Best Practices of Prosocial Organizations in Youth Development

Abstract

In this chapter we give an overview of some of the prosocial efforts that for-profit organizations undertake to provide services for youth. Although there are a number of excellent nonprofit organizations serving the needs of youth, this discussion is outside the scope of this chapter, and instead we focus on the considerable and yet often unheralded efforts of for-profit organizations. Recognizing and learning from these efforts are important because effective mobilization of adults for positive youth development is likely to require the contributions of all sectors of society. We begin by reviewing three main reasons why organizations engage in prosocial activities: societal, economic, and human resource related. We give many examples of the best practices in addressing youth issues from various corporations. We offer an overview of some of the challenges in providing youth programs. Finally, we highlight the need for evaluation research. Surprisingly, although many for-profit organizations describe the services they provide and the amount of money that is spent, there is little in the way of systematic evaluations of the programs they design or efforts they support, representing significant opportunities for researchers to partner with these businesses in the future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)