Comprehensive Youth Development System (CYDS)

Result areas:
Strong Families
Healthy Children
Children Succeeding in School

CYDS focuses on supporting youth in preparing to lead healthy, productive lives. Its purpose is to enable all Georgia's youth to achieve their highest potential by meeting family and community needs and offering community programs that focus on building young people's strengths.

CYDS is designed to combat the high costs and long-term negative effects of economic and social problems (e.g., high rates of violence and substance abuse, high teen pregnancy rates, low SAT scores, and low high school graduation rates). Youth participate in identifying problems and designing prevention activities and programs that reduce these problems and are proven effective in increasing adult independence and self-sufficiency.

Since January 2002, regional CYDS teams have organized to develop CYDS plans for each region in Georgia. Comprised of youth and representatives from civic, faith, business and diverse public/private/nonprofit youth-serving organizations, these teams currently receive support from a core of state-level partners.

Vision
To craft a statewide comprehensive system that provides an opportunity for regions to come together to create a youth development system or to further youth development efforts already underway. The CYDS system will:

• Practice joint planning and resource allocation to better meet the needs of youth and their families.
  
• Collaborate to better leverage resources, increase services, and minimize or eliminate resource duplication and overlap.

State Partners
A core of state partners commit to improving interagency communication and decision making in support of coordinated, youth development community strategies and better outcomes for youth. State partners include:

• Children and Youth Coordinating Council
  
• Department of Human Resources (DHR), Divisions of Public Health (PH) and Family and Children Services (DFCS)
  
• Departments of Juvenile Justice (DJJ); Labor (DOL); Education (DOE); Technical and Adult Education (DTAE)
  
• University System of Georgia, Board of Regents
  
• 4-H, Family & Consumer Sciences, Carl Vinson Institute of Government (VCVIOG), College of Education
  
• Family Connection Partnership (FCP)

Role of Family Connection Partnership
As a state partner, the Partnership works to improve outcomes for youth by supporting youth development efforts that promote the strategies below in counties statewide:

• Encourage young people to get involved in youth development programs and activities.
  
• Encourage adults to care about the young people in their community and get involved in parent advisory committees, even if they are not parents.
  
• Encourage neighborhoods and communities to make youth development activities available and promote them to all teens.
  
• Encourage local agencies to offer youth development programs that focus on teen assets.
  
• Encourage policymakers to support youth development programs.

Related Links

The Alan Guttmacher Institute
For information on pregnancy and birth, abortion, prevention and contraception, law and public policy, sexual behavior, sexually transmitted diseases and HIV, and youth. www.guttmacher.org

Georgia Department of Technical and Adult Education
For information on Comprehensive Youth Development Strategy and School-to-Work in Georgia. www.dtae.org/gastw

Georgia Division of Public Health, Adolescent Health and Youth Development
For information about public health programs and services including abstinence education, community involvement, comprehensive adolescent services, male involvement, teen pregnancy prevention. www.ph.dhr.state.ga.us/programs/

Georgia Division of Public Health
For information on Department of resources partners www.health.state.ga.us

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy
For information and resources about current issues in teen pregnancy prevention.
www.teenpregnancy.org

Resource Center for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention
For information on statistics, summaries of research articles and theories on teen pregnancy prevention. www.etr.org/recapp/

School & Main Institute, Inc.
For information on partnership development strategies and training for community development. www.schoolandmain.org

The Urban Institute Involving Males in Preventing Teen Pregnancy
For information and research on topics and issues related to economic and social policy. www.urban.org

Contact Information