Empowering Youth

We are seeking to promote a sensible framework and a common language to enable the community to understand and coordinate efforts to improve the lives of children

Developmental Asset Building for Youth
Our mission in this area is to create awareness of, and intentionally provide, developmental assets...the positive experiences, opportunities, skills, and qualities and personal qualities that young people need to grow up to be healthy, caring, and responsible. We are utilizing the Search Institute, the nationally recognized developer of the 40 Developmental Assets framework, for its research, training, and technical assistance capabilities.

What are developmental assets?

Why are they important?

Types of assets

Download a list

After sponsoring several community workshops by the Search Institute in Wilmington in 2007, and a community review of an alternative evidence based model, the Interfaith Coalition launched the Search Institute’s developmental asset building framework in February 2008. It was funded in part by the Office of Prevention and Early Intervention, Delaware Children’ Department. In April 2008, we facilitated the training of 12 faith-based and nonprofit organizations (18 total people) in Wilmington with 12 hours of contact time that provided a thorough understanding of the Essentials of Asset Building curriculum and the ability train others in the community.

We continue to advocate for:

• Adoption of developmental assets as a standard for youth development programs

• Additional training of other organizations, youth and the community

• Conducting formal youth program assessments to see how well they are building assets

• Developmental asset surveying of youth in Wilmington to see how many assets they have

We have launched a website and staff interface to coordinate these activities and look to partner with other youth development organizations for adoption of these initiatives.

Youth Council
We are supporting the development of a West Center City Youth Council to create a forum for youth to speak on issues affecting their environment, to focus on what they need to reach their potential, and to develop programming and community involvement opportunities that support their development as we well as that of other youth in the community. The Interfaith Coalition will rely on the infrastructure at William Hicks Anderson Community center and our network of churches in West Center City to help us support the Youth Council.

We will use developmental assets as an important foundation for the work of the council. The Youth Council will receive training on developmental assets, conduct assessments of members, discuss assets in their lives, develop ways to build assets in youth programs, pass out literature and spread the message about the importance of developmental assets.