History of the Center for Youth Studies
To understand what the Center for Youth Studies is about, who we are, and what we do, it would help to know how we started and have evolved. Welcome to our story!
CYS is mostly the work of volunteers--youth leaders, students, and professors. It actually originated in a class on Youth Culture in the summer of 1983. Teaching the class was Dean Borgman and his wife, Gail, a clinical social worker and former Young Life volunteer. Dean has been fortunate to have had youth work experience in many settings: secular, parachurch, and church; suburban, rural, and urban; in the U.S., Europe, West Africa, and East Africa; and in workshops with leaders in other parts of the world. These experiences, and a further degree in counseling, prepared Dean for teaching and writing. His desire to keep up with new research and a rapidly changing youth culture influences the spirit of CYS.
Having teenagers of his own and attending a seminar by Michael Warren in the early 1980's, Dean realized the power of the media and the need for research. Advertisers knew much more about young people than youth workers did. Youth workers needed to be as informed as mainstream advertisers like Calvin Klein and Pepsi.
In the summer of 1983, after ten years of teaching youth ministry, Dean taught his first course on Adolescent Culture. A large class was divided into groups representing the main influences on teenagers: family, school, athletics, television, movies, music, and advertising. There was great enthusiasm about the presentations of these small groups and the back of the classroom was brimming with visitors. A student yelled out in excitement, "Dean, you gotta copy all these reports and send them to us!"
And that's how the Center for Youth Studies (CYS) was born! Editing, copying, sending reports-soon to be out of date-seemed out of the question. We needed to put our best resources on computer, update it and add to it...and then came the Internet.
It has been a long struggle. Anne Montague, a seasoned youth leader, was in Dean's second course in 1984 when she caught the vision of the Center for Youth Studies. For the next 8 years, she committed herself to CYS, working diligently in all capacities. Jim George, a computer programmer from Pittsburgh, created a system that allowed people to call our computer from all over--in days before the Internet. We printed some of our findings in a publication called Implications. More and more youth workers were ordering our floppy disks.
We tried unsuccessfully to find a software publisher. Then our funding was cut, and we shelved the project in 1992. Gradually, in the mid 1990's, people urged us back into business. Students once again began contributing articles for the Encyclopedia. Don Walls sent his observations of Swedish postmodern youth culture, and Andy Fletcher contributed articles on "third-culture kids." We were now sharing information on youth culture around the world. Our advisors and contributors have come from all over.
By the late 1990's, it was time to put all of our information online. We wanted to share ideas and insights about society and youth ministry with all youth workers - secular or of any faith. The Encyclopedia needed to be updated and expanded regularly. From awkward and frustrating beginnings, CYS has found a home with an organization called the Urban Youth Workers Institute - www.uywi.org. While our website will remain indefinitly, it will be integrated onto their site in hopes of reaching a broader audience as UYWI seeks to train a generation of emerging urban youth leaders around the world. Christen Yates remains our website manager, content editor and researcher and development assistant with the help of various seminary students and volunteers.
Now, we stay busy keeping our website updated regularly. We continually seek the best, most practical information for youth workers today. Our hope is that this endeavor will be as collaborative as possible. Social issues, trends, and needs of young people are dynamic - demanding constant research and review. It is our challenge and desire that we might together follow, analyze, and share the essence of youth culture with one another.
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