 | Partners Center for Youth and Communities Susan Curnan, Director Established in 1983, the Center for Youth and Communities at Brandeis University's Heller Graduate School, is one of the nation's leading research, professional development, and policy development organizations in the broad areas of youth, workforce, and community development. On the domestic front, the field of workforce development and employment training for low-income youth in the United States was hardly a field at all until Brandeis faculty and researchers in the Center for Youth and Communities helped shape its development. Few in policy and program circles knew whether youth interventions such as job training, work experience, mentoring, entrepreneurship, or community service could be designed at scale or whether they would even work for various groups of poor teens. Healthy youth development strategies for all youth that builds on young peoples' natural strengths and community assets had found little interest in other universities, yet we adopted this perspective early on as a focus of our work. So too with attention focused on new interventions to assist marginalized communities; Brandeis has emerged as a leader in identifying appropriate and effective "place-based" strategies and helping policymakers to design policies that will support low-income neighborhoods and their families. More Information Center for Youth and Communities www.heller.brandeis.edu/isd.asp |
