Gil E. Clary and Jean E. Rhodes (Eds), Mobilizing Adults for Positive Youth Development: Strategies for Closing the Gap between Beliefs and Behaviors

The edited volume, Mobilizing Adults for Positive Youth Development: Strategies for Closing the Gap between Beliefs and Behaviors by Clary and Rhodes (2006), is a collection of applied essays that attempt to draw volunteer recruitment strategies from the research literature in a range of fields. The book is divided into ecological strata that reveal potential sources of volunteers for youth development programs. The book begins with a picture of adult volunteers today. Then a section examines research from social psychology about key characteristics of successful and enduring volunteers. The final two sections describe recruitment efforts and strategies for specific types of organizations (e.g., religious, neighborhood) and suggest social policies that may facilitate a culture of volunteering in society at large. This book is rich in examples, and it steers readers towards key research literatures and the strategies they reveal. The book is as much about who volunteers are as it is about how and where to find them. Its strength is its heavy reliance on theory coupled with its realistic and empirically supported examples of recruitment strategies. Consistent across chapters is the theme that volunteers for youth development programs are scarce and it can be a real challenge to recruit and sustain volunteers. Yet, after readers have combed through the chapters and pulled from them what is currently known about volunteers in youth development programs, readers might find themselves asking the question, ‘‘Are our efforts to recruit volunteers for youth development programs all that they should be?’’ That is, can’t programs become both more strategic and more selective when recruiting volunteers? It is commonly known in the practice world of mentoring professionals, for example, that the most pressing question for the staff of mentoring programs is, ‘‘where to find new and better mentors?’’ Realistically, it may not be possible to capture ample mentors sufficient to satisfy the need, which has been estimated as five times the number of adult mentors who are currently serving as program-based youth mentors in the U.S. today (MENTOR 2006). How to tap into and retain this essential and scarce resource seems, so often, a question with very few, clear answers. Mobilizing Adults for Positive Youth Development (Clary and Rhodes 2006) addresses this question. It is a fourteen chapter, 260 page collection of research from several fields about what motivates adults to work with youth, who are the typical volunteers, and how best to recruit these adults. This book is not without limitations. It surely is not the final statement on the very pressing problems of how and who to recruit as volunteers. Mobilizing Adults for Positive Youth Development may nevertheless be the most research-based collection of essays available that focus solely on the topic of how to mobilize adults for participation in youth development programs. If it is not the best, most timely, and comprehensive volume available on the topic, then I don’t know its superior. The chapters in the book draw upon high quality research from peer-reviewed, top-tier journals. This is just what practitioners want to know about but rarely receive in an accessible, summarized, and translated-for-application format. More commonly positive youth development (PYD) program practitioners have to dig deep into complex research articles to find the few kernels of wisdom that have been squirreled away in the discussion sections of published research, which frequently don’t reveal strategies directly applicable to mobilizing adults for PYD programs like theirs. Much like the series of research summaries on M. J. Karcher (&) Counseling and Educational Psychology, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA e-mail: michael.karcher@utsa.edu