More than twenty five years ago, in 1982, Second Wave Centre for Youth Arts was set up in Deptford in South East London by a group of young women. A small, friendly charitable innovatory youth organisation in the field of urban arts, Second Wave aims to develop and support young people who are under-represented in the arts and in cultural industries, through running a programme of performing arts activities for young people aged 13-24.Second Wave has a proactive range of collaborative relationships with numerous supporting partners, including Lewisham Borough Council (LBC), the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), Lewisham Community Police Consultative Group (LCPCG) and the Territorial Support Group (TSG).Youth-centred artistic and creative processes are at the heart of everything that Second Wave does as an organisation. Underpinning this mission is a model of youth arts practice that has been highly successful. This model is not always easy to recognise or understand, as it has aspects that are based on an almost invisible structure designed to facilitate effective practice in youth arts work.Young people who join Second Wave are brought into a community of practice (CoP) (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1999) involving a dynamic, fluid process which is distinctive in its transformative power to change people’s lives. The philosophy behind this involves Dewey’s notion of the ‘active self’ (Dewey, 1916) and the theories of ‘social constructivism’ (Vygotsky, 1978). The process fosters trust, confidence and social learning (Bandura, 1977; Vygotsky, 1978) in which young people join in with a dialogue involving participation in the youth-centred creative space. The ‘border zone’ (Heath, 1994) in that creative space enables young people to connect with each other in the specialist field of youth arts. The youth-centered partnerships involved lead to greater confidence and development in a range of important artistic, social, cognitive and emotional skills and opportunities. Ultimately, the young person may become engaged in multi-agency working with Second Wave’s external partners. Throughout all of these processes, young people are encouraged progressively to develop a more ‘active self’ to engage proactively with many different beneficial opportunities relating to the performing arts.This report aims to describe key aspects of Second Wave’s approach and to identify and disseminate its model of good practice in order to make this more explicit and accessible to others. It is with awareness of the profoundly challenging circumstances facing young people, particularly but not exclusively in inner city urban areas such as Deptford, and the valuable contribution youth arts work can make to their well-being and development, that the research report has been produced.Without the support of such beneficial practices in youth arts, young people may find themselves adrift, drowning in a sea of uncertainty and difficulty with many life problems. The Second Wave Youth Arts Model of Creative Practice is provided to assist others to support young people to find ‘islands of truth’ and safety in the development of their identity and their future, both in creative arts and in their adult lives ahead.