What do effective youth organizations offer inner-city youngsters that schools do not? This book suggests that educators can learn much from inner-city social and youth organizations, which reach at-risk youngsters by developing a sense of family that many of them fail to get at home.
Addressing a variety of issues--collaboration across organizations, the role of gangs in social control, the historical roles of ethnicity and gender in youth organizations--Heath and McLaughlin describe frames for identity that extend beyond ethnicity and gender.