The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in "youth development" as both a policy and a community approach to helping children achieve healthy outcomes as young adults. Despite the success of frameworks which have shifted the focus from intervening with teenagers who exhibited "high risk" behaviors to improving developmental outcomes as the goal in the short term, they have often left the longer-term outcomes implicit, or excluded them completely. The Community Action for Youth Development Framework seeks to integrate basic knowledge about youth development and the community conditions that affect it with emerging hypotheses about what it will take to transform communities into places where all young people can achieve their fullest potential.

The Community Action Framework for Youth Development seeks to address five questions: 1) What are our basic long-term goals for youth? 2) What are the critical developmental milestones or markers that tell us young people are on their way to getting there? 3) What do young people need to achieve these developmental milestones? 4) What must change in key community settings to provide enough of these supports and opportunities to all youth that need them? and 5) How do we create the conditions and capacity in communities to make these changes possible and probable?