The Center for Youth and Community Inc. is an organization, which partners with communities to co-create an experience that can positively impact young people as they come of age along with the adults they are connected with to strengthen the fabric of the entire community. At the core of this process is the center’s successful Rite of Passage Experience© (ROPE®) initiative. 

Designed primarily as a school and community-based initiative that helps to guide children in grades 6-12 though adolescence and into adulthood while guiding them to mentor younger youth and engage in healthy recreation, play and community service. It has 20 design principles that can be used in almost any setting. However the center does not offer or promote rites of passage programs for individual parents or children.

The Center’s mission is to support community building that promotes positive youth development and to assist children in the transition through adolescence to becoming healthy adults connected to their communities. All our ancestors, whatever our cultural and ethnic backgrounds, celebrated the passage from childhood to adulthood. Special ceremonies and rituals were designed to transform children into contributing members of their communities. But, most important these rites of passage were designed to strengthen a community, making them resilient and able to adapt to change. Rites of passage, first and foremost were for the survival of the community. It is a reciprocity and in a sense was the first way humans carried out youth and community development work.

One of the emerging foundations of the center’s work has been and continues to be asking the question: “What’s the Story?” This is the first element in the architectural framework for youth and community development through rites of passage. It is this structure in which one strategy, the Rite Of Passage Experience© ROPE® unfolds. Within that multi-year process a number of milestone and initiatory – public rite of passage process occur, including the Initiation of Scholars©® Learn more HERE about the center and its history and lineage of collaborating with communities to get the Story right.

Organizational Information