is that there are too few cookbooks, so to speak, that group and compare the recipes for youth service. There are even fewer books that explain the differences and similarities between cuisines and diet plans. As it stands, families and communities have neither agreed upon lists of USDA-like recommended daily allowances to aim for, nor nutritional labels to judge youth-serving products. Folks on the ground are doing their best to make side-by-side charts. Scholars are doing comparative analyses.

And both sides are asking why those organizations committed to helping communities help their youth aren’t doing more themselves to clean up the confusion. It’s a good question.

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Pittman, K. (2000, July). "Private Competition, Public Confusion." Washington, DC: The Forum for Youth Investment. A version of this article appears in Youth Today.

Karen Pittman is executive director of the Forum for Youth Investment.