The John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, located at Stanford University in the School of Education, acts on the conviction that all organizations and agencies in a community that affect youth must work together. Support for effective youth development efforts will require a coordinated effort across sectors and interests. City councils need to get involved. Schools need to act, as do diverse community groups, funders, and youth. The Gardner Center works to integrate a community youth development perspective into the practices of schools, local governments, regional institutions, and policymaking systems, with the goal of maximizing the responsiveness of these systems to the developmental needs of young people. Building new knowledge and capacity in the arena of community youth development requires careful, intensive work in local communities. This on-the-ground work is beginning with three San Francisco Bay Area communities -- Redwood City, Oakland, and the San Mateo County Mid-Coast. The Gardner Center is helping to build the infrastructure needed to better serve youth by creating alliances among community leaders, schools, organizations and youth. In collaboration with these communities, the Gardner Center initiatives are “co-developed” to ensure that all partners have an equal voice in the development and implementation of our collective work.

The Gardner Center's primary role in all of its partnerships is that of convener. The center creates alliances among all the stakeholders and brings together the community leaders, educators, policy makers and youth to promote community youth development and engagement. When the stakeholders are in place, the Gardner Center works with the partners to identify priorities for youth by generating and analyzing data specific to the local community. By successfully utilizing this information, the Gardner Center can then help its partner communities develop the organizational capacity and infrastructure to achieve their community youth development goals.