Growing up during the fifties and sixties in a low-income, single-parent family in the nation's capitol instilled Karen Pittman with the desire to be a sociologist. She beat the odds-went off to college, graduate school, and a professional career. Why couldn't other at-risk kids?

"When I think back to my childhood I felt that, though I was in a low-income community, there was enough going on to effectively change the odds," Pittman says. The formula for healthy youth development, as she defines it now, is being surrounded by people with high expectations who are committed to your well-being. And having the stamina to be different.

Pittman went through the Washington, DC schools in their renaissance and got a terrific education. She joined the DC Youth Orchestra. She also actively participated in church programs, the kind that built self-esteem. "The church was an equal opportunity clapping audience. Whether you did great or you did poorly, everyone got the same thing," she recollects.

Her own positive experiences developing into a healthy adult gave her the armor to resist contemporary research being done around low-income children. Pittman decided not to focus on the deficit-based theory; she turned instead to development: "There was something not quite right about the research, in the way that it pigeon-holed kids. That led me to look for a concrete set of things that we could do to help change the odds, something that would be bigger than one kid at a time and short of eradicating poverty in our lifetime."

As she recalls, the time became ripe in the early 1990s for a paradigm shift, away from single-focused programming and toward broad-based youth development. Pittman is now vice president and director of U.S. programs at the International Youth Foundation (IYF), an organization that works to make the most positive impact on as many kids as possible across the globe. IYF invests in organizations that already exist in the community. Because "people don't grow up in programs," Pittman asserts, "they grow up in communities."

Communities, Not Programs
The idea struck Pittman over a decade ago while delivering a speech peppered with data about children's programs: "Someone in the audience piped up, 'I think I'm a pretty well-adjusted adult but I really don't remember being in a program.'"

"That hit me," she says. The sociologist grew increasingly sensitized to the things spoken about as being programs-generic things that young people need to have somewhere in their community. "I realized that one of the things we do in this country, to the point of obsession, is package these things into programs."

Pittman began picking those programs apart, looking at where the various supports could be relocated as more permanent fixtures. At the same time, she convinced her colleagues to start looking at young people as individuals in charge of their own development.

"Young people are going to develop whether or not we put programs in their path. They're going to work on the things that are important to them, whether they do it in pro-social or anti-social ways, and we can have some control over that by what we do put in their paths," Pittman says.

Pittman looked at the variety of settings that a child navigates and suggested that those places-from family to school, to the mall and to work experiences-should provide valuable resources. "We need to have a much better way of asking whether the kids are getting what they need in the mix of settings available to them," she says.

If not, Pittman asserts, then we need to introduce a program. But she recommends that we should be introducing temporary supports that could meld into the fabric of the community. The popular Head Start program for preschool children, for example, has become an institution. Pittman is concerned about the programs that disappear, "those that are filling in the gaps for things that aren't there in the families or communities. Like training instruction or services that are being delivered for a short period of time. Then it goes away. That's where our track record has been quite mixed to poor."

From her work at IYF, Pittman knows too well that when the program dies, everything is gone again. "I've seen this happen with disastrous consequences in other countries. When we've taken our programming ideas and built monstrous things that the community just can't support. Like early child-care centers, when it would have made much more sense to increase the literacy of the people in the community."

Arts Level the Playing Field
Pittman strongly advocates putting a wide variety of arts activities in the path of developing youth. "The arts give you something for real. Everything else in your life is practice. When you're up on stage, it's real. And it doesn't matter if you're 12 or 25. It's real performance, real expectations and real consequences."

Playing in the DC Youth Orchestra remains one of Pittman's most important experiences on her own route to maturity. "Kids need as many opportunities to find out what they're good at as possible. Someone who is not academically inclined may be a real virtuoso in music or the arts, drama, or whatever," she says.

The arts train children to be young artists and young adults, says Pittman.

Pittman also draws from her experience as a camp counselor to a wide mix of high school students during her summer breaks from Oberlin College. She recalls: "They really were youth development camps, with high standards and children doing real things. Arts were very important there. Everyone learned to do folk dancing quite well by the time they left."

The lesson she drew from those summers is that the arts set up a level playing field for kids from very different backgrounds.

Arts provide a real balance for youth, and exposure to a medley of people. Pittman explains: "In schools you're sorted by age, grade, cognitive skills. You really go through school with kids very similar to you. When you go into the arts, you have the opportunity to go with a real mix of kids. You also have another vantage point to compete in. Playing first chair in the orchestra is a different platform.

"Arts are one of the few venues where age does not matter. And it builds self esteem and social skills, experience, not to mention greater expression and all that."

International Perspective
The arts play a key role in Pittman's work at IYF as she constantly looks for "best practices" in youth development. Those practices identified by IYF and its international partners in 11 countries (15 countries by the end of 1998) promote the confidence, character, competence, and "connectedness" of young people to their family, peers, and community. The mission at IYF is to expand the reach of those effective practices so that more young people may benefit. Often that means the proliferation of arts activities.

IYF particularly looks for programs that are part of the community, like dance programs and theater groups. Pittman offers as examples: "Venezuela uses youth orchestras as community organizing tools. The Irish Youth Foundation has a national theater movement, known as the National Association for Youth Drama, with hundreds of clubs around the country. There are 600 school clubs in Germany used to bring in theater and drama. They all grew out of the idea that young people really need to be both part of the culture and be able to translate their own ideas into art."

Pittman says that "many countries use the arts to continue local traditions like Origami. So kids don't lose the art of folding paper. There's African drumming," she continues, "Art and music are approached in Asia with equal seriousness. Every young person there needs to be artistic and literate."

A Personal Wish List
"If I could wave the wand in the air, I would ask for training in music and arts to be considered as important for American kids as cognitive development. To be part of the total education," Pittman says.

Continuing with her list, she asks for "people to think more about what it takes to build artistic competencies." Her biggest lament is the lack of thought behind creative activity: "We use more popsicle sticks in this country than anything else in terms of arts and crafts. We think of it as something to keep the kids busy. There's not much craft in that."

Nonetheless, Pittman is optimistic that the tide is turning in favor of more hands-on, thoughtful arts instruction. People are becoming aware of the importance of the arts in youth development. And, she says, people are thinking about standards to re-gear that activity at a higher level. "We're at or near a mini movement around the arts," she believes.

There's an awakening to the concept of art as life, "they test you and rank you and have you try out," Pittman asserts. And as all youth need to understand early on, "some kids will get in and some kids won't."

Susan Kellam has an extensive 25-year career in journalism and social policy, including editorial positions at Rolling Stone magazine and Congressional Quarterly and as communications director at the American Public Welfare Association. She is currently a free-lance writer.