This article maintains that although all youth share some needs in common, much of what they need is structured by where and how they live. Rather than hope for a ripple effect, by which youth learn to care through expanding waves of attachment and interpersonal exchange, youth services providers are encouraged to take a constructivist approach by helping communities and organizations create services that provide and nurture caring attitudes and behaviors. Major themes in the research on youth services are scrutinized and supplemented by field work and focus group findings. Recommendations for modifying cultures and organizing caring communities are presented. INTRODUCTION Everything we know about youth should convince us that their social, behavioral, and cognitive development takes place, for better or worse, in contexts that connect to larger and larger systems. In The Troubled Journey, for example, Benson (1990) has demonstrated that the amelioration of individual deficits that can place youth at risk requires the external assets found in as well as the internal assets. More recently, the Basic Behavioral Science Task Force of the National Advisory Council on Mental Health (1995), reporting in response to a Senate appropriations committee mandate, placed major emphasis on the importance of effective care-giving within the cultural and context of young people's social networks for optimum mental and emotional development. In my own work (Ianni,1983,1989), I have stressed the importance of establishing youth charters,' whose purpose is to consciously construct environments for development that are facilitating and caring, because I continue to believe that we as a nation cannot empower our youth or their relationships until we strengthen and enrich the social contexts in which they must live and grow. For over a decade spanning the 1970s and 1980s, Elizabeth Reuss-Ianni and I, working with teams of graduate students, followed a line of research on the interactive effects of families, peers, schools, the workplace, the criminal justice system, and other social institutions on the life course of youth in 10 American communities using field observation and in-depth psychodynamic interviewing techniques (Ianni, 1983,1989). Then, from 1989 through 1993, along with a new generation of graduate students, we re-analyzed our earlier observational and interview notes and went back to some of these same communities to validate and extend our original analyses using focus group interviews. We conducted these re-analyses in 20 school and sites, focusing on how youth needs were perceived and whether effective care-giving was offered or denied by the various social institutions.2 Based on these most recent studies, the central premise of the argument posed in this article is that while there are some needs that all youth share, much of what they need is dictated by where and how they live. It follows, then, that rather than hope for a ripple effect, by which youth learn to care for each other in ever-expanding waves of attachment, a constructionist approach is warranted. That is, youth services providers are enjoined to organize communities as humanizing systems that permit, provide, and nurture caring attitudes and behavior (Scherer, 1972). By this means, the question How can we guide our youth to become caring individuals within social units, systems, and communities? can be reoriented to ask How can we organize or reorganize our social units, systems, and communities to create a care-rich environment for youth? THE COMMUNITY AS A UNIT OF SOCIAL ORGANIZATION Caring and community are similar concepts in that they are words almost everyone understands but has some difficulty explaining. Both are relational terms that define any number of people who interact and share a set of values that lead them to want to be together. Likewise, the two terms share a dependence on social processes such as communication, empathy, mutuality, and interdependent attachment. …