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In turn, these skills and qualities can contribute to building community capacity (Intrator & Siegel, 2008) and youth resilience (Wang & Gordon, 1994) to help resist the appeal of gangs, drugs, school dropout, teen pregnancy, and similar temptations. [...] youth development promotes wraparound programs that include physical activity as well as, for example, health and educational services and job training.

Many of the problems of urban youths can be traced to the socioeconomic grathent that depicts a strong relationship between the decline in socioeconomic status and the decline in health and well-being (including morbidity and mortality). Not only does the number and severity of health issues and disabilities grow, but educational and social services and resources provided by organizations in the community shrink in number and size while the remaining ones become overburdened and underfunded. None of this is news to anyone familiar with the urban landscape.

The purpose of this symposium was to explore ways to increase the engagement of youths in physical education (PE) and physical activity (PA). Certainly the limited number of organized sport and exercise programs available in urban areas in comparison with more affluent communities, as well as the limited resources, the low pay of service providers who offer the programs (especially in youth work), and the besieged mentality of many professionals require our attention and assistance. But, as the social grathent shows, the problems of urban youths are systemic. As the late sport sociologist Alan Ingham commented, "Poor people cannot jog their problems away" (personal communication).

Although that is true, our field could contribute to reducing the socioeconomic grathent problem by taking a more holistic perspective, something advocated in the past by followers of the "education through the physical" approach, who argued that our focus should be on the four domains of development - the physical, cognitive, social, and emotional. However, for the most part, this movement did not offer specific strategies and processes to carry out this holistic mission.

The emerging field of youth development, on the other hand, is also holistically based on the four domains of development (Eccles & Gootman, 2003), and it has two added advantages. First, it began in response to the needs of urban youths and communities (Dewitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, 1996), a particularly relevant point for this symposium. Second, it now has a ??/PA component, represented by recent initiatives such as "sports-based youth development" (Perkins & Le Menestrel, 2007) and Positive Youth Development Through Sport (Holt, 2007). Others, such as sport psychologists Al Petitpas at Springfield College and Dan Gould at Michigan State, have contributed a number of specific strategies and processes to carry out holistic PE/PA programs.

The youth development commitment to urban youths and communities focuses on problems stemming from the socioeconomic grathent by embedding youth development principles into PE/PA program instruction and experiences. For example, holistic skills and values such as peaceful conflict resolution, decisionmaking, goal-setting, and helping and leadership roles, as well as focusing on kids' individual strengths and their possible future can be integrated into skill and fitness development activities and games (Hellison & Cutforth, 1997). In turn, these skills and qualities can contribute to building community capacity (Intrator & Siegel, 2008) and youth resilience (Wang & Gordon, 1994) to help resist the appeal of gangs, drugs, school dropout, teen pregnancy, and similar temptations.

Moreover, youth development promotes wraparound programs that include physical activity as well as, for example, health and educational services and job training. Full-service schools and small alternative schools are examples of these kinds of pro- grams. Physical activity can therefore play a more systemic role by becoming both the medium for embedding holistic youth-development principles and the message that physical activity is important.

To maximize the potential of physical activity for urban youths, serious consideration needs to be given to integrating youth development principles and processes into PE/PA professional preparation, in both preservice and inservice programs for urban service providers. But youth development instruction alone is insufficient. Concurrent experiences with urban kids in schools, alternative schools, and afterschool programs are also needed. It would help if students and faculty (especially faculty) - unless they come from or have had experiences in a low-income urban community - were to become immersed in an urban environment by repeatedly visiting low-income neighborhoods, schools, and community-based organizations, not only to observe but to engage teachers, youth workers, and kids in conversation. Visitors need to come into these settings with questions, not answers. This is slow and tedious work, because those who work with these populations must earn the right to interact with both urban kids and the professionals. It takes trust. It takes practice in what one of my graduate students called "skillful inaction," until we get comfortable and begin to grasp "the lay of the land."

This kind of professional preparation in PE/PA - and especially in PA - is already being offered at a few institutions such as the University of Northern Colorado, San Francisco State University, and the University of Memphis. The most robust version is in Tom Martinek's undergraduate and graduate programs in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

It may seem difficult to recruit interested students for this kind of work, but my experience at several universities suggests that some and sometimes many undergraduate and graduate students want to experience and perhaps pursue credentials in urban physical activity work. They already possess the necessary motivation and values and sometimes the urban background as well. Those of us who provide professional preparation have to find these students, interview them, and develop relevant courses, workshops, and experiences for them.

The National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) also has a role. 1 recently witnessed attempts to recruit members for AAHPERD and NASPE from a group of minority professionals. In one case, an urban PE teacher from Chicago literally cried out for inservice help in working with the kids at her school. Perhaps it is incumbent upon NASPE to respond to these needs without concerns about member- ship. If the workshops are success- ful, "they will come" (at least some of them will, and it would certainly be a more effective recruitment tool than a NASPE rally). Beyond membership, such a plan would strengthen our unique contribu- tion to urban physical activity programs.

Higher education has an important role in professional preparation, and an expansion of this work to urban settings would build capacity in those communities, not only by teaching kids how to help others and helping them to become more resilient, but by providing partnerships with universities. Partnerships with schools and youth organizations would also strengthen the role of PE and PA in the "engaged university." Physical education and physical activity in higher education also have a tougher, but very important, task to undertake in order to fulfill its potential in urban youth engagement. Our field has become a group of minimally associated silos. Being sliced and diced into narrow specialties can limit our effectiveness in collaborating across subdisciplines as we try to address the whole person, instead of narrowing our focus on motor skills or fitness or culture or psychology or program philosophy. An alternative model is emerging in youth development, wherein subdisciplines such as sport psychology (e.g., Petitpas, Cornelius, Van Raalte, & Jones, 2003) and sport sociology (Hartmann, 2003), as well as allied fields such as parks and recreation (Witt & Crompton, 2002), contribute to a common purpose - the holistic development of youths. Whereas many research articles close with "more research is needed," in this case more collaboration is needed.