Building the Conditions That Help Young People Thrive
For more than 60 years, Search Institute has been asking one fundamental question: What do young people need to thrive?
Our research has taught us that young people thrive through the strengths they bring and the relationships, opportunities, and environments surrounding them.
Now, we're building on decades of developmental science to help organizations more intentionally create and sustain those conditions for every young person.
New Strategic Direction: Building the Conditions That Help Young People Thrive
A Changing World Requires Us to Think Differently About Youth Thriving
Young people are growing up in a rapidly changing world. Technology is reshaping how they learn and connect, while schools, youth-serving organizations, families and communities are navigating growing complexity and uneven access to opportunity.
We know more than ever about what helps young people thrive. The challenge is making sure every young person experiences those conditions consistently.
Knowing what matters isn't enough. We need to become more intentional about building it.
Relational Ecosystems: The Conditions for Thriving
Young people develop within relational ecosystems: the living, adapting patterns of relationships, opportunities, and conditions through which young people and communities continually shape one another. Strong relational ecosystems make developmental relationships, supports, and opportunities connected across settings, dependable over time, and accessible in ways that respond to each young person’s needs and context.
Together, they help create the conditions for belonging and connection, sparks and purpose, agency and voice, and character and contribution—important indicators that young people are thriving.
Three dimensions help us understand and strengthen those ecosystems:
Developmental Assets: What Young People Develop and Can Access
The internal strengths young people develop and the external relationships, supports, opportunities, and resources they can access and use.
Developmental Relationships: How Development Happens
The everyday interactions through which young people experience care, support, challenge, shared power, and expanded possibilities.
Developmental Contexts: Where Development is Shaped and Sustained
The settings and organizational conditions that influence whether relationships and assets are accessible, culturally responsive, connected, and sustained.
From Knowing to Building
For decades, Search Institute has helped the field understand what young people need to thrive.
Our next chapter is about helping organizations put that knowledge into practice.
We're bringing developmental science, practical tools, data and technology, and human partnership together in more integrated ways to help partners strengthen their relational ecosystems, learn from what young people experience, and continuously improve.
Our goal is not simply to share what we know. It's to help build what thriving requires.
The Next Chapter
A Vision for Thriving Youth and Communities
Learn how Search Institute is deepening its role as a bridge between research and practice by embedding relationships, equity, and continuous learning into the systems that shape young people’s lives.
Building It Together
This Strategic Direction establishes where we're going. The next phase is about bringing it to life.
We'll build, test, learn, and adapt alongside young people, practitioners, partners, and communities, bringing together developmental science, practitioner wisdom, and lived experience.
In the months ahead, we'll share new research, partnerships, tools, approaches, and what we're learning along the way.
Be Part of What's Next
Thriving should not be left to chance.
Creating the conditions that help every young person thrive requires all of us. Whether you're an educator, youth-serving organization, researcher, funder, policymaker, or community leader, we invite you to help shape what's next.
Help us build what thriving requires.
How Will You Create the Conditions Young People Need to Thrive?
Connect With Us to Learn How We Can Partner With You
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