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.