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Finding new outlets for youth and young adults is way past due, considering findings recently published by the Youth Violence Prevention division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that point to 5,686 young people (ages 10 to 24) murdered in 2005—an average of 16 each day, with homicide being the second leading cause of death for young people in that age cohort. The figures, released this summer, also indicate that among 10-to-24-year-olds, homicide is the leading cause of death for African Americans.

Recent high-profile efforts aimed at curbing youth violence and reclaiming crime-ridden streets have fallen short of the mark. The 10,000 Men movement in Philadelphia, launched in 2007 amid great fanfare with a proposal to organize African-American men into crime-fighting patrols, quickly fizzled after the patrols failed to mobilize. Organizers faulted logistical challenges, but outside observers noted poor planning and the group’s failure to capitalize on volunteers’ initial excitement.

Meanwhile, community-based organizations have been working quietly toward rechanneling young people’s energies in a way that has reestablished a sense of hope in some of the country’s most troubled places.

Working out of a former fur factory in downtown Newark, Robert Clark oversees YouthBuild Newark, a community service, job-training, and pre-apprenticeship program where low-income young people can also work toward a GED or high school diploma. As the founding director of the group—a local partner of YouthBuild USA—Clark is equal parts administrator, construction foreman, and counselor.

“Our program and others like it that try to have an impact on youth violence or youth crime try hard to make sure that people don’t go back to prison. That’s the struggle around the country: How do you stop these people from going back and forth to jail?” Clark says.

“You have to provide them with an opportunity to believe that anything is possible. Until they do that, you can’t stop the crime. People are trying to figure out how to survive with what they know and the tools they have—you just have to give them some different tools.”

Clark, 36, is speaking of tools in both the literal and the figurative sense. The students Clark works with are typically poor and have been “failed” by society, he says. But since he returned to his hometown in 2000 to start YouthBuild Newark, recruitment hasn’t been a problem, and despite “extreme social challenges, the beauty of youth development is engaging young people to know that change is possible.” Clark did add, however, that a core of funders is essential to youth development programs’ survival, particularly for newly established organizations like YouthBuild Newark, which benefits from financial support from the Prudential Foundation, as well as a YouthBuild USA line item from the U.S. Department of Labor budget.

For organizations like YouthBuild, which started with a planning grant from the federal government, partnering with nonprofit housing-development organizations to advance its youth-development goals is central to achieving its mission. “We come in and use their projects as our own construction training projects,” Clark says. A housing project gets built, and YouthBuild students learn marketable skills.

Clark points to the emerging green-collar economy as a source of encouragement not only for him and his students pursuing careers in construction, but also for YouthBuild’s funders and partner organizations. Green-collar jobs—workforce opportunities created by firms, organizations, and developers specializing in sound environmental practices—are on the rise. The American Solar Energy Society points to a $970-billion renewable-energy and energy-efficiency industry responsible for creating 8.5 million jobs. The New York-based Sustainable South Bronx (SSBX), for example, has based programmatic initiatives on improving the social fabric of the community through green-collar job training in a 10-week Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training program.

SSBX founder Majora Carter, in a Summer 2008 Shelterforce interview, pointed to the correlation between joblessness and increases in crime: “When you’ve got poverty, you’ve got diminished opportunities for employment. It’s easier for people to end up in jail because there are the attractions of the illegal economy.” (See “Greening the Ghetto,” Shelterforce, Summer 2008.)