The Foundation's decision to target those organizations that work with young people during the non-school hours is based on our belief that this is where both the need and opportunity are greatest. In simple economic terms, the reality is that few of these organizations have the resources to serve very many young people with quality programs. Demand already outstrips supply and what supply there is suffers in quality. The total number of youth service providers in the United States reaches only a tiny fraction of the overall youth market. Only two percent of middle-school-age youth, for example, participate in any program in the out-of-school time. Big Brothers Big Sisters, one of the largest national service providers, serves less than 200,000 young people, when there are at least 16 million low-income youth who could benefit from this type of service.

Another reason for the failure of the youth-services field to serve more kids with better programs is the fractured delivery system and inconsistent nature of programs both within individual communities and across the nation. As a result, we have a hodgepodge of programs that range from truly local stand-alone groups, to local chapters of national affiliates, to those offered through multi-service providers that are responsible for addressing a wide range of community issues. This mixed bag of program types and inconsistency affects quality and leads to other problems that range from equally fractured funding streams to little or no agreement on professional standards or what constitutes effective practices.

Perhaps though the most compelling reason for targeting programs that serve kids in the non-school hours is the fact that most young people spend more than half their waking hours in the largely discretionary time outside school. This is time that is often used unproductively even in better-off communities, but it becomes a breeding ground of highly destructive activity in communities troubled by violence, drugs, gangs, and early pregnancy, and where adult supervision is scarce because of work schedules, absent parents, or both. It is no coincidence that 90 percent of youth arrests occur in the immediate after-school hours between 3 and 7 p.m. Even the best-run school can be powerless, in a typical seven-hour day, to overcome the influence of social forces that dominate the nine or ten waking hours of non-school time.

The point is not simply that non-school hours outnumber those of the school day. The reason out-of-school time is so critically important–particularly to pre-teens and adolescents–is precisely because it is discretionary. It is in these hours that young people (ideally with caring adult supervision) form habits by which they will later allocate their free time, learn to conduct themselves socially, take their first jobs, and formulate ideas about what constitutes a satisfying, worthwhile life. People develop personal interests, choose rewarding social activities, begin earning an income, and formulate dreams and ambitions partly in these hours. Some of that also happens during school time. But the difference is that, in school hours, adult influence is the norm, and young people can make only a narrow range of choices.

Put simply, if the out-of-school hours are the time when young people are most likely to get into trouble, then a positive use of those hours should lead to less trouble and to more success in school, at work, and in the community.

Because we will be focusing our investments on organizations that already have some plausible or demonstrated effects on the four outcome areas that we consider critical to a young person's future success, we will be starting with organizations that have some feel, at least, for the outcomes they believe they're achieving, and for the ways in which their services lead to those outcomes. With help, we believe that most or all of them will be able to translate those ideas into better programs that produce more reliable and even measurable results. That information will be useful not only for those organizations' own management and program planning, but given the current state of research, it will be likely to benefit the rest of the field. Specifically, more programs will be able to apply this new knowledge, thus increasing the overall social return on dollars spent for similar improvements in youth services.

What's the Opportunity for the Foundation to Help the Youth of Today?

We at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation believe that our new approach to grantmaking–helping select nonprofit organizations improve the quality of their work, and increase the number of people they serve–will enable us to make a far greater difference, for each dollar we invest, than our past efforts to support initiatives that seek to reform large public systems. Similarly, our selection of youth development as our single grantmaking focus is based on the observation that nonprofit organizations in this field:

• can play a pivotal role in improving the lives of young people from poor families
• can significantly expand and improve the role they now play, and
• will respond more willingly, positively, and swiftly to our investment than will large public bureaucracies.