Community youth workers are young people and adults who are engaged in education, empowerment, activism, or other activities focused on adolescents in community-based settings, including churches, schools, or community centers. As a distinct field, community youth work, (often just called youth work), has been established in the United States since the early 20th century. Youth organizations including the YMCA, Boy Scouts, and 4-H set the early standard for youth work. Many believe they were simply following the lead of organizations in the United Kingdom. Since that time a plethora of groups have become active, leading advocacy, research, and education about community youth work around the world.
Famous quotes containing the words community, youth and/or workers:
“Jesus would recommend you to pass the first day of the week rather otherwise than you pass it now, and to seek some other mode of bettering the morals of the community than by constraining each other to look grave on a Sunday, and to consider yourselves more virtuous in proportion to the idleness in which you pass one day in seven.”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“Not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of his enthusiasm, and there are now men,—if indeed I can speak in the plural number,—more exactly, I will say, I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible, that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest of sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I suspect that American workers have come to lack a work ethic. They do not live by the sweat of their brow.”
—Kiichi Miyazawa (b. 1919)