It is a great pleasure to offer this volume from Michael J. Nakkula,
Karen C. Foster, Marc Mannes, and Shenita Bolstrom as the latest in the
Search Institute Series on Developmentally Attentive Community and
Society. Its importance to the series and this ?eld of inquiry and
practice is readily evident in its title, Building Healthy Communities
for Positive Youth Development. Since the early 1990s, Search Institute
has invited and encouraged communities of all shapes and sizes to use
its framework of Developmental Assets and principles of asset building
to create strong, vibrant, and welcoming communities for children and
youth. We have operated largely at the grassroots level, encouraging
innovation and adaptation around a shared vision, rather than proposing
a program or model for replication. We seek to learn as much from the
communities as they learn from us. This book offers in-depth case
studies of what happened in eight diverse c- munities that took up our
invitation. In them, we see a wide array of strategies and approaches
that, on the surface, seem to have little coherence. But, as Nakkula and
colleagues found, underlying each of these distinct efforts was a deep
commitment to transforming the social norms of community life to more
effectively attend to young people's healthy development throughout the
?rst two decades of life. There have been many ambitious efforts aimed
at comprehensive community change on behalf of young people.