This winter, while the nation's capital weathered what would be two blizzards in a week, the area’s young black men face a seemingly perpetual storm that limits their visibility, cripples their mobility and increases their risk of preventable “accidents” associated with success-threatening if not life-threatening behaviors that stem from idleness and futility. In her column for Youth Today, Karen Pittman reflects on one storm that we all have to help dig ourselves out of.

States are struggling. Children’s lives, too often, are truly in the balance as states and localities decide where to make cuts, often sacrificing long-term investments to achieve short-term cost savings. And a new National League of Cities report, City Fiscal Conditions 2009, suggests that the situation will worsen over the next two years.

On any given day, scores of young people with limited individual and social capital are simultaneously struggling to exit some systems and enter others: foster care, residential treatment centers, higher education, mental health programs, gainful employment.

On January 20, I joined millions of Americans and millions more around the world to watch the inauguration of our 44th president. Bad knees kept me out of the crowd, but I dutifully taped the day for family and friends who went out to be counted. I beamed at the image of the soon-to-be president, head back, eyes closed, breathing in the wonderful music played by Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. I drank in the powerful words of the inaugural address, watching once, listening twice with eyes closed. I warmed to the close-ups of the people in the crowd – so much diversity, so much hope, so much respect for the moment and for each other.

The core belief here at the Forum for Youth Investment – that all young people should be Ready by 21 – ready for college, work and life – often provokes public criticism. The exchanges typically go like this:

"Not every young person needs to go to college," calls out one person from an audience. True, I say, but all should be ready to.

Karen Pittman recently sat down with the real experts on the "high school dropout crisis" -- seven students from Des Moines, five of whom had dropped out and another who had come very close. In her latest Youth Today column, Karen shares what these young people had to say about why they left, what made them return to school and what they recommend for education.

Changing the odds for young people requires both passion and precision: passion in our commitment to providing high-quality support to all youth, and precision in measuring how well we and they are doing. In this column, Karen Pittman says it's possible, affordable and essential that we develop ways to measure community-level outcomes to help leaders change the ways they do business.

"Superintendents rock! I've never started a column like this before, certainly not one about school administrators—the people whom youth workers frequently butt heads with over money, building space, bus schedules and even permission slips. But at a forum hosted by the American Association of School Administrators, I recently spent two days with 25 of the most enthusiastic public leaders I've ever met." In her March 2008 Youth Today column, Karen Pittman explores what it takes to shift from superintendents of schools to superintendents of new, student-focused learning systems.

Karen examines the connections between two seemingly divergent articles in the October 2007 issue of Youth Today—and offers this recommendation to the youth development field: "Seize the day. Let's claim powerful words like 'creativity' and 'spirituality' and make them our own. Let's define them in ways that reflect and respect diversity and capture the essence of what makes us human: the desire to find the spark, the spirit, the connection to something bigger than ourselves or something deep within ourselves. Let's acknowledge the central role that youth workers can play and are playing to help young people find themselves."